{"id":14034,"date":"2014-07-14T09:05:28","date_gmt":"2014-07-14T13:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=14034"},"modified":"2014-07-14T09:05:28","modified_gmt":"2014-07-14T13:05:28","slug":"watching-community-form","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=14034","title":{"rendered":"watching a community form"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 2014 Summer Institute of Civic Studies<\/a> consists of 24 people who differ by\u00a0discipline and profession, age, gender, race\/ethnicity, ideology\/religion, and nationality. (India, Iran, Ukraine, German-speaking Northern Italy, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Francophone Canada, Mexico, and the US are represented.)<\/p>\n

Before the Institute began, I asked each member to tell\u00a0me as many as\u00a0five general principles that she or he strives to live by; up to five truths about life that she sees as relevant to her moral decisions; and up to three methods that she uses to make moral decisions. I then gave them back their own lists of ideas and asked them to link any pairs that they saw as strongly connected. That allowed me to map each person’s moral worldview as a network of ideas.<\/p>\n

The resulting maps differed not only in their content, but also in their form. Here is a network that is small (just six nodes) and largely\u00a0centralized around a single idea: “Love the world.” This individual felt\u00a0that Loving the World\u00a0implied three other very general ideas.\u00a0He\u00a0added two more ideas that he chose not to connect to anything. That produced a disconnected network with a highly centralized core:<\/p>\n

\"subject1\"<\/p>\n

In contrast, this person produced\u00a0a much larger and denser network in which many nodes are\u00a0connected but there is no clear core:<\/p>\n

\"subject2\"<\/p>\n

I\u00a0believe that moral reasoning is intrinsically social–we\u00a0believe what we do because of our interactions with other people, and we have better<\/em> beliefs if our interactions go well. I think we each\u00a0start with the\u00a0network of ideas\u00a0that our context gives us,\u00a0and our\u00a0duty is to improve it through interaction. I posit that different network forms are better or\u00a0worse for interaction.<\/p>\n

Because some members of the Institute\u00a0provided identical (or substantially\u00a0identical) responses to the questions I had asked before we met, I could graph all of their ideas and connections as one network. Once we convened at Tufts, I gave them opportunities to discuss their own network maps with their colleagues. I did not encourage them to link their ideas together, but some chose to do so, and others simply borrowed ideas from their fellow participants. I edited the database when people changed their responses. As a result,\u00a0the class map became gradually denser. Here is an illegibly small image of all 272 ideas and how they relate in the minds of our participants\u00a0on\u00a0Day 6 of the Institute. (Responses are color-coded by individual.)<\/p>\n

\"subject3\"<\/p>\n

I would posit that we have formed an intellectual community to the degree that the individual networks have linked up. This community\u00a0is not defined by shared premises. There is no one idea that everyone shares–in fact, not even close–and several ideas on the map are mutually\u00a0contradictory. (To name an evident example, the map includes both “God is loving and kind” and “God is dead–everything is permitted.”) The community is rather defined by its density and connectedness. These are matters of degree. Ten\u00a0nodes are completely disconnected, and the network as a whole is only 1.5% as connected as it would be if every node were directly linked\u00a0to every other one. But we have more of a community than we had on Day 1, as any participant would attest.<\/p>\n

By the way, this means that John Rawls was wrong. Rawls\u00a0saw a \u201cplurality of reasonable but incompatible comprehensive doctrines\u201d as a \u201cfact\u201d about the world, or at least about the modern world. He explained: \u201ca reasonable doctrine is an exercise of theoretical reason: it covers the major religious, philosophical, and moral aspects of human life in a more or less consistent and coherent manner. It organizes and characterizes recognized values to that they are compatible with each other and express an intelligible view of the world\u201d (<\/span>Political Liberalism<\/em>, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. xvii, 59).<\/span><\/p>\n

Do we see\u00a0a comprehensive doctrine here? Or two doctrines, or three? I know that\u00a0the group includes an observant Mexican Catholic, a couple of explicit atheists, a highly Kantian liberal, and some Deweyan communitarian pragmatists. I can identify their favored ideas on the map. But I do not see separate islands of thought. A few\u00a0people have organized their networks, made their ideas mutually compatible, and could summarize them by identifying one or more core premises from which they think the rest follow. Most\u00a0people could not do that. To “express\u00a0[their] intelligible view[s] of the world,” they would have to show their whole maps, which now connect to other people’s maps.<\/p>\n

Diversity is a fact. A diversity of “comprehensive doctrines” is not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 2014 Summer Institute of Civic Studies consists of 24 people who differ by\u00a0discipline and profession, age, gender, race\/ethnicity, ideology\/religion, and nationality. (India, Iran, Ukraine, German-speaking Northern Italy, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Francophone Canada, Mexico, and the US are represented.) Before the Institute began, I asked each member to tell\u00a0me as many as\u00a0five general principles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moral-network-mapping","category-philosophy","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14034"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14044,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14034\/revisions\/14044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}