To understand, you need to know the facts and their possible consequences. Your experience and the information you have acquired must be sufficient to reveal to you the workings of the world, of nature and society, and other people’s tendencies and motives. You have to think them through.

Errors, however, are likely. We voice and write down mistaken judgements and incorrect figures out of ignorance, misplaced trust, lack of data or disatraction. If you pay attention, you find your own and other people’s errors everywhere. To correct them, you have better tools than in the past: your own education, books, archives and the IT and communication tools. You can form more considered opinions, but meanwhile the world is becoming more complex and harder to understand.

You cannot know everything. You need advice. To ask for it, you must express yourself clearly, and you almost never manage that at the first attempt.

John Kenneth Galbraith claimed in the preface to his book The New Industrial State (1967):

‘My writing begins to look spontaneous after the fourth or fifth revision.’

When I read this sentence, I found it irritating.

I said to myself:

‘Why are so many revisions necessary? If you know what you want to write, think it through carefully beforehand, and you won’t need to make corrections.’

I was wrong.

Once I understood this, I greatly improved my communications: technical reports, articles and books. There is no doubt that revising a text improves its quality. Writing reveals errors of formulation, gaps and contradictions that were previously invisible. Writing does not merely serve to communicate thoughts already formed. It often serves to form them.

Writing, however, is not enough.

Dialogue is vital. It helps us edit our thoughts. It is better to talk to people who are more knowledgeable and intelligent. Scientists recommend to discuss with our peers at least. The most reputable professional journals subject work submitted for publication to peer review. It is published if expert, anonymous referees give it a favourable assessment or if the suggested corrections are made.

For decades I discussed things with the best people I could find. I studied different ideas and disciplines. I learnt from books, from mentors and from former students who became my teachers. I recorded their criticisms of my manuscripts. Many ideas arise from these exchanges. Others are corrected, scaled back or abandoned. Dialogue performs a function for the mind analogous to the one revision performs for a text.

Words are good tools. They form sentences, which are the building blocks of languages. We use certain sequences of words to refer to complicated things. The individual words in the sequence do not help us understand the structure or process they designate.

We are accustomed to talking about simple things. We know what someone is talking about when they say:

‘A kilo of cane sugar.’

or

‘A Ford Focus estate with a 1.6-litre engine.’

So we are led to believe that someone is talking about something familiar when they say:

‘Italy’s Gross Domestic Product in 2008 was 1.272 teraeuros.’

Yet often this is not the case. Many people do not know what GDP is, or how it is measured. They do not know that a teraeuro consists of a thousand billion euros. They do not know many other things, yet they talk about economics, technology, morality and politics. Their authoritative statements seem to make sense even when they do not.

Complex issues are often open to debate, but there is no point in arguing with someone who is divorced from reality.

This is why we should seek the company of the best minds we can find. Some belong to the classics. Others belong to contemporaries who are still alive. It is difficult to understand what the great contemporary minds are saying unless we first understand what the classics said. Yet it would be a mistake to confine ourselves to the most famous names. There are many less celebrated authors who have not invented wonderful things, but who know how to explain well what others have discovered or invented.

The internet makes it easy to get in touch with interesting people. Online, you learn of the existence of individuals who have understood important things, have invented things, have seen connections and possibilities not yet imagined. Sometimes you can even discuss things directly with them.

Online, however, many people speak and spread messages. Some are of little worth. Others would be interesting if they knew how to communicate well. So we need criteria for judgement to accept the best and reject the mediocre and the worst.

The quality of our understanding depends on the quality of the criteria by which we select ideas, authors, arguments and evidence. Writing, dialogue, studying the classics, engaging with contemporaries and continuously revising our beliefs are different tools that perform the same function: to improve judgement.

This article is an extract from Roberto Vacca, Dialoghi. Come ho editato parole e idee con Primo Levi et al, CSA editrice, 2024

https://www.amazon.it/Dialoghi-Come-editato-parole-Primo/dp/8893542579