Theorizing is a very individualist mode of knowing.
Collective modes of knowing involve something that looks like theorizing but operates very differently, since it seeks convergence to consensus rather than correspondence to phenomenology.
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Institutional knowing is an interesting hybrid of individual knowing (theorizing) and collective knowing (consensus creation). In fact an institution could almost be defined as an entity that harmoniously combines the two.
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I've been thinking about Turchin's elite overproduction idea. It picks out a real phenomenon but doesn't actually construct it correctly. The problem is it conflates institutional knowing structures (elite jobs and competition for them) with knowing
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The adaptive balance between the theorizing and consensus-creation aspects of institutional knowledge gets of whack. The inner consensus dynamics ("angels on a pinhead") gets overtheorized, and outer correspondence to phenomenology ("are angels real?") gets neglected.
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Or to put it another way, the individual act of theorizing as a way of knowing goes meta, via a level of indirection. People unconsciously theorize maps instead of territories.
So they study patterns of consensus about the thing imagining they are studying the thing itself.
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In the interest of full disclosure, I went to confirm whether ‘phenomenonology’ is in fact an actual word. Verdict: it is. Sorry for having doubted you.

