the law of small numbers dividing the attention space motivates creativity,
sometimes of genuinely new positions, by negating key premises of opposing
positions.
In practical reality there is no danger that future intellectuals will run out
of topics for creativity. No matter how much mass higher education expands
in the future, with the rising tide of credential inflation, no matter how many
professors need to write articles and books for academic promotion, there will
always be topics to write about. The inverted pyramid of publications building
on previous publications has no intrinsic limit.
Does the widening combinatorial fan of intellectual productions mean that
the humanities and social sciences of the future will diverge infinitely into
multiple realities? Social processes imply that intellectual atomization may not
go very far. Within any particular intellectual community, the law of small
numbers limits how many positions can receive widespread attention. This still
could leave us with half a dozen hermetically sealed viewpoints in each spe-
cialty. But borders will not be sharp, precisely because so many publications
are constructed by combining ingredients from several previous lines of work.
The larger the number of intellectuals all under pressure to publish original
work, the more incentive there will be to range widely across borders in search
of new combinations.
The sense of a common reality is fostered where the patches of intellec-
tual production are stitched together piece by piece into a multi-patterned
quilt. This does not produce the object-like reality in which all the intellectu-
als in a given faction share a single world frame, or posit the same kind of
world substance whose characteristics they are all investigating. Combinatorial
construction of intellectual topics, if unmitigated by other social features of
the intellectual world, produces neither a central conception nor a limiting
frame around what they believe they are studying. It nevertheless leads not to
infinitely fragmenting individual realities, but to a decentered network of
overlapping realities.
In philosophy, because its central terrain remains conceptual rather than
historical or empirical, the construction of multiple realities seems fated to an
especially strong form of divisiveness. Philosophy takes as its terrain the
discovery of deep troubles, self-propagating difficulties. These deep conceptual
troubles are the hidden treasures of first-rate philosophical creativity, the
discovery of which brings fame to those who bring them to light. To cultivate
deep troubles is to court disagreement. It is to keep the law of small numbers
operating, thereby bringing the focus of hard-fought argument which energizes
conceptual advance.
Yet even in the heart of philosophy there is a shared reality. The very con-
cept of a deep trouble combines an element of realism with its inevitable con-880 •^ Meta-reflections