Close encounters of the cognitive kind

Of all the ironies in academia, this one seemed particularly unlikely: I’d been asked to introduce Steven Pinker and moderate a Q&A about his latest book, When Everyone Knows Everyone Knows…: The Shared Knowledge and Secrets of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.

The problem? Pinker and I inhabit different intellectual worlds.

Two physicists, two scientists

If you can connect cognitive science to physics, Pinker’s world works like Newtonian mechanics: clear lines, predictable paths, and universal laws. Language, in his view, is an instinct, a distinct unit that has evolved in our species. It operates in clear causal chains and direct relationships. Common knowledge (that recursive structure where I know you know that I know) is something we can deliberately identify, analyze, and construct to solve coordination problems.

My world looks more like quantum mechanics and relativity. Language, to me, is made up of bits and pieces put together from our evolutionary history. As Elizabeth Bates notes, “It’s a new instrument built from old parts,” parts borrowed from tool use, the lucky coincidence of our vocal anatomy, and the expansion of our brains. These elements have converged to form what we call language, but it is fundamentally messy, embodied and emergent. We, like many other animals on this planet, sense our way through the world, listen, move, feel, and from all those sensations, we build a model of other people’s minds and our own.

Pinker and I acknowledge that our models are flawed. But here we differ: I believe that the world is much more flexible and less precise than its framework allows. Even when we set standards (when something becomes “what everyone knows and everyone knows”), they change incredibly quickly. This influx of information, or what I call informational singularity, makes knowing what constitutes common truth unexpectedly treacherous.

Common knowledge question

During the Q&A session, one person asked how we should navigate the competing narratives Social mediawhen different societies seem to live in completely different realities. Pinker’s answer was characteristically clear: we can establish common knowledge through rational inquiry (statistics, hypothesis testing, reliable sources). If we all agree on the methods, we will be able to build a common understanding.

It’s a convincing answer. It is also where our differences crystallize.

For Pinker, common knowledge is something we can intentionally build and maintain. It is a tool for coordination, built on common rational standards. For me, what becomes “popular” emerges from complex social dynamics that we barely understand. It is not something we construct so much as something that happens to us, emerging from embodied interactions, status hierarchies, and group dynamics. Shared knowledge is a result, not a blueprint.

This is not just an academic distinction. It shapes how we think about our current predicament.

When shared knowledge is broken

Martin Jory, V Public revolutionHe makes an alarming observation: Information has doubled almost every year for most of this century. Not just an increase, but a doubling. This is not Moore’s Law for computers. This is the cognitive flood. Our world of constant alerts, ringing phones, videos, and viral posts pulls us in multiple directions at once. It’s a deluge of information that we’re all trying to navigate.

Here’s what makes this dangerous: When information proliferates at this rate, anyone can build a self-contained ecosystem of common knowledge. Each society develops its own “everyone knows that everyone knows” structure, complete with its own statistics, its own sources, and its own standards of evidence. From the inside, it feels complete, cohesive and clear.

What was once difficult (creating parallel realities for common knowledge) is now almost trivial. You won’t need to control printing presses anymore. You need a Substack and some passionate followers. Each cognitive bubble generates its own recurring cognitive structure, and the people within it can coordinate beautifully with each other. The problem is coordination across bubbles.

So, when Pinker calls for establishing common knowledge through common rational standards, he assumes a foundation that is increasingly difficult to maintain. It is not impossible, but it requires exhausting and constant work. It’s like trying to use Newtonian mechanics to predict the behavior of particles at the quantum level. The tool isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s not enough for the system you’re already in.

The value of the meeting

And yet.

Hosting Pinker was inspiring for reasons I didn’t expect. More than anything else, it gave me a glimpse into how precise and systematic his approach to the world was. He sincerely and deeply believes that we can establish common understanding through careful reflection. This shared knowledge is not just something that happens to us, but something we can cultivate and protect.

Although we differ in how we understand perception, there was something refreshing in his conviction. In a world where Sarcasm Giving up seems easier: “Everyone has their own truth” can become an excuse for intellectual laziness, says Pinker. He insists that we can build bridges across different ways of knowing, and that common understanding is possible if we commit to it.

I do not share his belief that common knowledge can be deliberately constructed from rational principles. I think it’s more fragile, more contingent, more dependent on social dynamics, and we can’t get out of it. But I found myself Thankful For his certainty. Not because he’s necessarily right (and I may not be), but because the world needs people who believe that shared understanding matters, that evidence matters, and that we can do better.

First communication protocols

Perhaps the most important thing I learned from presenting by someone with a very different worldview: We need these encounters. We need to sit in rooms with people whose frames are foreign to our own, not to convert them or to have a debate, but to understand how differently you can see the world and still be committed to understanding it.

Pinker’s Newtonian world has precision that I cannot achieve in my quantum world. My world has a flexibility that it cannot comprehend. Neither of us was right (although we probably bristle at this formula for different reasons).

But the conversation between those worlds? This is where something interesting happens. Not synthesis, exactly. More like the productive friction between tectonic plates, creating something that none of us could have predicted.

I presented a man whose intellectual viewpoint did not fit with my own. He spoke with clarity that I liked, even when he was skeptical. The audience saw two cognitive worlds orbiting around each other without colliding.

And somehow, in that precise distance, we all learned something about the limits and possibilities of shared understanding itself.

What frameworks shape how you understand thinking itself? When have you met someone whose cognitive perspective was completely different from yours?