How does “collaboration” occur at all? Remarks on epistemological issues related to understanding / working with ‘the other’

Collaboration, if to occur successfully at all, needs to be based on careful representation and communication of each stakeholder’s knowledge. In this paper, we investigate, from a foundational logical and epistemological point of view, how such representation and communication can be accomplished. What we tentatively conclude, based on a careful delineation of the logical technicalities necessarily involved in such representation and communication, is that a complete representation is not possible. This inference, if correct, is of course rather discouraging with regard to what we can hope to achieve in the knowledge representations that we bring to our collaborations. We suggest two actions. First, we can strive to make all stakeholders more aware of the incompleteness of their knowledge representations. This awareness should serve to moderate one’s confidence in advocating for the “Truth” of her or his knowledge representations. Second, a moderation in one’s certainty of “Truth” should increase each stakeholder’s humility and respect for ‘the other’, thereby, promoting both the efficacy of collaborations and the ability to live helpfully in an increasing complex and needful world