Yascha Mounk and Steven Pinker at Yascha Mounk’s Substack:
Yascha Mounk: I love your work. I have read many of your books. In the new book, you suggest that a deceptively straightforward concept—common knowledge—actually holds the key to explaining all kinds of different social phenomena. You take us on a really fun wild ride, both in terms of the anecdotes you provide, the illustrations you provide, and in terms of the kind of domains of social life that you illustrate through this seemingly simple concept. Before we jump into some of those points and some of those examples, what do you mean by common knowledge?
Steven Pinker: I’m using it in a technical sense, which is not the same as the everyday sense of conventional wisdom or something that people know. Common knowledge in the technical sense refers to a case where everyone knows that everyone knows something and everyone knows that and everyone knows it, ad infinitum. So I know something, you know it, I know that you know it, you know that I know it, I know that you know that I know it, et cetera.
Now, people start to smile when I explain the concept, because it sounds so complicated. It sounds impossible—although it’s tapping into a familiar feature of human nature: we’re always trying to get inside each other’s heads.
More here.
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