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putting laser toner in the copier figuring it's probably OK? Do they proceed
despite a conscious uncertainty?
Although we must appreciate J's situation, I think all these hypotheses are
unnecessary. Put yourself in the place of someone to whom the photocopier is
asking for dry toner, and suppose that you had not yet known that the copier
and printer employed two incompatible types of dry toner that could be con-
fused for one another. You made dozens of separate moves in answering the
copier's call to be resupplied with toner, and any of those moves could be mis-
taken in dozens of different ways. The actual problem, namely that the bottle
marked “dry toner” was not actually the correct substance, is pretty obscure,
as if somebody parked a car nearly identical to yours a couple spaces down. In
the case of the wrong car, some discrepancy would probably force itself upon
your attention before you got too far. Yes, evidence of the mistake was readily
available, but were you really supposed to list all the things you might be do-
ing wrong and go looking for evidence to rule out each one? That would be
impossible.
The problem, in short, is only obvious in retrospect. Having been warned
that toner comes in two types, one should probably start to check. But nobody
is born with that knowledge. Someone could become perfectly proficient at
replacing toner in copiers and still run afoul of this difficulty, simply because
types of toner had never become an issue for them. The arrival of the laser
printer would invalidate one of the innumerable implicit background assump-
tions of their toner-changing routine, but it is hard to articulate the general
policy that could have informed them of this. Read the fine print on every label
every time? But the world is full of representations; how do you decide when to
stop reading them all and start doing something? The phrase “dry toner”, to us,
having been informed of the problem, is ambiguous: it could mean “laser dry
toner” or “copier dry toner”. But that ambiguity is only consciously and morally
an ambiguity for
us
, the well-informed. And for all we know, “dry toner” could
also be ambiguous in an unlimited variety of other ways.
In the end, all we can do is stop moralizing and fix the problem. Make
the toner bottles so different that it's physically impossible to install the wrong
stuff. Train everyone. Or lock up the toner.
A story about some instructions at a performance in an art gallery
One day I went to the MIT Media Lab to see a performance. The performance
took place in a windowless room that's about thirty feet square with a high
