Communication codes require a taken-for-granted foundation immune to negation

Evidence

All communication pre-requires a level of taken-for-granted understanding that cannot be negated. This level, at which negation cannot occur, has to change according to the type of communication process, and its readiness to address its subject-matter. In the older European tradition, the verbal formula of perfection was available for such taken-for-granted understandings. It introduced, for example, the form of political ordering of human life as the ‘most glorious’ community. The concept of perfection points on the one hand to the possibility of augmentation, and on the other sets a boundary to it. As a form of reality, perfection itself can be increased to the ens perfectissimum (God as the most perfect being), where the relatively imperfect finds at once its reason for existing and the grounds for its own critique. With the help of this logic of perfection, the aspects of a code, preserved from negation, could be formulated in a way which also catered for the use of negations in the codified processes. Participation in perfect truth implied the possibility of error, participation in perfect power, the acceptance of limitations. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 688

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how codes stabilize against negation — the ‘un-negatable floor’ beneath any communicative medium, foundational to understanding why system trust can reduce complexity.
• XREF: Parallels Giddens’s notion that expert systems presume a taken-for-granted trust background, and Stevens’s unexamined assumptions about ‘dignity’ and professional duty. — connects to: Ethical response to another demands risking that no signal is actually sent — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2257; Conventions require infinite-regress common knowledge to take root — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 126