Rethinking the Gift in Diplomacy: Generative Relational Knowledge Emergence through Encounter

A gift asserts nothing that could be checked. It carries no proposition whose truth is at issue, and it discloses no procedure by which a content might be substantiated. It nonetheless does something that statements do poorly, and this paper asks what. The account offered is that a gift is composed by a reading of the recipient, that what crosses carries structure and no content, that the receiving party construes it under its own procedures, and that what it produces is deposited in the context against which its later construals are made. On this account a gift reaches the rule by which a party interprets only through what that party has already made of what arrived, so the alteration is mediated and is not an effect of the event. Three consequences are drawn, each with a simple dynamical illustration. A single crossing moves a state and returns, while a sustained practice moves the slower variable, which offers a reason for the repeated character of the practice. The interval before a return is of the order of the time the receiving system takes to relax, since a return offered sooner is composed largely of what the giver has just supplied and tells the giver little. And a gift that has gone wrong is poorly corrected by explaining it, because the explanation is construed against what the first construal deposited. A phase portrait of the slower variables is added and is stated for a class of coupled pairs in place of for any interpretation of them. It shows that whether such a pair admits one resting condition or several turns on the shape of one response, which the account does not determine, and that where two accumulations share one slower variable a given inequality between them rests at a larger value the higher that variable stands. The paper closes on the accountability that a channel asserting nothing cannot support.