The paper considers narratives as dynamic memory banks and shifts understanding from emphasizing the origins of the present to the emergence of the present. In the construction of reality, imagined futures articulate with knowledge obtained in the past.
In another inversion, rather than explain change and consider stability as the norm, it focuses on change as the norm and investigates the creation of stability to explain, for example, why our societies are so slow in acting on climate change.
The creation of meaning is the result of an interaction between thinking and experience, like the interaction between a map and the territory it represents. It reduces the complexity of the territory to the simplicity of the map, shaping simultaneously the cognitive map and the territory it represents. Such cognitive structures evolve into dense networks of cognitive dimensions.
Tipping points emerge as a particular cognitive structure is no longer enabling a society to deal with its changing environment because it does not fully trace the logical and functional nature of the relationship between the two. To facilitate that, we need to understanding noise as signals for which no interpretative conceptual and cognitive structure has yet been identified.
1 Introduction
All of us human beings live in the present, and thus between the past and the future. In ancient Rome, the god Janus symbolized that. He had two faces, of which an older, often bearded, one looks backward to the past, and a younger, often clean shaven, one looks forward towards the future. Etruscan in origin, Janus was the god of beginnings, ends and passage from one thing to another. He was invoked at the beginning of all actions or engagements and thus linked past and future in a society that profoundly anchored itself, and its actions, in history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus, consulted 1/19/2023) (Fig. 1).
A photograph of the sculpture of the head of the Roman god Janus. The head has 2 faces. One of the faces with a beard is towards the left, and the other face without a beard is towards the right side.
Fig. 1
The Roman god Janus. He is the god of transitions and looks both towards the past and towards the future
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In our current society, we are generally more used to looking at the present, or to limit our perception to the short-term past and/or future, rather than see our actions as part of a deep-time historical continuum. The academic discipline of history emerged, in our societies, over the nineteenth century, as part of a shift from generally considering the present as a continuation of the past, to a perspective where change could be introduced to create a (different) future (Girard, 1990). Considering history thus became the discipline of a particular community focusing on the interaction between continuity and change. Over the last two centuries, as explaining change became more important than studying continuity, in the modern a-historical perspective the present, the recent past and the future increasingly dominate in narratives.
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This paper attempts to broaden out our perspective on narratives and tipping points by proposing somewhat different ways to look at those issues. It raises a number of issues that I think are worth considering. But it does not present coherent solutions to them. In that sense, the paper is programmatic, a work in progress, outlining some directions where our thinking might go rather than presenting a firm and coherent approach.
I will elaborate a perspective on the emergence, use and change of narratives that takes the past-future duality of human temporal perception as point of departure. It considers the emergence of tipping points to be part of the changing perception by society of the dynamic interactions between the social and natural environments. In the process of attempting to understand, and deal with, the world that surrounds us as humans, we exploit what we have learned in the past about the environment with which we interact, to explore how to deal with the situations we are faced with.
The paper is divided into four parts. The first outlines my approach to human cognition and decision-making, which is rooted in my understanding of the creation of categories in human cognition. It sketches the role of narratives as dynamic memory banks. It shifts our perspective from “ex post” to “ex ante”, from an emphasis on origins of the present to an emphasis on the emergence of the present and emphasizes the role of imagined futures articulating with knowledge obtained from past interactions in the construction of reality. It ends with a section on the role of collaborations in creating collective meaning, institutions, and technologies.
The second part begins with another inversion of our perspective. Rather than explain change, and consider stability as the norm, I think we also need to focus on assuming change as the norm and investigating the creation of stability if we are to fully understand the dynamic. Making that change might help us to explain why current societies have been so slow in acting on climate change and related issues: they were under the illusion of control. In building and maintaining control, a crucial factor is the construction and spreading of meaning, as here exemplified by the introduction of the concept of a united Europe.
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The third part concerns the process of creating meaning. Little work has been done on that within our narratives community. I adopt Gendlin’s (1997) approach that meaning is the result of a responsive interplay between thinking and experience. In practice, that can be translated as the interaction between a map and the territory it represents. That interaction creates, simultaneously, both the cognitive map and the territory it represents, reducing the complexity of observed phenomena in our minds and using those ideas to simplify the phenomena observed.
In the fourth part, I outline the emergence of tipping points as a process of invalidation of a particular cognitive structure that was created to enable society to deal with its environment. Such structures evolve into dense networks of cognitive dimensions, as can be observed for technology in the way the USPTO shapes emergent technological knowledge into a cognitive space. Then, moving towards Kuhn’s outline of scientific change (1962), I argue that he does not fully trace the logical and functional nature of the relationships between the old paradigm and the phenomena that cannot be fitted into it. To facilitate that, I conclude by arguing that we need a new approach to the understanding of noise—as signals for which no interpretative conceptual and cognitive structure has yet been identified. Right now, the 100,000 Euro question is whether Machine Learning could provide that approach.
2 Part One: Cognition
2.1 Narratives as Dynamic Memory Banks
In the cognitive dynamic, societally accepted narratives function as memory banks of what the society has learned, and thus partly shape the way in which the society looks at its present circumstances and imagines its future. In much of the discussion about the structure and role of narratives, they are considered as existing stories that impact decisions. The exploitation of cognitive categories and structures that result from acquired past experience is therefore the primary focus of the research, and the dynamics of exploration of the future are paid less attention. Here, I want to re-equilibrate that bias, adopting Beckert’s (2016) argument that our decision-making and our behavior are affected by the role imaginary futures play in our thinking. How does the interaction between exploitation of acquired understanding and exploration of the unknown future impact on decisions?
2.2 The Role of Imagined Futures
Since around 1750, according to the economist Beckert, the opening up of the western perspective on the future set in motion a (uniquely Western) cognitive feed-forward loop that creates in our minds imagined futures and then develops fictional expectations that motivate people towards realizing them. In his words: “… expectations of the unforeseeable future inhabit the mind not as foreknowledge but as contingent imaginaries (2016, 9) […] they create a world of their own into which actors can (and do) project themselves” (2016, 10). These fictional expectations are anchored in narratives that are continually adapted. The exchange between imagined futures and present conditions shapes the narratives involved, which in turn drive our imagined futures and our decision-making. Hence, “fictionality, far from being a lamentable but inconsequential moment of the future’s fundamental uncertainty, is a constitutive element of capitalist dynamics”, including economic crises (2016, 12). Beckert illustrates that in detail for the four main pillars of economics: money, credit, investment, and innovation. But the implications of the role of narratives in shaping our imagined futures stretch far beyond capitalism or the economy, into the fundamentals of our worldview. Some of these implications are the following:
First, narratives express the cultural, institutional, social, and environmental embeddedness of our human decision-making. Decisions reflect the value systems of the people concerned; they are shaped in the interaction networks among these people, and they determine to a considerable extent the path-dependent evolution of societies. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2015), for example, are in essence based on a Western imagined future of continued “progress” that, as part of globalization, has been projected onto other cultures. In other parts of the world, one finds underneath that global projection very different imagined futures. As Henrich argues (2020), the particular intellectual and social history of Euro-American culture has created a worldview that differs uniquely from the worldviews of most other cultures.
Second, because our future is constructed in a confrontation between the experienced past and such imagined futures, those visions of the future are only maintained for as long as there is confidence in that future. In the absence of such confidence, a degradation in the clarity of a society’s perceptions and certainties, a crisis, or even a tipping point is experienced. The anticipatory loop can then, very rapidly, be turned in a negative direction characterized by self-fulfilling negative dynamics driving towards uncertainty, as in the case of recent financial crises. But it is not confined to such sharp crises—it can also slowly undermine the totality of our vision of the future and result in hesitations, contradictory actions, and general loss of self-confidence.
Third, we need to consider the relationship between our imagined futures and the “real world out there” in detail. It is impossible to predict the outcome of future confrontations between imagined futures and the material and social “real” world, especially over the longer term. That is due to the unintended consequences of such interactions, which cause changes in the second order (change-of-change) dynamics of the context in which shorter-term decisions are made. That interaction is clearly an open-ended one that is not fully controllable, as it is subject to ontological uncertainty (Lane et al., 2009). Loss of confidence in the future can very rapidly transform peace into war, progress into the opposite, and trust into distrust. As Gurri (2014) argues, the introduction of electronic social networks has rapidly accelerated the second-order communication dynamics, with major political consequences.
2.3 Categorization as the Core Cognitive Process
In an earlier paper (van der Leeuw, 2019), I have argued that the core dynamic underpinning perception and decision-making is categorization, in which first open, exploratory (groups) and subsequently closed, entities (classes) are created that are exploited to grapple with the unknown. In technical terms, based on theoretical and experimental work of Tversky and Gati (1978), the evolution of pattern recognition is here seen as a shift from extrinsically circumscribed, polythetic open categories to intrinsically defined, monothetic, closed categories. That perspective is chosen because the distinction between open and closed categories has been widely discussed in the cognitive sciences (e.g., Cohen & Lefebvre, 2018), but also in cultural anthropology, sociology (e.g., El Guindi, 1972, 1973; Selby & El Guindi, 1976) and other disciplines (e.g., Davis-Floyd, 2018).
The open categories introduce a hypothetical intellectual construct that identifies certain dimensions of the patterns as potentially relevant to the society’s knowledge system but does not exclude all those dimensions and all the patterning that may ultimately not be considered relevant, so that there is a degree of fuzziness in the description of the categories. In a second step, defining closed categories fully selects the relevant patterns and excludes the irrelevant ones. That selection is based on the existing knowledge system which has emerged over time in a path-dependent evolution of its own. Open categories maintain the possibility that several alternative hypotheses could describe them, which is not the case for the closed categories. Therefore, the former do not allow the cognitive system to dependably manipulate the material world, whereas closed categories do.
Adopting this dynamic perspective on category formation and cognition, it follows that the emphasis on the codification of an existing worldview in the emergence of a narrative does, in my opinion, unduly emphasize the importance of closed categories in that process. And it does not pay enough attention to the dynamic interaction between imagined futures and present, ongoing, experience that all human beings practice in creating their narratives. We need to investigate two questions: first “What is the role of imagined futures in the generation of a narrative?”, and then “What is the nature of the confrontation between imagined futures and everyday reality?” or “How does the confrontation between imagined futures and everyday reality change those imagined futures?”
To begin answering these questions, we must first attempt to distinguish, in narratives, between the contribution of closed and open categories respectively. In a paper with van der Leeuw & Folke (2021) I have pointed at a way to do so, notably by systematically monitoring the difference between the expected and the observed entropy as one follows the course of a narrative. Where that difference is slight, the narrative usually refers to a known past, formulated by the narrator in terms of closed categories, but where the difference is larger, the narrator seems to refer to personal experience, so that the categories used are predominantly open, and there is room for different conceptions of the future.
2.4 Early Acquisition of a Cognitive Structure
Cognitive structuration evolves through time in a dynamic process that begins with the earliest experiences of a child as it learns to identify categories, patterns, and dynamics in its interaction with the outside world. That interaction dis-embeds certain dimensions of potential perception from among the infinite multitude that constitute the unknown unknown that the child is confronted with: mother and father, light and dark, pleasant and unpleasant, different smells and shapes. These early cognized dimensions lay the groundwork for the structure of the worldview of the child; dimensions that are subsequently identified elaborate the ever-growing number of dimensions of that perceptual skeleton (van der Leeuw, 2016). The process is fed by the double niche-creating dynamic of resonance between the internal niche of the mind and the external niche of the environment (Iriki & Taoka, 2012; Laubichler & Renn, 2015; Odling-Smee et al., 2003), summarized in van der Leeuw and Murase (2021).
In the present context, it is important to emphasize that many of the dimensions of the cognitive framework that is thus dis-embedded are not consciously retained in the world view of the (adult) individual; they do however play an important role in that individual’s decision making. The same goes for collective decision-making in groups. Many of these dimensions are what the anthropologist would describe as constituting the ‘culture’ of the community of decision-makers. ‘Culture’ in that context summarizes a large, and in part inextricable, number of such unconscious or semi-conscious cognitive dimensions that have become standard operating procedure in the interpretation of observed phenomena (cf. van der Leeuw & Dirks, in press b). In this paper, we will call these dimensions the “metadata” that individuals bring to bear on any perception or decision-making.
Any individual or group is part of, and employs, a multi-level decision-shaping hierarchy of cognitive dimensions that structures his, her or the group’s worldview. The organization of that structure will generate unknown biases in the decision-making process which will play an important role in interactions among individuals in collaborative contexts (Dirks & van der Leeuw, in press). In practice, in the interaction between the internal and the external cognitive niche creation processes, this organization determines the values and the priorities of individuals’ cognitive decision making. Those values are in part shared by the group, but within the group the priorities accorded to individual values usually vary.
2.5 Collaborations
Recent brain research is beginning to open up ways to improve our understanding of the impact of group interaction on shaping group members’ thinking. In a very interesting paper entitled “How consensus-building conversation changes our minds and aligns our brains”, Sievers et al. (in press) have studied how conversations between individuals have impacted on their respective ways of thinking, and on the role of these individuals in a collaboration. They conclude on the basis of a very stringent experimental protocol that conversations result in developing shared areas of brain activity among the participants in the conversation. Their work thus confirms the long-standing ideas about the importance of social interactions in shaping basins of attraction in group cognition.
This draws our attention to a new research domain that has until now been underappreciated: the cognitive dynamics of collaboration. In May 2022, a timely and interesting symposium on this topic was organized by Lupp, Verschure and Roepstorff at the Ernst Strüngmann Foundation in Frankfurt.1 My takeaway from that symposium concerns first of all the ubiquity of collaboration as the basis for negotiating cultural values, institutions, and priorities. Next, there are now a number of perspectives on the emergence and decay of collaborations that bring us closer to understanding the intricacies of collaboration and how they shape their outcomes. But no less important is the fact that these raise new questions that have insufficiently been dealt with in the transdisciplinary approach used here. Among these, I want to emphasize three:
How do collaborations emerge?
How do the results of collaborations perdure?
How might collaborations end?
Based on our discussions there, my colleague Gary Dirks and I propose the following tentative, “nutshell” perspective on how collaborations emerge, and how individual perceptions among the participants can be transformed into a collective solution to a challenge, including a societal institution or a technological innovation (Dirks and van der Leeuw, in press).
Resonance between individuals’ ways of conceiving the world around them forms the basis for all productive collaborations. Without such resonance in the form of partially shared ideas, including underappreciated or even unrecognized metadata baggage, participants are unlikely to begin collaboration. If there is no initial resonance at all (for example in certain business collaborations), resonance needs to be created by imposing shared values and goals, and that makes the collaboration much more difficult.
In the collaborative process, discussions between participants will discover cognitive dimensions that offer the best chance of bringing the group together. Other dimensions suggested by each of the participants are accorded secondary importance. In that selection process, the group engineers a shift from individuals’ open, exploratory, categories emphasizing potential shared dimensions, to closed categories defined in terms of shared dimensions, which also emphasize the differences between the group’s ideas and everyone else’s. These are deemed effective as a framework to work on the issues the group is attempting to deal with. That framework is then adapted and elaborated by the participants in the form of one or more rules, laws, institutions 2 or technological solutions. Once thus “invented”, such rules of behavior spread among the wider community involved as adequate solutions to perceived challenges, in a process which is generally called “innovation” in the relevant literature (Stengers & Schlanger, 1991).
The transition from groups to classes, which excludes many of the individual cognitive dimensions of group members, formalizes ideas that are the result of the collaboration, ensuring a transition from the comprehension of socio-environmental dynamics that is necessary to formulate an effective solution to the challenges the group attempts to deal with, to a situation in which mere competency is sufficient in dealing with the solution implemented (without the need for comprehension). This generates what might be called “tools for thought and action” such as institutions, laws, technologies, implicit or explicit algorithms, or aspects of the external environment that are intended to perdure beyond the period of active collaboration.
Once that transition has taken effect, these closed categories become a major barrier to changing societies’ attitudes. After language, closed ontological categories are the most important structuring elements in our thoughts. There is a connection between the two. Language creates the platform for thinking about the categories and has often integrated many of the “metadata” individuals have acquired in becoming part of a societal community. Language thus contributes a cultural history that is not necessarily conscious.
As the group’s “tools for thought and action” are impacting on its environment, the latter is changed by the unanticipated consequences of the “solution(s)” the group has implemented. This is the inherent result of the fact that the collaborators’ collective solution eo ipso adopts a very limited set of dimensions but is then confronted with the almost infinite dimensionality of the realm of phenomena in which it is instantiated (“the wider world”). As a result of that confrontation, both the solution and its wider context are changed in ways beyond the control or the perception of the collaborating individuals. I have discussed this elsewhere, calling attention to the fact that “Solutions create problems” (van der Leeuw, 2012).
As these changes emerge, they are dealt with by the individuals of the group, each in their own way or in the context of other collaborations. As a result, the original collaboration usually falls apart because individual members of the group refocus on the changed situation, and in the process mobilize other cognitive dimensions than those they have shared in the collaboration. That in turn will ultimately undermine the ideas the group collectively put forward and will thus signal the end of the collaboration. The ideas that were not shared become the seeds for institutional—and ultimately societal—change. Thus, transient stability institutionalizes instability.
3 Part Two: Change and Stability
3.1 How to Create Stability?
The relationship between stability and instability highlights the way in which our Western scientific approach biases our work. In general, that approach is based on the Aristotelian world view—and notably the assumption that stability is the “normal” state of things, and that change is the exception that needs to be studied. The above argument in favor of a direct causal relationship between stability and instability opens the door to another approach, based on the Heraclitan perspective, in which change is considered permanent and stability is the exception and needs to be investigated. This suggests an interesting and highly relevant question: “How do humans create a (temporarily) apparent stability in a dynamic process?” My initial answer should be clear: “through collaboration”. But that is not enough. If we are to understand tipping points, we need to investigate the creation of apparent stability and its relation to time in much greater detail. For one, the appearance of stability is directly related to the temporal scale of observation chosen. Apparent stability disappears when the temporal scale of observation is changed to a more encompassing one. That relativity is often ignored in many studies of societal dynamics.
In the study of transitions, taking this point of view is a necessary complement to the more generally proposed question “What are the dynamics of change?” It assigns our understanding of the socio-environmental dynamic to the societal domain. That seems highly relevant as humans are, in the Anthropocene, the main actors of the combined socio-environmental dynamics. “Tipping points” are then understood as the moment that human attempts at creating the illusion of stability (and the illusion of control, see van der Leeuw & Dirks, in press b) are no longer sufficient, rather than as moments in which the supra-linear forces of change overcome a particular dynamic structure. Although this does not at first sight change our understanding of any structural transitions in socio-environmental dynamics in any major way, the change in emphasis re-directs an important part of the research effort towards questions such as the following:
In the process of collaboration, which values/priorities are shared? How is that determined?
Does that selection change during the collaboration? If so, how?
Are the selection and its changes related to closed/open categorization?
What decides which of the participants’ perspectives comes to dominate?
How do changes in the context (as a result of collaboration) affect that collaboration?
What values decide individuals’ thinking?
How are the values in the collaboration prioritized/ordered?
These require a major, transdisciplinary effort to answer, which greatly exceeds the context of the present programmatic paper aimed at motivating a community such as the TIPPING + one to deepen out these questions.
3.2 The Illusion of Control
The dynamics that lead up to a tipping point in social-environmental systems have been studied brilliantly from a combined natural and life science perspective by Scheffer and his team (e.g., Scheffer, 2009), applying a Complex Systems approach to improve understanding of the emergence of change. Numerous others have approximately taken up this approach, mainly in the context of the Resilience Alliance (e.g., Carpenter et al., 2019; Folke et al., 2010; Homer-Dixon et al., 2015). Here I am arguing for a different perspective. To do so, I will be building on the first part of this chapter and on two earlier papers (van der Leeuw, 2020; van der Leeuw & Folke, 2021).
The core of my argument is that, as categorization in a group or culture shifts from open, exploratory categories (“understanding”) to closed ones (“knowledge”), the relationship between observations and interpretations changes because, increasingly, the acquired knowledge comes to dominate the observations on the phenomena. As a result, observable differences and questions are pushed to the background in favor of a set of fixed interpretative ideas. The representation of the subject increasingly comes to be divorced from its immediate context. That growing disconnect leads to what many have called unintended consequences, not because the dynamics change (which they do) but because the interpretation no longer tracks the changes. It is thus that solutions create problems (van der Leeuw, 2012).
In the runup to a tipping point, the group or society concerned holds on to its interpretation of what is happening in the outside world, although that increasingly becomes ineffective, if not illusionary. Hence, I emphasize the “illusion of control” as the state of the group or society just before a tipping point (van der Leeuw & Dirks, in press b).
A good example is the tipping point (“Zeitenwende”) pronounced by Chancellor Scholz upon the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Sauerbrei (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/24/opinion/germany-scholz-zeitenwende.html, New York Times, 25/12/2022, consulted 25/12/2022) argues that this tipping point follows a phase of “Überraschungsresistenz,” (resistance against upsets or surprises), in which Germany, notwithstanding many warning signals such as the Russian war in Syria and its invasion of Crimean peninsula, built an economy heavily dependent on Russian gas and neglected its military. Japan is going through the same process in implementing, with an eye on the threat to a war with China, a constitutional change that for the first time, after 70 years, allows its armed forces to serve other functions than defensive ones. Why were these societies holding on to an outdated narrative?
Such illusions of control are often structured around specific narratives (as in the German and Japanese cases the idea that these countries could survive as pacifist islands in a warring world, that Russia would forever be a trustworthy provider of cheap energy, and that China could be shaped into a peaceful global economic partner). To understand such developments from our perspective, we want to gain an improved understanding of why and how such narratives emerge, and why and how they become resistant to change even though the environment the society interacts with clearly does change! In the process, In the process, people increasingly believe what is anchored in their closed categories and accommodate their narratives and justifications accordingly (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982).
4 Part Three: Creation and Role of Meaning
4.1 Birth and Growth of the European Union
I want to begin this argument by going back to the immediate post-WWII period and the beginnings of the movement towards European unification, which initially led to the European coal and steel community (ECSC), founded in 1951 in Paris under the inspired leadership of a small group of people let by Robert Schumann and Jean Monnet. Their collaboration was inspired by the idea and narrative that further Franco-German wars needed to be avoided, and that this was best done by creating economic dependencies between the two protagonists. That idea was Beckert’s “imagined future” of Europe. In applying it, the first emphasis was on dependencies grounded in the heavy industries that were the core of their economies.
A few years later, after other politicians joined the movement, the collaboration was expanded to the (equally fundamental, but emerging) domain of nuclear energy by establishing Euratom. In 1957, the next step was the founding of the European Economic Community by the treaty of Rome, involving the six countries that were members of the ECSC and Euratom (Germany, France, Italy, and the Benelux countries). This treaty involved a much wider economic domain. From there, suffice it to say that the initiative grew in impact (including a huge harmonization of economic and industrial rule-setting, leading up to the Euro), in size, and by increased transfer of sovereignty into the European Union of 28 (now 27) countries (Treaties of Maastricht (1993) and Lisbon (2007).
Underpinning this whole development was a path-dependent dynamic that slowly but surely transformed an imagined future of a few people into a reality, implementing the European narrative in many domains of the everyday life of the citizens of the participating countries: values, laws, institutions, policies, technologies, etc. It created its own cognitive space. This could not have happened if there had not been (1) important resonances between the different countries values and priorities, reflecting centuries of interactions between the peoples concerned and (2) a context (the cold war) that was a threat to Western Europe. The convergence was enabled by resonances between the ruling elites in different countries, who had generally lived through the consequences of WWII. These initially backgrounded the differences between countries that began the movement, and later those between the Western European and the Eastern European conceptions of society. In more recent years, these differences are being foregrounded, and that is creating tensions.
In order to understand those tensions, we must investigate how such resonances reflect wide, underlying structural similarities in thinking among the populations concerned, asking “What are the structural similarities and differences?” and then “How have these on the one hand enabled the emergence of a shared meaning, and subsequently generated the observed tensions?”
4.2 The Construction of Meaning
The path-dependent dynamic underpinning the concept and the implementation of the European Union was built around an idea, and that idea came to dominate the politics and economics of Western, and later also Eastern, Europe, enabling the creation of a relatively stable institutional structure. For that to happen, those ideas would have to confer meaning to the people involved. It seems therefore that the question “What creates and confers meaning among people?” is a central one when considering how human beings create (temporary) stability in societal dynamics.
If we assume, as many in the narratives research community seem to do, that narratives are a direct reflection of the structure and references of thinking among the community that share them, that focuses our attention on the relationship between the developmental trajectory of narratives and the creation of shared meaning as a foundational element in the conceptual stability that is being constructed. Many questions arise concerning that relationship. The one that here concerns me most is the relationship between experience and language. Language involves the conceptualization, and thus also the categorization and expression, of individual or collective experiences. Not being a specialist in this domain,
I rely in what follows heavily on the work of Eugene Gendlin (1997), who strikes a position between on the one hand the empiricist-rationalist position that maintained Descartes’ mind-body distinction and on the other the (post-)structuralist position (Levin, 1997). In the former, representations of the real world were created in the mind by an association of sense data and distinct ideas. In the latter, the conceptual network of a language is held to determine the forms and categories through which one experiences the world, so that there are no objective meanings, and attaching a meaning to a word is always arbitrary. Gendlin’s position is that there is something he calls ‘felt meaning’, which is not an inner representation of the outside world, but the result of a responsive interplay between thinking and experience, between the realm of phenomena and that of ideas. In the terms used here, his felt meaning has a higher sensed dimensionality than its linguistic expression, and the communicable linguistic expression thus involves a reduction of the meaning’s dimensionality. In that sense it is not unlike the concept of ‘Gestalt’ in psychology and in cognitive science, or the approach of Ingold to ‘embodied knowledge’ (2000), emphasizing that we don’t know what we know until it is confronted with relevant aspects of the outside world.
4.3 The Map Is Not the Territory
One could thus summarize the interaction between the realms of phenomena and ideas as expressed in the title of this section: the territory is described on the map by a reduced set of dimensions. One can thus have different maps (different dimensional reductions) of the same territory. A narrative can be described as a map of a realm of observations, and different narratives can be applied to one and the same realm of observations. If that is accepted, then the fundamental question concerns the choice of map (the perspective from which one wants to study the territory).
I have argued in Sect. 2.4 and elsewhere (2016) how that choice is determined to an important extent during the very earliest acquisition of a cognitive structure by the individual(s) concerned, because throughout life, an individual’s perceptions will be shaped in a path-dependent process rooted in early experiences, which during the person’s lifetime expands and details her perception. This early shaping of individuals’ cognitive structure, before they are trained in a scientific discipline, is for example responsible for what many scientists consider “scientific illiteracy”—which has assumed major proportions in the USA (cf. van der Leeuw, 2015).
This early acquisition of information processing structure results in a considerable number of implicit and unconscious cognitive dimensions (“metadata”), which have an impact on perception and decision making that is generally underestimated or completely ignored. Many of these dimensions are “cultural” (shared by a community), including aspects of the individual’s epistemology in shaping and treating “data”. But not all are due to shared cultural information processing. Some are individual or are shared by subgroups of a population. Only when they are shared can one speak of narratives in the societal sense of a repository of values and dimensions of perception. As mentioned, to truly understand these dimensions a detailed multi-scalar analysis of the relevant perception structure is needed. Such an analysis can begin with close reading of the narratives individuals refer to.
The emphasis in the process of acquiring meaning is therefore on the interactions between the internal (individual or collective) information processing structure as reflected in a society’s language and narratives and the outside world of phenomena. Another way to come to grips with that process is to look at what, within an individual’s or group’s cognitive structure, is called “noise”. Generally, noise is considered in Western science as constituting statistically insignificant signals “around” the categories that fit a particular interpretation (Kahneman et al., 2016). They are thus ignored. I would argue that another interpretation of noise is relevant in this context: noise concerns those signals for which information processing has not (yet) found a coherent interpretative framework in the society concerned. Noise is thus “significance that remains to be found”, not unlike “felt meaning”. Extending the arguments of Tett (2021), one could therefore also begin by identifying cognitive dimensions and interpretative structures for what is considered noise.
5 Part Four: Tipping Points in Cognitive Space
5.1 Energy Narratives from Comprehension to Competency
Subtly but surely the status of the narrative changes over time as it becomes more and more solidly established and includes more and more people. In Sect. 2.5, I have summarized that process as a move from comprehension to competency (van der Leeuw & Dirks, in press a), from fully understanding a system and exploring unanswered questions to responding to that system without understanding it fully, no longer exploring its cognitive space. I have related that to the ongoing shift from open to closed cognitive categories. Here, I want to illustrate that by taking the dynamics of the current energy debate as example, conceiving it as a dynamic interaction between two narratives, the fossil energy narrative and the renewable energy narrative.
If we go back some 50 years, to the 1970s, the fossil energy narrative is well-established and has spread its cognized space to encompass most of Euro-American societies’ world view. Yet, even at the time, there was among the fossil fuel community a spark of awareness of some of its future challenges.3 That seems to have led to early defensive reactions focused on spreading doubt about scientific results that were negative for the industry (such as we know much better from the tobacco industry (Oreskes & Conway, 2010).
While fossil energy use was spreading, the community’s narrative spread all over the economic and political communities, to the point that Euro-American societies waged wars to control the fossil energy sources in the Near and Middle East, and elsewhere. Secret negotiations about the threats to the industry brought the community closer together and closed more and more of the categories that anchored the fossil energy narrative. Thus, the community increasingly isolated itself from interacting with other parts of society, becoming a more or less closed silo, holding on to the past values, categories, and worldview on which it was based, without adapting these to the changed context. Control became its aim, to ensure continuity of its existence.
In the beginning of this century, as alternative, renewable sources of energy became technically and financially available, a bottom-up movement emerged that strove to fundamentally change the energy narrative, moving from fossil to renewable energy. In its early days, that community was essentially exploring novel possibilities, technologies, and ideas. It had a worldview formulated in open categories. But over the last 20 years, as the alternative solutions which that community proposed became more widespread and solidly anchored in particular technologies, its categories also tended to close, creating an increasingly siloed community. Natural disasters, phenomena clearly ascribable to climate change, and the huge publicity that was given to the potential threats for our (mainly Euro-American) lifestyle, spread this narrative in different parts of our societies, particularly among the young. Fridays for Future became a worldwide movement, and in the last few years, we saw a shift in the alternative energy community to disruptive societal actions, such as those of Extinction Rebellion.
That shift was a clear sign of frustration that very little was changing. Why? In my opinion because the alternative energy narrative was subject to the same silo-ing that the fossil energy community had undergone earlier. Categories closed, the community’s vision increasingly depended on accepted (by now ‘old’) ideas and cut itself off from discussions with non-members. Here, too, the shift from comprehension to competency reduced the possibility of change, adaptation and—importantly—negotiation.
This example conveys an important lesson about the dynamics that lead up to tipping points: the fact that the narrative that leads up to such points has ‘fossilized’—has shifted from comprehension to competency, from an open exploratory narrative trying to understand what is going on to a closed narrative that exploits certain assumed ‘truths’ (‘knowledge’) about the phenomena concerned. Such a cognitive shift seems to be inherent as any narrative grows older, spreads among more people who integrate an abbreviated version of it, and thus becomes institutionalized. It inevitably leads to a “tipping point”.
5.2 Tipping Points
Now let’s get to the final aim of this paper: a reconsideration of the concept of “tipping points”. In the general discussion about such events, the assumption is that an exogenous or an endogenous nonlinearity, or a combination of these, relatively rapidly tilts a system’s dynamic into a different basin of attraction. That discussion therefore focuses on what causes change. Here, our interest is primarily in what created the stability that dominated the system before the change, and how that stabilizing dynamic came to a point that it relinquished control.
The acquisition of meaning occurs in a collaboration between individuals negotiating a focus for their collective effort, backgrounding most cognitive dimensions of participants, while foregrounding a selection that they can all agree to. That process, which we have summarized in Sect. 2.5, and exemplified in Sect. 4.3, ends with the reduction of the dimensionality of the initial, exploratory categories into intrinsic definitions of clearly closed categories that are integrated in the overall information processing apparatus. It permits the community involved to develop ways to handle particular aspects of the environment, devising “solutions” to the problems that were the subject of the collaboration. Such solutions are based on societally agreed conventions, which we often formulate as ‘knowledge’.
But at that point, the interaction between the information processing structure and the environment does not stop. The solutions implemented create their own unintended consequences, which then come to preoccupy the collective concerned. Further collaboration can negotiate new solutions, which add to the information processing apparatus. Mostly, these involve the creation of additional categories and conceptual feedback loops creating further understanding of the dynamics involved.
The process of creating a cognitive structure by filling cognitive space with dis-embedded dimensions can be followed by monitoring the growth of the US Patent and Trademark Office’s patent database (or its European or other equivalent). Because an approved patent mentions the other patents on which it is based, this permits us to construct technological genealogies and show the growth of the dense network of branches that structure the cognitive space that can grow out of the invention of a single solution (Strumsky et al., 2011a, 2011b; Strumsky & Lobo, 2015; Youn et al., 2015). Most of these new conceptual entities are either embellishments on existing solutions or combinations of existing solutions to new functionalities. Truly completely new inventions, called “originations”, are far and few between. Overall, this process captures how a particular cognitive logic, initiated by an originating invention can create a cognitive space by filling it, resulting in a path-dependent evolution of both the internal, mental, niche creation and the creation of the external niche that developed in tandem with it (Iriki & Taoka, 2012).
It is important to remain aware that this example concerning technology is just one way to create a cognitive space by filling it. An infinite number of others could do the same thing in the same or different domains. This is the case, for example, for societal values, legal systems, institutions, or scientific paradigms. Moreover, it is conceivable that different genealogies, emphasizing different aspects of the same cognitive domain, structure a cognitive space differentially.
Kuhn’s famous “Structure of scientific revolutions” (1962) focuses on how one scientific cognitive structure is transformed into another, novel one. He takes the paradigm shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican as example. His main argument is that during the period of use of a paradigm, ultimately, phenomena will be observed that cannot be fitted into that paradigm. As these accumulate, a “tipping point” is reached at which the existing paradigm is deemed insufficient, another one is invented and over time replaces it.
Because Kuhn is studying historical phenomena, what he does not fully trace is the logical and functional nature of the relationship between the old paradigm and the phenomena that cannot be fitted into it. Can one specify that further than simply referring to “unintended consequences” of applying a particular paradigm to the realm of phenomena? “What is the interaction between a cognitive structure that is limited to the discrepancy between the relatively few dimensions of human perception, and the (almost?) infinite number of dimensions of any ‘real world’ phenomena?
5.3 Reinterpreting Noise
Is there a relationship between cognized dimensions and un-cognized ones in a cognitive space? In particular, does the role of noise adjacent to cognized signals, such as Tett (2021) seems to argue that we need to investigate, move us closer to understanding dynamics? As I adopt the perspective that noise constitutes signals for which no theoretical explanatory framework has been created, it clearly is not “statistical uncertainty” as Kahneman et al. (2016) argue. But that asks the question “How can we explore relationships between different non-interpreted signals in order to create interpretative intellectual frameworks?” I have no clearcut answer to this question but am wondering whether Machine Learning (ML) might bring us closer.
Computers are now able to make and implement their own decisions, and to beat human champions at games such as Chess and Go. They acquire this capability by being confronted with very large numbers of data and searching independently for correlations in them—similar images, similar language, or any other kind of positive or negative similarity. Interpreting these configurations allows them to develop categorizations that are regularly beyond human perception because humans could never digest such huge volumes of data. Japanese astronomers, for example, have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) technique that transforms into information signals that were until now considered noise (https://scitechdaily.com/astronomers-use-artificial-intelligence-to-reveal-the-actual-shape-of-the-universe/, consulted July 14, 2021). They do this without the step that is fundamental in science—the development of categories that make sense to the observers.
This approach opens up questions about the nature of human knowing. The scientist responsible for this experiment (Qin, 2020) asks: “Don’t scientists want to develop physics theories that explain the world, instead of simply amassing data?”, “Aren’t theories fundamental to physics and necessary to explain and understand all phenomena?”, “What about doing the same for large numbers of signals on narratives?”, “Would that enable the identification of relationships between some of those signals that have not yet been brought into an understanding of ongoing dynamics and are regularly qualified as noise?” From a social science point of view, one would have to add: “How is one to situate knowledge?”, which opens up yet another major domain once it is understood that such situation needs to be done collectively.
6 Conclusion
This paper aims to open up a number of interesting discussions around narratives and tipping points by shifting the emphasis towards a complex systems perspective, emphasizing emergence in our thinking rather than origins, and looking at what creates stability rather than change in interactions between individuals and groups. Collaboration is seen as eliciting shared cognitive dimensions from among the many individual dimensions that are always present, and formulating them in terms of shared, closed categories that establish a cognitive structure that a community can use to manage its relationships with it’s environment. Such structures are codified in terms of narratives, and these are used to articulate the community with its unknown future. That also shifts the emphasis on tipping points, from moments at which endogenous and/or exogenous dynamics create a sudden change in the community’s environment to moments at which the cognitive structure of the community is no longer capable to deal with the changes occurring in its environment. Moments when solutions create problems (van der Leeuw, 2012). If, as I do, one accepts Luhman’s (1989) idea that rather than communicate with the external world, humans communicate among themselves about the external world, but that their activities trigger changes in that external world, this creates a field of tension between societies’ perspective on the external world and the dynamics driving change in that world. That ‘cognitive-reality’ dissonance regularly brings a society to a (tipping) point where it has to revise its perspective on the outside world and its dynamics (van der Leeuw, 2020, Ch. 16). In a sense, one could call the social construction of a new worldview after such a breakdown a ‘positive’ tipping point which involves societal collaboration (see Dirks & van der Leeuw, in press).
A deep reassessment of our current Western scientific epistemologies and the perspective on the ontologies and narratives that they have shaped will be necessary. Questions to be asked include “What are factors that shape and limit scientific perception”?, “Are these to be found in humans’ cognitive capabilities?”, “What is the value of the scientific theories that, until now, rule our life?”, ”What are the structural biases of Western science?”, and thus also “What are the biases introduced by the current scientific approaches?” and “What are the phenomena that science has ignored because of these structural biases?”. Those questions relate scientific knowledge directly to the information processing system that the society has, through its worldview or mindscape, and its institutional, political, and economic structure. In the case of our present challenges, one will have to ask, for example, “Is our democratic structure able to deal with the environmental change issues?”
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The workshop was held under Chatham House rules, so that I cannot cite any individual contribution. The collective results are to be published in an edited volume (Lupp, Roepstorff, Verschure, eds.) by MIT Press in 2023 or 2024.
“institutions” is here used in the anthropological sense of “any and all collective ways to organize behavior, from shared ideas to informal customs and habits, to technology, and to formal institutions”.
Recently, it was discovered that Exxon, in a confidential internal report in the 1970’s, pointed to some of the potential challenges to its ‘oil for all’ worldview.
