Diplomacy in a World of Heterogeneous Knowledge Systems: Exploring Generative Relational Systems Perspectives and Formal Models

Abstract

International arrangements are made among parties that differ in what counts, for each of them, as showing that a claim is so. This paper treats that difference as its object, taking a knowledge system to be the verification component of a normative order given dynamics of its own, and asks what two such parties can hold in common, what holding it costs, and what becomes of a claim in the passage between them. Four constructions are supplied. A joint description is represented as a common factor of the parties' dynamics, yielding the absence of a greatest such description and the result that an arrangement may cease to describe the parties' situation while every obligation it imposes continues to be performed. The passage of a claim is represented as an event carrying no content together with a construal operating on the receiving party's current state, under which the vocabulary of exchange is recovered where the receiving state is irrelevant, and under which exchange and the registration of divergence are shown to stand in an exact identity, so that the coarsening which secures agreement is the same operation that conceals misconstrual. Disclosure is represented as the consumption of a stock, giving a bounded lifetime attestation and a maximum arrangement length reached with no party defecting. Epistemic standing is represented as a directed graph whose failure of transitivity constitutes the office of the intermediary without conferring authority. Three bodies of institutional material are read by mechanism, and the account is stated in constraint form throughout, its condition concerning whether a party can bring a divergence onto the record and alter the terms on which the record is kept.