From one of the world's most celebrated intellectuals, a ';fascinating' (Financial Times), brilliantly insightful work that explains how we think about each other's thoughts about each other's thoughts, ad infinitum. It sounds impossible, but ';superlatively gifted science writer' (The Times) Steven Pinker shows that we do it all the time. This awareness, which we experience as something that is public or ';out there,' is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous impact on our social, political, and economic lives.
Common knowledge is necessary for coordination, for making arbitrary but complementary choices like driving on the right, using paper currency, and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It's also necessary for social coordination: everything from rendezvousing at a time and place to speaking the same language to forming enduring relationships of friendship, romance, or authority. Humans have a sixth sense for common knowledge, and we create it with signals like laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech.
But people also go to great lengths to avoid common knowledgeto ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can't know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like benign hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and pretending not to see the elephant in the room.
Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life's enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretense of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date. Artists and humorists have long mined the intrigues of common knowledge, and Pinker liberally uses their novels, jokes, cartoons, films, and sitcom dialogues to illuminate social life's tragedies and comedies. Along the way he answers questions li
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