is more history of the network to incorporate. Awareness grows that the indi-
vidual positions are constructed as parts of a web of oppositions. Eventually
the meta-concept emerges that there are higher-order concepts, and that there
is an error—a narrower sphere of awareness—in treating a symbol as if it were
a concrete existent. Reflexivity is the growing self-exploration of relations
among standpoints within this increasingly complicated network-generated
mind.
The argument so far explains why the diversity of positions within an
intellectual community should drive upwards the abstraction-reflexivity se-
quence, but it leaves open a prior question: What causes the diversity of
positions in the first place? Here I bring in two of the basic principles of
intellectual creativity, used throughout this book: the law of small numbers,
which shapes the internal struggles within the intellectual attention space; and
the two-step model of causality, through which external social conditions
operate indirectly by rearranging the material base for intellectual life.
Creation by Negation and by External Shock
Intellectual life proceeds by horizontal tensions among contemporaries as well
as by vertical sequence among the generations. Let us avoid the retrospective
fallacy, the explanatory complacency which comes from taking for granted
what the positions will be because we already know the history, say, of Greek
philosophy from Thales to Epicurus. Visualize a small number of particles—
three to six—moving through a tunnel of time; each draws energy from its
past momentum, renewed and accelerated by repulsion from the other parti-
cles. This tunnel is the attention space of the intellectual world; indeed the
tunnel is created by the movement of the particles and the tensions that connect
them. The tunnel’s walls are not fixed; it extends forward in time only so long
as the negative interplay of the particles keeps up a sufficient level of energy.
As arguments intensify, the tunnel becomes brighter, more luminous in social
space; and as positions rigidify, going their own way without reference to one
another, the attention space fades.
Surrounding the tunnel are the ordinary concerns of the lay society. Persons
on the outside notice the intellectual tunnel only as much as the glow of its
debates makes it visible from a distance. Intellectual stratification is represented
by distance from the core of the tunnel. The walls of the tunnel are no more
than a moving glow generated from within. The trajectories of the particles
and the borders between light and shadow are seen most sharply at the center,
by viewers situated on the main energy lines. The farther one is from the central
zone, the harder it is to see where the walls are, this membrane of relevance
for the controversialists inside it. In the half-light of semi-focused regions, it is
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^791