I’ve found it surprisingly powerful to reframe statements of the form “it is so” into “I can’t trust that it’s not so”. It’s not just because this is an I-statement: “I think this is so” doesn’t have the same effect, and “I know this is so” certainly doesn’t.
It’s because “it is so” is an attempt to foreclose the possibility space, whereas “I can’t trust that it’s not so” or “if that’s so, I don’t know it” leaves the sense of shared knowledge open. In fact, arguably it’s less that it leaves it open and more that it pushes it open.
In my “I can tell for myself” sequence, I talk about personal gnosis, by which I don’t mean anything particularly metaphysically profound or perfectly true, but simply the capacity to know directly, rather than knowing something because somebody else told you and you believed them.
What unforeclosing statements do is they say “it may be so, but I cannot tell for myself”. And, in the face of someone asserting such a thing, this implies further “and I will not (perhaps cannot) take your word for it.”
“Look, I’m not saying he’s untrustworthy, or that you shouldn’t trust him. I’m just saying, that even given everything you’ve said, I still don’t trust him.” (And, therefore, we don’t coherently trust him.)
“Oh is that so? I haven’t heard of it.” (I’m not refuting your sentiment, but I’m adding zero sense of knowing towards it, and I’m allowing your statement into the space but not letting it become new common knowledge now that you’ve said it.)
Consider the difference between:
The former is clearly “fightin’ words”, whereas the latter leaves space for the absence of knowledge to be filled in: “ah, you do care, I just didn’t see it because I was assuming that if you cared you would do XYZ and you weren’t.”
Here’s an even more extreme example—note that the parity of negation is the same in both of these sentences! They don’t express opposing denotations. Both are saying “you are not clearly guilty”.
In a way, the simplest form is just when someone asks “are they together?” and gets the reply “uhh they’re not not together“. This isn’t explicitly about the speaker’s ignorance, but it is saying “look, the idea that they’re not together is not one I’m going to agree with”. But it doesn’t foreclose in the way that “they’re together” does.
That’s the entirety of this idea: an unforeclosing statement is one that expresses what you don’t know, rather than expressing that you do know something. And it’s a meaningful (and sometimes critical) contribution to the common knowledge space, even though what it does is to reduce the sense of common knowledge.
If the thing you’re unforeclosing was previously being taken for granted, then unforeclosing can move the conversational stance from commongrounded to chasmed. But also, when you get in the chasmed mode, switching to unforeclosing statements is a good way to re-establish commonground one layer out.
As Matthew Pierce’s Law of Radical Consensus notes:
Any disagreement can be reframed as a form of consensus by jointly acknowledging THAT the dispute exists.
Likewise, any not-knowing can be reframed as a form of knowing: I know I don’t know. And, bridging these: if you can respect that I don’t know / don’t trust / don’t have the info I would need in order to feel good about… then we can hold that together. Even while you feel that you do know/trust/etc.
Using unforeclosing statements helps avoid confusing the absence of knowing-that with the presence of knowing-not.
Unforeclosing statements often have a particular kind of double-negative shape to them relative to the claim in question, which is why I constructed a double-negative-shaped word to refer to them.
When I first started noticing the contrast between foreclosing statements and unforeclosing statements, in my head I was calling these “positive” and “negative” claims. But as soon as I went to try to communicate the idea, I realized that that was a terrible idea—”positive & negative” are among the most overloaded and ambiguous words in the entire english language, and in this particular case usually mean a *different* specific thing, which is “a claim that something is the case (or exists)” vs “a claim that something is not the case (or does not exist)”.
But I don’t mean that, and I don’t mean “good and bad”, nor “happy and sad”, nor “reinforcing and balancing” nor anything like that. I don’t even quite mean “positing something / negating something”, although that is close. But negating is still foreclosing.
What I mean is: whether it is about claiming/asserting what is known, or withdrawing/reserving what is not known. The latter is not a claim that something is not the case, it is the undoing of a claim at all. You claim “X”, I claim not “not-X” but “not-we-claim-X”. “Reserving” as in, “I reserve the right to…” Refusing to join a coalition that takes it for granted as part of its common ground.
For awhile, I was trying to call it “assertional” vs “reservational” or something. I really wanted a word that started with “withdraw” but somehow ended with “ional” but uhh English doesn’t support that.
I can’t find the source because youtube search (including history search) is made of lies, but in early 2024 I watched a video of John Vervaeke in dialogue with someone, and in it he says something like “I think you’re accusing me of being an idealist. But I’m not an idealist. I’m also not a realist, but I’m not an idealist. The idealists make this error [he describes the error], which I agree with you is an error.”
There’s something about this that resonates for me with unforeclosing statements. Arguably, many philosophies are defined by the errors they don’t make. Insights in general are characterized by the overcoming of a specific class of systematic error. But usually, having overcome that error, they fixate a new error. My liberating insight became a new ruling coalition. Sometimes this has a characteristic back-and-forth spiral quality (a la Kegan stages, spiral dynamics) sometimes not.
When I first tried reading Stuart Kauffman’s Reinventing the Sacred, back in 2017 when I was still more of a yudkowskian rationalist than a chapmanian metarationalist, I found the very idea of post-reductionism (the premise of Kauffman’s book) kind of threatening. I bargained: maybe he’s confused about ontological vs epistemological reductionism…? but no, on a second read I see he specifically calls out the distinction and sees both as naive. So I pause to ask myself: why is reductionism important to me?
And I wrote in my notes:
When I think about this, it becomes relatively clear that a better description for the whole thing is more like: many people taking non-reductionistic approaches seem to consistently make certain kinds of thinking errors. The largest class of these errors in the ontological domain could be described as supernaturalism. […]
So “reductionism” as I’ve understood it, is primarily a way of thinking that avoids these errors. But we might then ask “might there be other, better ways of thinking, that avoid these errors and also avoid whatever errors reductionism may make?
And from here I have rederived an appetite for reading Reinventing the Sacred, which purports to present exactly this!
It’s not that pre-reductionism is wrong, and reductionism is right. It’s that pre-reductionism is wrong, and reductionism is, well, less wrong. And post-reductionism—a true post-reductionism, worthy of the name because it properly transcends and includes reductionism—is less wrong still.
In a way, all insights should be called “post-[whatever-the-error-I-was-making-before]-ism”. Except probably not, because that would be annoying.
But let’s play with it at least, for a few bullet points:
There’s a sense in which in order to transcend and include something you know, you first have to perceive (not necessarily explicitly or consciously) the way in which it’s made of negative space. You need to stop foreclosing!
But then it’s common, after your insight, to somehow foreclose your new view in a way that negates the old view altogether. @aphercotropist has some very clear thoughts around this:
This tweet summarizes a lot of my feelings about politics: accepting that something is a problem does not require accepting any proposed solutions. 99% of described problems are real and important, at least in some sense. 99% of proposed solutions are at best irrelevant and at worst actively would exacerbate things.
Yes, people with [unique property] deserve [dignity]. I can’t see how [this kind of special-casing them] won’t just make them even more targets. Yes, [situation] could be more fair. I don’t trust that price-fixing/wage-fixing gets us there. Yes, the disappearance of [tradition] is important. I can’t tell how to reverse memetic evolution. Yes, [behavior] has bad side-effects. I haven’t seen {making it illegal, protesting, judging anybody who expresses anything positive about it} help with this. Yes, your political opponent is saying false or misleading things. I can’t see how banning misinformation improves the situation.
Of course, in many situations, you might want to say something even stronger than “I can’t see how”. But that will close down dialogue more.
Capgras delusion is a phenomenon where someone insists that their loved one (mother, husband, etc) has been replaced by an imposter. It seems to me that this error comes directly from confusing the absence of knowing-that with the presence of knowing-not.
And of course, there is no No Evidence—lack of evidence where you’d expect there to be evidence is evidence against—but this doesn’t mean that you know. In a way, Capgras delusion is an extreme form of the fault line I described in Commongrounded vs Chasmed (reconstructing intersubjectivity), where the discomfort of the chasm—that the presence of your mother or lover does not create in you any emotional connection—is so great that the person’s sense of what’s going on breaks in some strange recompartmentalization.
I have a short video on this:
Constantly consciously expanding the boundaries of thoughtspace and actionspace. Creator of Intend, a system for improvisationally & creatively staying in touch with what's most important to you, and taking action towards it.
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