Individual people, and possibly cultures, differ hugely in their ability to grasp this.

Poetry, especially classical, deals hugely in nuance, evoked, contextual, and implicit meanings and associations. Time was I really didn't get this, and I still often have to work at it.

Much work that's highly contemporary _to its own time_ (not necessary the world of 2020), similarly simply assumes a deep familiarty, not necessarily intellectual and quite often not, of the particulars of the moment.

2/

I realised this, eventually, reading a highly-annotated version of some 19th-century thing or another where I realised that the now-obscure references would have been as obvious as ... "The Force" or "Snowflake" or "cancel-culture", say ... would be today. Some notions have staying power, some not.

Preindustrial recipes often reference amounts or sizes in units now unfamiliar: "size of a quail's egg", say. They'd be similarly confused by some manufactured item: size of an iPhone, say.

3/

There's some discussion of the degree of awareness of implicit references or concepts with intelligence or mental state.

Robert Sapolsky, talking here of schizophrenia, discusses the absolute rigidness and literal-mindedness of severe sufferers of the condition:
https://invidio.us/watch?v=nEnklxGAmak

There's the problem of "willful ignorance".

Upton Sinclair:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/

4/

And various cultural and other associations also seem involved. Tribal identity is often tied to specific beliefs, and there's the notion that certain power structures are established, maintained, or demonstrated by adherence to clearly bogus beliefs, possibly as a form of credible signalling.

So it's not _just_ a matter of intelligence or pathology.

Ironically, the notion of latent functions and perceptions is itself latent, and exhibits some of the challenges of the concept.

5/

One is, obviously (I hope) that some people will simply refuse to believe in the idea of a latent or non-manifest meaning or function. Strict literalists insist that words have one meaning, that a thing is what it says it is, etc., etc.

(Which brings to mind Stafford Beer's "The purpose of a system is what it does", an inherently latent notion in this sense.)

But the other problem with identified latent functions or meanings is that _they may be incorrect_. They're second-order elements.

6/

They're proved or explained typically by either causal analysis (A implies B implies C...), or by statistical correlation (X is associated with Y with correlation coeficient r...).

The problem with causal or rational explanations is that they're often wrong (we are attracted to simple and clear narratives). See virtually all of pre-scientific explanations, and much within science. And, well, "correlation is not causation".

Which means that any latent condition is associated with risk.

7/

That is: the possibility that the supposed latent meaning or function ... doesn't really exist. Or does so only sometimes.

I've been listening to Peter Adamson's "History of Philosophy in India" recently, and the bits of Indian philosophy which deal with perceptions and truth and their relationship seem to delve into these areas.

All of which seems like it should be well covered in Merton & elsewhere.

It's not.

#HistoryOfPhilosophy #PeterAdamson
#Sociology
#psychology
#Philosophy

8/

So, if anyone out there is familiar with work discussing latent and manifest *perceptions*, or tying Merton's and Branislaw Malinowski's notions of manifest and latent functions _to_ perceptions, or of the relationships of risk to manifestation, I'd really appreciate pointers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_and_latent_functions_and_dysfunctions

Even within sociology interest seems to have fallen off somewhat -- this seems like one of those Grand Vision Theories which is so large in scope it loses meaning (and fashion or favour).

9/

The field of cybernetics, especially as it was sought to be applied to social sciences, seems similar in regards.

My sense is that manifestation isn't. I see connections to Gresham's Law, which seems to hinge behaviours triggered by manifest (face-value worth) vs. latent (actual specie content or purity) perceptions, and has been applied to contexts well beyond money.

Or evolution, which seems on the one hand tautological: "things that succeed succeed", but proves useful.

#GreshamsLaw

10/

_Why_ biological evolution (or the broader "universal evolution": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_evolution) is useful is that it pointed the way to further discoveries and realisations.

Evolution (either sort) depends on variation, inheritance, and selection.

Systems without all three elements are not evolutionary.

And inheritance requires some mechanism of persisting trends across generations of an organism. Darwin didn't know of genes or DNA, but suggested what Mendel, Crick, & Watson found.

11/

In the Universal Evolution concept, the idea of progress across iterations of virtually _anything_ that has variation and inheritance is argued. So long as there's some basis for propogating a trait forward in time: cultural memory, words, a legal code, melody.

It seems to me that the notions of latent and manifest functions, and perceptions, have a similar explanatory power, but that this hasn't been deeply explored.

If I'm wrong, I'd love to see evidence otherwise.

12/end/