Social cooperation rests on expectations about others’ conduct, not on language

Evidence

But his root conception of what makes social existence possible does not really depend on the role of words in expressing such commitments. Rather, it depends (and in ways which perhaps extend with comparative ease to some other species) on the presence or absence of relatively well-founded expectations about the conduct of others — expectations which can serve, until too harshly violated, as premises for partially cooperative conduct of one’s own. What the root conception consists in is a picture of the conditional meshing of mutual interaction. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1155

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘conditional meshing of mutual interaction’ — precisely the mechanism Saramago’s blindness destroys by removing observability of others’ conduct.
• XREF: The ‘expectations about the conduct of others’ as premises for cooperation is structurally identical to the monitoring problem Hardin identifies and the one sight-loss collapses in Blindness.