No one recalls seeing it arrive.
Blottisham: Curious title.
It sounds like someone has finally decided to classify certainty as an endangered species.
Stray: Or perhaps as a domesticated one.
Quillibrace: Those are not mutually exclusive.
(A pause while pages are turned.)
Blottisham: Well.
It's certainly ambitious.
The author seems to believe civilisation is essentially an elaborate response to not knowing things.
That strikes me as unnecessarily gloomy.
Quillibrace: Does it?
Blottisham: Of course.
Civilisation exists because we do know things.
Agriculture.
Medicine.
Engineering.
Constitutional law.
The plumbing in this building.
Quillibrace: Ah.
You have immediately supplied examples of accumulated knowledge.
The author appears to be asking a different question.
What required those accumulations in the first place?
Blottisham: Ignorance.
Obviously.
Quillibrace: No.
Ignorance requires remarkably little organisation.
Uncertainty does.
Stray: That's an interesting distinction.
Ignorance can remain private.
Uncertainty often becomes collective.
Blottisham: I'm not sure I follow.
Stray: If I don't know the capital of Peru, the consequences are modest.
If no one knows whether a bridge is safe, society rather quickly becomes organised around finding out.
Quillibrace: Or, more precisely, around deciding what shall count as finding out.
Blottisham: Surely that's splitting hairs.
Either the bridge is safe or it isn't.
Quillibrace: Quite.
But before anyone walks across it, committees must meet.
Measurements must be trusted.
Experts must be recognised.
Standards must be agreed.
Reports must be signed.
The bridge may be a physical structure.
Confidence in the bridge is an institutional one.
(Blottisham reads silently for a moment.)
Blottisham: Hm.
The author says something rather odd here.
"Important unanswered questions produce conferences, journals, centres, frameworks and funding streams."
That can't literally be true.
Quillibrace: Can't it?
Blottisham: Questions don't produce conferences.
People produce conferences.
Quillibrace: Yes.
The interesting question is why.
Stray: Perhaps because a sufficiently important question cannot remain merely a question.
People begin organising themselves around it.
Quillibrace: Exactly.
The manuscript is not treating uncertainty as an intellectual deficiency.
It is treating it as a social generator.
Blottisham: Generator?
Quillibrace: Of institutions.
Of professions.
Of procedures.
Of authority.
Perhaps even of civilisation itself.
(A longer pause.)
Stray: That's rather a beautiful inversion.
Most histories describe institutions as products of knowledge.
This manuscript suggests they are equally products of what remains unresolved.
Blottisham: If that's true...
(He closes the manuscript and looks around the room.)
...then universities have been misunderstood from the beginning.
Quillibrace: Universities have always understood perfectly well what they are doing.
The difficulty is that they occasionally describe it differently.
(Silence.)
Blottisham: I dislike it.
Quillibrace: Good.
Blottisham: Why good?
Quillibrace: Because a genuinely unfamiliar idea should not feel immediately hospitable.
It should rearrange the furniture before offering you a chair.
(Another silence.)
Stray: I wonder whether the manuscript is really about certainty at all.
Quillibrace: No?
Stray: I think it may be about civilisation.
It simply approaches civilisation from the opposite end.
Instead of asking how knowledge accumulates...
...it asks what unanswered questions make people build together.
Quillibrace (closing the manuscript): Yes.
I rather suspect that is the more interesting question.
The discussion then turned, for reasons no one subsequently recalled, to whether the Senior Common Room itself ought properly to be regarded as a response to uncertainty.
No conclusion was recorded.
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