Focus on relations
The Interdemocracy format consists of three elements: check-in, thought experiment and check-out (see: blog posts 31, 41). All three share a simple procedural constraint: every participant responds to the same question.
Because every participant responds to an identical question, they enter the same conceptual field. The constituent concepts remain constant across participants. Only the relations established among those concepts are free to vary.
The procedural consequence is that participants’ perspectives become structurally comparable. They do not differ in their conceptual inventories but in the relational organizations they construct.
Significant form
Focusing on relational organizations rather than conceptual elements resembles Clive Bell’s notion of “significant form”. Bell argued that the aesthetic power of a work of art does not reside in the objects it depicts but in the formal relations among its visual elements. The depicted objects may remain identical, while their organization gives rise to entirely different meanings. The organization of the objects, rather than the objects themselves, becomes the primary bearer of meaning.
Interdemocracy appears to apply an analogous principle to social understanding. The shared question fixes the conceptual elements. Participants differ not in the concepts available to them but in the relations they establish among those concepts. Meaning emerges through the relational organization of a shared conceptual field.
Ma denotes the interval within which these relational organizations can emerge, become visible and be encountered by others. It is not an empty space between fixed positions but the relational space that makes alternative organizations of the same conceptual field possible.
Personal ontology
Participants organize the same conceptual field differently. They do that by offering what Nick Chater calls a thought cycle. These thought cycles are not created out of nothing but improvise on earlier thought cycles. Chater writes: “Each fresh improvisation is built from the fragments of past improvisations – so each of us is a unique history, together with a wonderfully creative machine for redeploying that history to create new perceptions, thoughts, emotions and stories. The layering of that history makes some patterns of thought natural for us, others awkward or uncomfortable.” (The mind is flat, 2018, p.220)
Because each participant brings a different history of thought cycles to the same conceptual field, they organize the relations among its conceptual elements differently. Their contributions therefore reveal more than opinions, preferences or positions. They disclose the relational organization through which meaning is generated. This relational organization can be understood as a personal ontology.
Within Interdemocracy, this notion becomes operational. Because every participant organizes the same conceptual field independently, differences appear not as competing conceptual inventories but as distinct relational organizations. What becomes comparable is not what participants think about but how they organize the relations among shared conceptual elements.
Change
The process does not stop with the formulation of participants’ personal ontologies. Participants subsequently encounter the personal ontologies of others: alternative relational organizations imposed upon the same shared conceptual field.
Because the conceptual field remains constant, differences become directly comparable. Participants may encounter relations established by others that their own personal ontology had left unnoticed or underappreciated. Such encounters can expose the contingency of one’s own relational organization and reveal alternative ways of constituting the same conceptual field.
Change therefore does not result from persuasion. Participants are not asked to replace one opinion with another or to adopt unfamiliar concepts. Rather, change emerges through the encounter between different personal ontologies. Reflection on alternative relational organizations may prompt participants to reorganize the relations through which they themselves generate meaning.
Conditions
Encountering different personal ontologies does not in itself necessarily produce change. Participants may simply dismiss alternative relational organizations or fail to disclose their own. The previous argument therefore leaves an explanatory question unresolved: what allows one relational organization to become meaningful for another?
Clive Bell’s account of significant form suggests that the answer lies with both the creator and the perceiver. The artist must establish relations that disclose a genuinely new organization rather than merely reproduce familiar forms. At the same time, the viewer must suspend the habit of comparing the work with external reality. Otherwise the relations themselves never become visible.
Interdemocracy appears to require analogous conditions. Participants must formulate their personal ontologies authentically so that the disclosed relational organizations genuinely reflect their own way of constituting reality rather than socially expected performances. At the same time, participants must remain genuinely curious about the personal ontologies disclosed by others. Without such curiosity, alternative relational organizations are evaluated against one’s existing ontology instead of being encountered on their own terms.
Authenticity therefore makes meaningful relational organizations available. Curiosity makes them perceptible. Together they preserve the conditions under which relational reorganization becomes possible.