Knowledge And Decisions

Explicit articulation — in words or symbols — is central to the intellectual process. By contrast the enormously complex information required to make life itself possible, which has systemically evolved and exists in unarticulated form in the genetic code, is not intellectual, though the efforts to transform the genetic code into an articulated form is a challenging if uncompleted intellectual process. Conversely, the forms of articulation may be elaborate and impressive and yet the substance of what is elaborated simple or even trivial. There is nothing either intrinsically difficult or profound about the proposition that LIX times XXXIII equals MCMXLVII. Children in the fourth grade perform this kind of arithmetic every day. The symbols alone make it formidable. Graphs, Latin phrases, and mathematical symbols likewise create an air of complexity or profundity in the process of elaborating ideas that may contain little of complexity or substance, much less validity.

However limited the scope of articulation, within those limits it serves a vital role in the intellectual process. A mere isolated idea, or arbitrary constellation of ideas — a vision — is metamorphosed into an empirically meaningful theory by the systematic articulation of its premises and the logical deduction of their implications. This does not in itself produce either truth or creativity. It aids in detecting error or meaningless rhetoric. The more rigorously formalized the reasoning, the more readily detectable are shifting premises or other internal inconsistencies, or a discord between the implications of the theory and observable events. In short, articulation is crucial to the intellectual process, however limited (and sometimes confusing) it may be in the social decision making process.

Articulation, indeed, readily loses information, as noted in Chapter 8 in discussions of price control and central planning. The definition or articulation of product characteristics by third parties seldom covers as many dimensions as are unconsciously coordinated in unarticulated market processes, so that (for example) an apartment typically has more auxiliary services when there is less articulation (in private housing markets) than when there are more elaborate articulations (in public housing regulations). The characteristics of even relatively simple things like an apartment or a can of peas cannot be exhaustively articulated, or even articulated enough in most cases to match the systemic control of characteristics through voluntary transactions. In more elaborate or subtle things, such as deeply felt emotions, articulation often seems so wholly inadequate as to be discarded for symbolic gestures, looks, and tones of voice, which may be less explicit and yet convey more meaning. Resort to poetry, music, and flowers on highly emotional occasions is evidence of the limited transmission capacity of articulation.

Because nothing can be literally exhaustively articulated, the process of articulation is necessarily to some extent also a process of abstraction. Some characteristics are defined, to the neglect of others which may be present but which are deemed less significant for the matter at issue. This purely judgmental decision may of course prove to be right or wrong. The point is that abstract intellectual models — “mimic and fabulous worlds”⁹⁰ as Bacon characterized them — are inherent in intellectual activity, whether these models be explicit and highly formalized (as in systems of mathematical equations) or informal or even implicit. In the implicit models, however, it is possible to ignore the fact that one is abstracting and theorizing, to call the premises or conclusions “common sense” and to shift one’s premises without being aware oneself and without alerting others to the shift. For example, one may use the public witnessing of executions as evidence for the immorality of capital punishment in one part of an informal and implicit argument, and pages later also use the public’s not witnessing executions as more evidence for its immorality. Were all the arguments reduced to equations, the inconsistent premises would at the very least be located nearer one another in a more condensed presentation, would be more readily detectable and more conclusively demonstrable by universally recognized mathematical principles. In a celebrated episode in the development of modern economic theory, a set of instructions given to a draftsman preparing a graph proved impossible to execute, leading to the later discovery of a substantive economic principle inherent in that impossibility.⁹¹ Had the same theory been presented in a purely informal and verbal manner, nothing would have compelled the recognition of the inconsistency. Indeed the particular inconsistency in question is still common among “practical” men, though analytically discredited decades ago.⁹²