By coincidence, I just finished up my summary of A Social History of Truth for LW. One of its core claims is that the “social graces” of English gentility were a fundamental component of the Royal Society and the beginnings of empirical science. Some key ingredients:
Honor culture that highly valued reputation and honesty, which viewed calling someone a liar as a grounds for dueling, which led to cautious statements, careful disagreements, and hypothesizing on how everyone might be right
Idleness culture that valued conversation as an art form / game where the right move is one that allows for a response (like a variant of tennis where the goal is to have the other party return the volley, rather than be unable to return it)
A negative view of scholarly pedantic argumentative culture, which viewed reputation as a zero-sum game and was detached from worldly considerations.
The claim is that the originators of the Royal Society were, among other things, concerned with keeping the conversation going. If experiments over here conflicted with observations over there, rather than trying to immediately settle which was correct, they wanted to relax and observe; maybe there’s a difference between the underlying generators between here and there, such that both can be locally correct and we can see more deeply into the underlying reality.
Part of this was a social and practical matter. There was a situation where two astronomers reported different locations for a comet on the same night, and the Royal Society worked to defuse the disagreement—in large part because they wanted to keep receiving observations from both of the astronomers, and suspected that being too critical of either might result in the loss of their data. (The Royal Society’s guess was that both observations were correct, and there were two comets.)
Politeness is, to a large extent, about concealing or obfuscating information that someone would prefer not to be revealed
I think politeness is “about” avoiding conflict (and, more broadly, reputational harm). It may use concealing or obfuscating information as a means to that end, but I think the goal is more central than the methodology.
By coincidence, I just finished up my summary of A Social History of Truth for LW. One of its core claims is that the “social graces” of English gentility were a fundamental component of the Royal Society and the beginnings of empirical science. Some key ingredients:
Honor culture that highly valued reputation and honesty, which viewed calling someone a liar as a grounds for dueling, which led to cautious statements, careful disagreements, and hypothesizing on how everyone might be right
Idleness culture that valued conversation as an art form / game where the right move is one that allows for a response (like a variant of tennis where the goal is to have the other party return the volley, rather than be unable to return it)
A negative view of scholarly pedantic argumentative culture, which viewed reputation as a zero-sum game and was detached from worldly considerations.
The claim is that the originators of the Royal Society were, among other things, concerned with keeping the conversation going. If experiments over here conflicted with observations over there, rather than trying to immediately settle which was correct, they wanted to relax and observe; maybe there’s a difference between the underlying generators between here and there, such that both can be locally correct and we can see more deeply into the underlying reality.
Part of this was a social and practical matter. There was a situation where two astronomers reported different locations for a comet on the same night, and the Royal Society worked to defuse the disagreement—in large part because they wanted to keep receiving observations from both of the astronomers, and suspected that being too critical of either might result in the loss of their data. (The Royal Society’s guess was that both observations were correct, and there were two comets.)
I think politeness is “about” avoiding conflict (and, more broadly, reputational harm). It may use concealing or obfuscating information as a means to that end, but I think the goal is more central than the methodology.