Uncomfortable knowledge

From Uncomfortable knowledge: the social construction of ignorance in science and environmental policy discourses by Steve Rayner.  From the Abstract: 

To make sense of the complexity of the world so that they can act, individuals and institutions need to develop simplified, self-consistent versions of that world. The process of doing so means that much of what is known about the world needs to be excluded from those versions, and in particular that knowledge which is in tension or outright contradiction with those versions must be expunged. This is ‘uncomfortable knowledge’. The paper describes four implicit strategies which institutions use to keep uncomfortable knowledge at bay: denial, dismissal, diversion and displacement. It concludes by suggesting that ‘clumsy’ arrangements may need to be constructed to ensure that uncomfortable knowledge is not excluded from policy debates, especially when dealing with ‘wicked problems’ where the accepted version excludes knowledge that is crucial for making sense of and addressing the problem.

An excellent discussion in the body of the paper about uncomfortable knowledge.  The government response to Covid-19 is our most recent example of uncomfortable knowledge which is true but incompatible with the choices already made.

Knowledge out of place can be viewed as a form of information pollution, lying on the boundaries of what is organizationally knowable and not knowable; we can understand that it may be dangerous. That is dangerous in at least two ways.

The first is that acknowledging potential information by admitting it to the realm of what is ‘known’ may undermine the organizational principles of a society or organization. This is the case with the Nuer and their ‘disappeared’ ancestors, memory of which would cause the system of cattle rights to unravel. The second source of danger is that not admitting such information may also have serious deleterious effects on institutions, either directly or by making them prone to criticism from other parts of society that they ‘ought’ to have known. The famous case of the vulnerability of the O-rings on the space shuttle launch vehicle (Vaughan, 1996) is just one of a multitude of examples in which subsequent inquiries reveal that information that was not available to decision-makers at the time was indeed known in another part of the organization, but could not be ‘heard’ until it was too late to avoid catastrophe. Potential information that presents either sort of danger to institutions can be described as ‘uncomfortable knowledge’. 

 

I use the term ‘uncomfortable knowledge’ to bridge two separate but related theoretical concepts: ‘wicked problems’ and ‘clumsy solutions’.

Originally identified by Rittel and Webber (1973) in the context of urban planning, wicked problems are often characterized by multiple competing definitions of what the nature of the problem is. Often the information needed to understand a wicked problem depends upon one’s idea for solving it. In other words, wicked problems are often defined by the availability of solutions. With wicked problems, there is no stopping rule: we cannot know whether we have a sufficient understanding to stop searching for more information or clearer definitions. Where there is no end to causal chains, every wicked problem can be considered as a symptom of another problem. Wicked problems are persistent. Indeed, although phrased in the language of ‘problems’, they may not be soluble in any definitive sense, but are rather chronic conditions that can be managed more or less well. Policy-makers frequently respond to persistent wicked problems by declaring ‘war’ on them. Indeed, almost any ‘declaration of war’ that is metaphorical rather than literally military is a reliable sign of a problem’s wickedness. Hence we have had the war on cancer, the war on terror, the war on poverty and now, courtesy of Richard Branson, the ‘Climate War Room’, which, if there were any lingering doubt, would seem to confirm the ‘wicked’ status of climate change. Other applications of the idea of ‘wicked problems’ include water resource management and large computer software systems as well as health system and social security reform.

The second concept, ‘clumsy solutions’, was originally articulated by the American jurist Michael Shapiro (1988), to describe the coexistence of diverse principles of judicial selection in the US, a clumsy solution allows for the coexistence of common, but differently theorized conclusions. Clumsy solutions may emerge from complex processes of both explicit and implicit negotiation. In other words, solutions are clumsy when those implementing them converge on or accept a common course of action  for different reasons or on the basis of unshared epistemological or ethical principles (for a series of case studies, see Thompson & Verweij, 2006). Related ideas include ‘constructive ambiguity’, for example around the idea of ‘sustainable development’, and Sunstein’s (1996) concept of ‘incompletely theorized agreements’. All these ideas describe social arrangements which permit different sub-sections of a society or organization to rub along with each other by not questioning each other’s motivations and worldviews too deeply. They are inherently satisficing (Simon, 1972) rather than optimizing approaches, since each of the competing solutions is optimal from the standpoint of the proposer. Clumsy solutions are inherently pluralistic, although they differ from Lindblom’s (1959) ‘muddling through’ in that they are also inclusive, which is not required in muddling through. According to Verweij et al. (2006) clumsy solutions require that ‘all the voices are heard and responded to’. Other writers on the topic emphasize that clumsy settlements may be left implicit and, at least in some cases, may depend on being so (Rayner, 2006). Clumsy solutions, then, may be at least one way to manage wicked problems.