Consensus as Social Memory
A description often arrives as if it were direct.
It says: c = a.
But very often something has happened in between. There is a missing term, a mediating frame, a typology through which the description has become possible. What has been presented as direct recognition may in fact be recognition through b. The danger is not only that b may be forgotten. It is that b may become so familiar that it disappears into the description itself.
This is where consensus has value. Consensus is not merely agreement about the final description. It is a shared knowledge of the character and necessity of the mediating term. We know, together, why c can be described as a, because we share some understanding of b. Consensus, then, is a kind of social memory. It remembers the typology that the description has hidden. It preserves the route by which the fact became legible.
But this also explains the danger. Consensus can keep b alive, or it can bury it more deeply. What everyone knows may become what no one thinks to examine. So perhaps the question is not only whether we agree. It is whether our agreement still remembers what made agreement possible.
For Example A spirit level offers a simple illustration. When the bubble settles between the two lines, we say the shelf is level. The description arrives as if it were direct. Yet the claim rests on a mediating term: the behaviour of liquid under gravity, the calibration of the vial, the shared convention that this particular bubble’s position encodes “horizontal.” Consensus makes the reading feel immediate because everyone already remembers, or once remembered, how the tool works. But that same consensus can also bury the mediating term. The bubble becomes authoritative even when the vial is warped or the temperature is wrong. What looks like direct recognition is really recognition through a frame that has been naturalised into the act of seeing.
David Marshall
Skerries