Mistake theorists treat politics as science, engineering, or medicine. The State is diseased. We’re all doctors, standing around arguing over the best diagnosis and cure. Some of us have good ideas, others have bad ideas that wouldn’t help, or that would cause too many side effects.
Conflict theorists treat politics as war. Different blocs with different interests are forever fighting to determine whether the State exists to enrich the Elites or to help the People.
Part of what seems strange about drawing the line at denotative vs. enactive speech is that there are conflict theorists who can speak coherently/articulately in a denotative fashion (about conflict), e.g.:
Clausewitz’s On War (“war is the continuation of politics by other means”)
It seems both coherent and consistent with conflict theory to believe “some speech is denotative and some speech is enacting conflict.”
(I do see a sense in which mechanism design is a mistake theory, in that it assumes that deliberation over the mechanism is possible and desirable; however, once the mechanism is in place, it assumes agents never make mistakes, and differences in action are due to differences in values)
I don’t quite draw the line at denotative vs enactive speech—command languages which are not themselves contested would fit into neither “conflict theory” nor “mistake theory.”
“War is the continuation of politics by other means” is a very different statement than its converse, that politics is a kind of war. Clausewitz is talking about states with specific, coherent policy goals, achieving those goals through military force, in a context where there’s comparatively little pretext of a shared discourse. This is very different from the kind of situation described in Rao where a war is being fought in the domain of ostensibly “civilian” signal processing.
Quoting Scott’s post:
Part of what seems strange about drawing the line at denotative vs. enactive speech is that there are conflict theorists who can speak coherently/articulately in a denotative fashion (about conflict), e.g.:
Clausewitz’s On War (“war is the continuation of politics by other means”)
Venkatesh Rao’s “A Quick (Battle) Field Guide to the New Culture Wars”
It seems both coherent and consistent with conflict theory to believe “some speech is denotative and some speech is enacting conflict.”
(I do see a sense in which mechanism design is a mistake theory, in that it assumes that deliberation over the mechanism is possible and desirable; however, once the mechanism is in place, it assumes agents never make mistakes, and differences in action are due to differences in values)
I don’t quite draw the line at denotative vs enactive speech—command languages which are not themselves contested would fit into neither “conflict theory” nor “mistake theory.”
“War is the continuation of politics by other means” is a very different statement than its converse, that politics is a kind of war. Clausewitz is talking about states with specific, coherent policy goals, achieving those goals through military force, in a context where there’s comparatively little pretext of a shared discourse. This is very different from the kind of situation described in Rao where a war is being fought in the domain of ostensibly “civilian” signal processing.