III — A heritage of thought about understanding

To build, we bring comprehensive support. It is temporary; what will last is the building.

What I have so far described as a practitioner's craft has been studied for a long time, under various names.

Cognitive and sociological theories ground the central claim of this essay: that making things simple is the condition under which judgement, decision and action become possible for the person who receives it. The authors differ in vocabulary but converge in observation.

Jerome Bruner’s scaffold

The Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner studied how human beings come to understand. In The Process of Education, he made what may be the most concise statement of this argument's thesis ever written by a major scholar:

Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development. ¹²

He admits that the form must change with the learner but the qualifiers rule out vulgarisation and baby-talk. Bruner's working term for the practical method was scaffolding: the knower provides temporary supports to a less-expert mind, so that the less-expert mind can carry out a task it could not yet carry out alone — and then, gradually, the scaffolds are removed. ¹³ They are not the building. The building is what the learner builds when the frames come down.

This is exactly the disposition I am calling making-simple. The matter remains the matter. What changes is the form in which it is offered to a particular mind, and the willingness of the simplifier to remove the supports as the learner finds their footing.

Paulo Freire and the stakes of agency

The Brazilian Paulo Freire, pedagogist and philosopher of liberation, put a sharper edge on the same observation, and gave it a name that carries political weight: conscientização, critical consciousness. ¹⁴ For Freire, understanding is not a neutral cognitive achievement. It is the condition under which a person becomes able to act on their own situation rather than be acted upon by it. To make things understandable, in this view, is to make agency possible.

Freire was writing about peasants and workers under conditions of structural oppression, and his vocabulary belongs to that context. But the principle generalises. A patient who does not understand their diagnosis cannot consent meaningfully to treatment. A citizen who does not understand the policy cannot vote meaningfully. A signatory who does not understand the contract cannot agree meaningfully. In each case the simplifier — doctor, journalist, designer, lawyer— is either enabling agency or quietly removing it. Such critical awareness makes the distinction between making-simple and reduction. The latter, however well-intentioned, removes agency. The emancipating simplifier restores agency.

Herbert Simon and organisational simplification

The economist and cognitive scientist Herbert Simon made the philosophical point still more general. Human beings, he argued, are not unboundedly rational. We are boundedly rational: our cognitive resources are finite, our attention is narrow, our memory is limited, and the world is larger than any of these. Therefore, we have no choice but to simplify reality in order to act in it. ¹⁵

The question Simon abstained to settle in advance was who does the simplifying. Sometimes we do it ourselves. Sometimes an educator or an advisor or an institution does it for us. Sometimes — increasingly often — a machine does it for us. The mechanism is the same; the order of magnitude is not. When we simplify for ourselves, the simplification is ours. When someone else simplifies for us, the worldview proposed to our minds is theirs and the horizon may be limiting.

Simon's framework gives this compendium's claim a convincing ground. Making-simple is not a stylistic preference. It is a structural feature of any decision human beings actually take in complex environments. The thing to be decided is whether the simplification will be done with us, for us in a respectful sense, or to us.

Edgar Morin: simplification and simplisme

The French sociologist Edgar Morin wrote for decades on the relation between complexity and understanding. His project was an entire body of work on what he called complex thought: thinking that respects complexity without surrendering to it, and which finds ways to render it thinkable without flattening it. He differentiated simplification and simplism.¹⁶ The line runs between simplification — which scrupulously organises complexity in a form a mind can hold — and simplisme, which reduces complexity by amputating what cannot be easily held. ¹⁶ Simplification discerns and shows the essential. Simplism keeps the convenient and discards the rest.

Any good simplifier would apply Morin's complex thought in miniature. The difficulty of doing it is not a defect of the explainer’s task. It is the task.

Thomas Kuhn, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Clifford Geertz on incomparable worlds¹⁷

The worlds between which we move ideas are not always comparable.

Thomas Kuhn called this relation incommensurability: practitioners of different scientific paradigms "see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction."

Hans-Georg Gadamer, writing about all understanding, made the same observation in terms of hermeneutics: every translation is at the same time an interpretation. The translator of meanings, like the translator of scientific paradigms, is sometimes moving between truths that cannot be perfectly mapped onto each other — and this is precisely why the work requires fidelity rather than mechanical equivalence.

Clifford Geertz, in his turn, warns that cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete, and that to explain it by universal properties of the human mind, or by vast, a priori weltanschauungen, is to pretend a science that does not exist.

Cognitive fluency research and the mechanism of verisimilitude

Several cognitive psychology studies established, that processing fluency allows statements to appear true to us regardless of their veracity.

Daniel Kahneman analysed fluency naming it Fast Thinking in his renowned “Thinking, Fast and slow”¹⁸. He explains that our fast thinking, “System 1”, operates automatically: it recognises sentences that are easy to compute, decides and solves problems intuitively, with some bias but without effort. This intuitive, fluency-sensitive mode of thought runs nearly all our judgements unless something forces us to slow down. ¹⁸

Reber & Unkelbach, 2010¹⁹ showed that statements often repeated and easier to read — by clearer typography, rhyme, by what I would call verisimilar phrasing — are more readily judged accurate than identical statements presented in less fluent form. ²⁰ Eryn Newman and colleagues demonstrated that even a wholly irrelevant photograph attached to a claim inflates what they called truthiness: the perceived truth of the claim rises, with no new evidence presented at all. ²¹ Leon Rozenblit and Frank Keil showed that people overestimate their understanding of complex systems they cannot actually explain — the illusion of explanatory depth — and that this illusion is reduced only when people are asked to attempt the explanation aloud. ²²

Convergent observations

These scholars — Bruner, Freire, Simon, Morin, Kuhn, Gadamer, Geertz, Kahneman — wrote in different countries, different disciplines, different decades. They meet on four observations.

The first is that making-simple is not optional. The mind that is to receive a complicated matter must receive it in a form it can hold, or it cannot receive it at all. This is true for the child in school, for the patient at the clinic, for the citizen in the polling booth, for the executive at the board table, and for the reader of these pages.

The second is that making-simple is ethically significant. The form in which a matter arrives in a mind, shapes what that mind may later judge and do. The expert who transfers knowledge and competence is therefore not an uninvolved service worker but a moral co-author of the receiver's cognition.

Third condition, different life-worlds are not comparable; they require re-creation.

Last but not least, practitioners who do the work of simplification and now, in their own automated way, the artificial intelligences— carry a weight. They gain to learn how to do it professionally.