Mon 25 Feb 2002 18:11
From George Ritzer's "Modern sociological theory" p. 190 
 
Double Contingency 
 
The social system based on communication creates social structures in order to solve what Luhmann calls the problem of double contingency. Double contingency refers to the fact that every communication must take into consideration the way that it is received. But we also know that the way that it is received will depend on the receiver's estimation of the communicator. This forms an impossible circle: the receiver depends on the communicator and the communicator depends on the receiver. For example, a professor, in choosing how to greet a student, might use the informal, "Hey!" if she thinks it will appear more friendly (the communicator takes into account the receiver). But if the student being greeted thinks the professor is talking down to him, he will not see it as a friendly gesture (the receiver takes into account the communicator). The less we know about each other's expectations, the greater the problem of double contingency. 
 
Fortunately, we almost always know a great deal about others' expectations because of social structures. In the example above, we know that the people involved are a professor and a student. Based on this alone, we expect that they will have a certain type of relationship conforming to institutional rules and traditions. We will have other expectations by knowing their genders, their ethnicities, their ages, their dress, and so on. Because of these expectations, norms and role expectations develop for interpreting people's communications. Either people fit the norms and role expectations or they do not. If we find a number of examples that do not fit our expectations, our expectations might change, but society can never do without these expectations because of the problem of double contingency. 
 
It is because each of us has a different set of norms that communication becomes necessary, and it is because communication has the problem of double contingency that we develop sets of norms. This shows how society as an autopoietic system works: the structure (roles, institutional and traditional norms) of society creates the elements (communication) of society and those elements create the structure, so that, as in all autopoietic systems, the system constitutes its own elements. 
 
Because of double contingency, any given communication is improbable. First it is improbable that we would have something we want to communicate to a particular person. Second, since the information can be communicated in a number of ways, it is improbable that we will choose any one particular way. Third, it is improbable that the person we are addressing will understand us correctly. Social structures have developed in order to make improbable communications more probable. For example, to say "Good day" to a particular person at any particular time is an improbable thing, but to social structures make a greeting normative in certain circumstances, they provide us with a limited number of acceptable ways to greet people, and they make sure that the addressee will understand the greeting in approximately the same way that the addressee intends it. 
 
The improbabilities that we've discussed so far refer only to interactions, but society is more than a collection of independent interactions. Interactions last only as long as the people involved in the communication are present, but, from the viewpoint of society, interactions are episodes in ongoing social processes. Every social system is faced with a problem: it will cease to exist if there is no guarantee of further communications, that is, no possibility of connecting previous communications to future communications. To avoid a breakdown of communication, structures must be developed to permit earlier communications to connect with later communications. The selections made in one communication are restricted by the selections made in previous communications. This is another way in which the improbabilities of the communicative process are overcome and transformed into probabilities by the social system. It is this need to overcome double contingency and make improbable communications more probable that regulates the evolution of social systems. 
 
p 191 
The selection of a particular solution does not imply that the "best" solution is chosen. It may simply be that the particular solution is the easiest to stabilize, in other words, the easiest to reproduce as a stable and enduring structure. In a social system, this stabilization usually involves a new kind of differentiation that requires the adjustment of all parts of the system to the new solution. The evolutionary process will have achieved a temporary end only when the stabilization phase is complete. 
 
p 193 
Not only does more variation caused by differentiation allow for better responses to the environment, it also allows for faster evolution. The more variation that is available, the better the selection.
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