I Know, You Know…
Why Read This
What Makes This Article Worth Your Time
Summary
What This Article Is About
This article examines Steven Pinker’s new book exploring how common knowledge—information that everyone knows and everyone knows that everyone knows—coordinates human behavior and drives societal progress. From three-year-olds learning language through tacit assumptions to recursive mentalising (the layered awareness of what others know), common knowledge serves as the foundation for human cooperation. Pinker illustrates this concept through diverse phenomena including pluralistic ignorance in dictatorships, where people conceal opinions without knowing discontent is widely shared until public demonstrations generate the common knowledge needed to coordinate resistance.
The article explores why complete transparency poses dangers alongside benefits. Pinker addresses cancel culture as stemming from fears that common knowledge makes ideas dangerous, the pandemic response revealing how stifling debate produced policies unsupported by scientific evidence, and what he provocatively calls the “ultimate dishonesty”—demanding complete honesty itself. The article concludes that while transparency trends are welcome, civilization requires maintaining zones of privacy because authentic relationships and human interdependence cannot survive converting every private thought into common knowledge.
Key Points
Main Takeaways
Language Coordinates Behavior
Language’s fundamental purpose is coordinating human behavior through tacitly assumed common knowledge, beginning when children learn words without worrying about differential meanings.
Recursive Mentalising Drives Progress
Human progress results from cognitive recursion—taking mental outputs and feeding them back into further cognition, creating layered awareness of shared knowledge.
Pluralistic Ignorance Enables Dictatorships
Dictatorships survive through pluralistic ignorance—people concealing opinions to avoid punishment, unable to know discontent is widely shared until public demonstrations create common knowledge.
Intellectual Freedom Enables Discovery
Universities cannot discover and transmit knowledge without intellectual freedom; academic establishments that stifle debate provide false guidance on vital issues like pandemic policy.
Cancel Culture Fears Common Knowledge
Cancelling instincts stem from the fear that common knowledge makes ideas dangerous, yet moral order survived accepting Earth wasn’t central or humans descended from apes.
Rational Hypocrisy Preserves Civilization
Complete honesty is the ultimate dishonesty; civilization requires privacy zones because authentic relationships cannot survive making every thought and conversation publicly common knowledge.
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Article Analysis
Breaking Down the Elements
Main Idea
Common Knowledge as Social Infrastructure
The article’s central thesis positions common knowledge—the recursive awareness of what everyone knows that everyone else knows—as essential infrastructure for human coordination and progress. This seemingly abstract concept manifests concretely in phenomena from language acquisition to political resistance, revealing how shared awareness enables collective action while its absence perpetuates oppression through pluralistic ignorance.
Purpose
Popularizing Cognitive Science Insights
The article aims to introduce general readers to Pinker’s sophisticated framework for understanding social phenomena through common knowledge dynamics. By illustrating abstract cognitive science with concrete examples—dictatorships, pandemic policies, cancel culture—it bridges academic theory and everyday experience while advocating for intellectual freedom and privacy rights against totalizing transparency demands.
Structure
Conceptual → Illustrative → Provocative
The piece opens by establishing the foundational concept of common knowledge and recursive mentalising through simple examples like children learning language. It then illustrates the concept’s power through political applications (pluralistic ignorance, declining resistance success rates) and intellectual debates (cancel culture, pandemic policies). Finally, it delivers a provocative twist—that demanding complete honesty constitutes the ultimate dishonesty—challenging readers’ assumptions about transparency.
Tone
Accessible, Analytical & Counterintuitive
The writing maintains an accessible tone while engaging with sophisticated cognitive science concepts. It balances analytical examination of social phenomena with rhetorical provocations like “the ultimate dishonesty” and “rational hypocrisy.” The tone conveys intellectual seriousness without academic jargon, making complex ideas about recursive mentalising comprehensible through concrete contemporary examples while challenging conventional wisdom about transparency and free speech.
Key Terms
Vocabulary from the Article
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Tough Words
Challenging Vocabulary
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The cognitive process of attributing mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, emotions—to oneself and others; understanding that others have thoughts and perspectives different from one’s own.
“Steven Pinker has a new focal point (common knowledge) alongside the running theme of his broader work, ‘recursive mentalising’.”
Relating to a condition or system where multiple distinct groups, beliefs, or sources of authority coexist; characterized by diversity of opinions or behaviors within a society.
“In dictatorships, people conceal their political opinion to avoid being punished, so they can’t know if their discontent is widely shared. This is pluralistic ignorance.”
Portraying someone or something as wicked, evil, or threatening; deliberately representing a person, group, or idea as fundamentally bad to discredit or suppress them.
“They were imposed by demonising what turned out to be reasonable criticisms.”
A set of reasons or logical basis for a course of action or belief; the fundamental reasoning underlying something.
“Everywhere the rationale for obliterating zones of privacy is, if you aren’t doing anything wrong you should have nothing to hide.”
Given, felt, or done in return; involving mutual exchange or action between two parties; characterized by mutual benefit or correspondence.
“Neither authentic human relationships nor homo sapiens’ overall interdependence would survive making every wisecrack, conversation and thought public.”
The state of being dependent upon one another; a mutual reliance between two or more groups or entities where each depends on the others.
“Neither authentic human relationships nor homo sapiens’ overall interdependence would survive making every wisecrack, conversation and thought public.”
Reading Comprehension
Test Your Understanding
5 questions covering different RC question types
1According to the article, when three-year-olds learn the word “mouse,” they tacitly assume common knowledge without worrying that it means different things to different people.
2According to the article, why have nonviolent civil resistance campaigns seen declining success rates over the past two decades?
3Which sentence best captures Pinker’s argument about the relationship between facts and identity politics?
4Based on the article, evaluate these statements about Pinker’s arguments regarding intellectual freedom and the pandemic:
Universities cannot discover and transmit knowledge without intellectual freedom.
Many early pandemic policies, including draconian lockdowns, have been revealed as not based on scientific evidence.
Pinker argues that stifling debate during the pandemic ultimately strengthened public trust in science and public health.
Select True or False for all three statements, then click “Check Answers”
5What can be inferred about Pinker’s concept of “rational hypocrisy” based on the article’s discussion?
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Recursive mentalising refers to the layered cognitive process where humans not only know things and recognize that others know them, but also understand that others know that we know, creating infinite recursive loops of shared awareness. This capacity distinguishes human cognition and enables the complex social coordination underlying language, culture, and civilization. It drives human progress by allowing cognitive outputs to feed back into further cognition.
Pluralistic ignorance occurs when people privately reject norms but incorrectly assume others accept them. In dictatorships, individuals conceal political opinions to avoid punishment, preventing them from knowing their discontent is widely shared. This isolation maintains regime stability because without common knowledge of shared opposition, people cannot coordinate resistance. Public demonstrations break this cycle by generating the common knowledge needed for collective action, which explains why dictators increasingly censor platforms that might coordinate such demonstrations.
Pinker argues that demands for total transparency are fundamentally dishonest because they ignore civilization’s dependence on privacy zones. The rationale that “if you aren’t doing anything wrong you should have nothing to hide” fails to recognize that authentic human relationships and societal interdependence require maintaining distinctions between private, reciprocal, and common knowledge. Converting every thought, conversation, and wisecrack into common knowledge would destroy the social fabric, making absolute honesty a destructive rather than virtuous principle.
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This article is rated Advanced. It engages with sophisticated cognitive science concepts like recursive mentalising and pluralistic ignorance, employs specialized vocabulary (tacitly, conjecture, refutation, draconian), and requires readers to synthesize abstract theoretical frameworks with contemporary social phenomena. The piece assumes familiarity with intellectual debates around free speech, cancel culture, and pandemic policy while presenti ng paradoxical arguments like rational hypocrisy that demand nuanced comprehension beyond surface-level understanding.
The article references acceptance of heliocentrism and human evolution to counter fears underlying cancel culture—that certain ideas becoming common knowledge will destroy moral order. By noting that society survived these paradigm shifts without moral collapse, Pinker argues that preventing ideas from becoming common knowledge through cancellation reflects misplaced anxiety. These historical examples demonstrate that human progress requires allowing challenging ideas to circulate freely through the process of conjecture and refutation, rather than suppressing them based on perceived danger.
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