'Common Knowledge' c/o Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker's latest book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: 

is subtitled: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.

It is 'common knowledge' that caught my attention. In health care we seek common knowledge on several levels:

person (patient, client) 🠜🠞 healthcare practitioner (whatever their training)
carer - guardian  🠜🠞  healthcare practitioner
person / carer  🠜🠞 team

If we think about the referral processes, interfaces, gateways that people have to negotiate on their way to the above, you see how hard-won common knowledge is.

Critically, the knowledge may be 'common' but how accurate is it?

For the team common knowledge is essential to ensure safety, understanding and continually assessing risk.

In healthcare (and education) for person-centredness we take note of what data is available, but simultaneously begin with a blank sheet. ...

Individual

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      INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC =========================  MECHANISTIC      

 SOCIOLOGY  :    POLITICAL 

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Group

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows:

'Sometimes, though, private knowledge can no longer be contained even if it is desirable; sometimes something is so evident that it does not even need words to express it. The presidential debate brings to mind a joke Pinker tells about a man in the Soviet Union arrested by the KGB for handing out leaflets, which turn out to be blank sheets of paper. "What is the meaning of this?" they demand. The man replies, "What is there to write? It's so obvious!"' Kelly, p.9.

Pinker, S. (2025). When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. New York, NY: Scribner.

My source: Jemima Kelly, Life&Arts, FTWeekend, 20/21 September 2025. p.9; and BBC Radio 4 Start the Week - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002k37y

Image source: https://stevenpinker.com/

Previously: 'blank' : '2+2=?' : 'Book: Love's Labour by Stephen Grosz'

The mask ...

'I will speak from my experience with Balinese masks, but I have to go back one step before that. One of the first, knockout exercises that you can do with actors, which is used in lots of theatre schools where they use masks, is putting a plain, blank, white mask on someone. The moment you take someone's face away in that way, it's the most electrifying impression: suddenly to find oneself knowing that that thing one lives with, and which one knows is transmitting something all the time, is no longer there. It's the most extraordinary sense of liberation.

This is one of those great exercises that whoever does it for the first time counts as a great moment: suddenly to find oneself immediately for a certain time liberated from one's own subjectivity. And the awakening of a body awareness is immediately there with it, irresistibly; so that if you want to make an actor aware of his body, instead of explaining it to him and saying, "You have a body and you need to be aware of it," just put bit of white paper on his face and say, "Now look around." He can't fail to be instantly aware of everything he normally forgets, because all the attention has been released from this great magnet up top.' p.219

self

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INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES              

humanistic ------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL   

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other

Brook, P. (1989). The Shifting Point. London, UK: Methuen. pb.

Secondhand from Reid's, Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, this book was already 'musty'. On October 18th it got 'wet' in a downpour from Sorrento to Capri and back. It smelt even more historic afterwards. It still provided great reading though! I noticed in a new pb edition the images were not included.  https://reidofliverpool.co.uk/

THE GRID by Eli Payne Mandel

individual

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INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

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group

[125] 'Therefore, a mathematician babbles when he refers to cutting a given line in two. The actual line that he shows to us on the abacus has length and width. But the line he has in mind is a stroke with length and no width. What is drawn on the abacus cannot be such a stroke, and he who goes about cutting it cuts not the line that is but the line that is not.' (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians 9.282) (n.b. The above is printed upside-down on the page.) Scatter the trace of the vessel from the ash. Pythagoras here is riddling about confusion and mental cloudiness, for if one wants to do philosophy one must pass over physical and sensible demonstration in favor of abstract argumentation. The ash is analogous to the dust on the abacus in which diagrams are delimited and proofs brought to an end.  (Iamblichus, Exhortation to Philosophy 34)' p.55

'[1] In ancient Greek, an abacus is a sand table. 'The abacist draws lines and maybe moves pebbles around the lines. When done, she wipes the sand blank.  [2] A board or slab for drawing, computation, games; a cutting board. Technical term, likely to be a loanword, but conjectured origin in Hebrew abãq "dust" remains unproven. --  Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue greque.' p.10.

'[122] The abacus computes and it erases. It tells a life. Then gambles it away. Achilles and Ajax sit down to play a game of dice. They have hung up their shields. They lean on their spears. They are tired. The Anatolian air is cold off the water. Attendants wrap them each in wool cloaks thick with eight-pointed stars. The stars wander along eddies and meanders. The only straight lines are servants of error. Their fingers are on the abacus, but Achilles and Ajax do not play, do not speak, lost in the maze of their cloaks. [124] The first reference in Western literature to written language is in the Iliad. An unsuspecting  man in a story is carrying semata lygra / grapsas en pinaki ptukto thymophthora polla: baleful signs written on a folded tablet, utterly soul-  destroying. The words, which some scholars conjecture to be Linear B, spell out the man's death, and the reader murders  the unreading man. After the murder, Death Wipes the tablet  blank and folds it back again.' p.54.

'[3] Because dust blows away and only the slab remains, an abacus is also the part of a column in immediate contact with what it supports. If that structure no longer survives, the abacus upholds the edifice of the sky.' p.10.

THE GRID by Eli Payne Mandel, Carcanet Press. 2023.

https://www.elipmandel.com/

Previously on W2tQ (with overlap):

arts :: drama :: poetry :: literature :: narrative

'Anthropologically strange'

INDIVIDUAL

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INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

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GROUP

"Phenomenology focuses on the inter-subjective constitution of the social world and everyday social life. Schütz (1964), in a seminal essay on 'The Stranger', shows how a social group has its own cultural pattern of life - folkways, mores, laws, habits, customs, etiquette, fashions and so on - that, as far as its members are concerned, are taken for granted, are habitual and almost automatic. Schütz's stranger provides a model for the ethnographer using participant observation. The ethnographer tries to treat the familiar world of 'members' as anthropologically strange, to expose its social and cultural construction. This is particularly demanding when a researcher is studying a group with which he or she is familiar, but represents an ideal attitude of mind for the researcher to pursue nevertheless." p.246.

Researching Society and Culture

"Anthropological strangeness: The art or mental trick of making a social setting and behaviour within it appear as if the observer is encountered as a stranger. If applied to mundane 'taken-for-granted' events, this can lead to unusual and original insights." p.556, (Glossary).

This ethnographic idea 'strangeness' provides an extension to the role of Hodges' model as a template, a clean slate across disciplines, settings and contexts. A means to 'reset' conceptually, to clear the mind, mindset, attitudes and start afresh.

Walsh, D. (2012). Doing Ethnography. (Chapter 14. pp.245-262) In. Researching Society and Culture, Seale, C. (Ed.). 3rd edition. London: SAGE.

See also:

Schuetz, A. (1944). The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology. American Journal of Sociology, 49(6), 499–507. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2771547

Another book student bound.

c/o Joan Didion 1934-2021: "Let Me Tell You What I Mean"

"All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dyingfall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture. Nota bone:

It tells you.

You don't tell it."

 INDIVIDUAL

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 INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC   

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

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GROUP

"Let me show you what I mean by pictures in the mind. I began “Play It as It Lays” just as I have begun each of my novels, with no notion of “character” or “plot” or even “incident.” I had only two pictures in my mind, more about which later, and a technical intention, which was to write a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all. About the pictures: the first was of white space. Empty space."...

My source: BBC Radio 4

Let Me Tell You What I Mean: A New Collection of Essays by Joan Didion

---

Episode 4

Book cover: goodreads.com

Text source:
New York Times archive - Why I Write, By Joan Didion, Dec. 5, 1976.
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/12/05/archives/why-i-write-why-i-write.html

Previously on W2tQ: Book: "The Empty Space"

The Longitude and Latitude of Care ...

... and what lies between

As I continue to reflect upon Hodges' model (PROCESS 0 : 4 DOMAINS and other posts) I can see two influences on what it contains and how it works practically and more formally - what logic(s) might apply? The first is the binary state of: blank template, or empty set. The other is initiated when we start to populate the model with care concepts. Whether '0' or '1' the situation - context of the clinical encounter, has a bearing on both. Imagine, a student armed with an explanation of Hodges' model - having just 'created' the model through a seminar (Socratic dialogue); then, presented with a blank template they are ready to begin, while they listen to their mentor and a patient/client/carer? Alternately, a qualified practitioner examines their previous 'notes', with a patient, evaluating progress.

Imagination aside, I'm wondering (as ever!) about the what, how and why of the significance implied in placing concepts x,y, and z. What is the justification, if any, beyond seeking to assure person-centred, integrated, safe and high quality care? Restating the question, when concepts are placed in the 'INDIVIDUAL' domains what are the relationships between them, the model and the interactions that determined them?

Perhaps, I ask too much of this model? Are there underlying properties that characterise concepts placed in a domain and so distinguish them from others: (INTRA-)INTERPERSONAL - SCIENCES?

The model is acknowledging, incorporates the Cartesian divide: Mind-Body. When I write and advocate that the model supports integrated care, at one point do, can these two domains merge, 'collapse' into one?

 INDIVIDUAL

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 INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

|

GROUP