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Steven and
Larry:
Thanks for your respective
responses. Let me respond to Steven first, as a matter of convenience, and
respond to Larry in another message (not yet composed), with whose view I may
have greater disagreement.
I don't understand why you choose
the case of dictionaries in particular to make your point, Steven,
since I understand dictionaries to be nothing more than attempts to provide
information about presently and previously prevailing word usage, which
information the users of the dictionary can put to whatever use they
wish. I would agree that dictionary entries should be signed so that
the author can be held responsible, but it seems to me that
your point is better made with reference to encyclopedias rather
than dictionaries, where the entries purport to convey information about
the subject-matter of words rather than about their
usage.
Perhaps you expressed your point
with reference to the case of dictionaries because of the special interest
recently shown here in the Century Dictionary, owing to the fact that
Peirce was the author of so many entries in it. But the primary reason for
that interest has not been because of the quality of the entries as
accurate accounts of the generally prevailing usage of the
words described in the entry but rather because Peirce's entries help
to provide us with a glossary of his own terminology, regardless of whether or
not his usage conforms to generally prevailing usage. This makes
it difficult to understand why you use the case of dictionaries to make your
point.
As regards your view of the nature
of authority, though, I think your definition of it as "the perceived
competence of a given individual to present a given subject so that we may judge
to what degree we can trust the information presented" is a promising
one, because it makes it possible to think of authority as a matter of
being more or less authoritative, which is important because it succeeds in
working the concept of fallibility into the concept of authority in just
the right way. Thinking of it that way it then makes sense to
say in reference to anything (person, document, procedure) identified
as being authoritative "okay, I won't argue about that, but I do want
to know how much weight should be put upon his so-called authority in
taking it into account in decision-making". As authority is usually
understood at present the identification of someone or something as an
authority is for the contrary purpose of shutting down the raising of any
question about it. Thus, as usually conceived, the authority or the
authoritative is the unquestionable.
I also think you are on the
right track, at least, in your distinction between the role of the familiar
and the conventional as the basis for trust in authority, and I agree with you,
too, that claimed authority should also be challenged whenever it is claimed in
an unqualified way because there really is no such thing as legitimate authority
in the absolute sense. All legitimation is based on assessment of its degree of
reliability, whether that assessment be intuitive or reasoned. The
assessment is of course fallible in either case.
It is not unreasonable to
trust on the basis of intuitive assessment or even to trust on the basis of no
assessment at all, i.e. to trust unthinkingly. (Intuitive assessment is
not unthinking assessment.) If it has never so much as occurred to us to
put something or someone into question as regards its reliability we cannot be
faulted for trusting it, nor can we be faulted for trust when it follows
upon an intuitive assessment provided the trust is not given because
we are deliberately turning away from recognition of obvious reason for
distrust (i.e. provided we are not "in denial" of the obvious, as we
say). Trust should be presumptive and normal, and for the same
reason that optimism should be presumptive and normal. A life that
takes no chances is unlikely to be a life worth living. This is, I
think, what William James was wanting to get at in "The Will to Believe" but
failed to do so by confusing the right to believe with the will to
believe.
On the other hand, when
someone lays claim to authority, whether it be their own authority or somebody
else's, we have good reason to deny it for that very reason, and I agree
with you in your suspicion that this is what Larry may be doing --
inadvertently, I believe -- in his present way of conceiving his task in the DU
project, given what he says in his description of it to us, to which I
will now turn in my response to him in another message, which will take me
a few hours to compose.
Joe Ransdell
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2006 2:33
AM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: Are there
authorities on authority?
Dear Joe,
There are no
authorities on authority and the public is vulnerable if it thinks
otherwise.
The memeio position can be summarized by saying that
dictionaries are bad and glossaries are good.
Dictionaries - and
non-attributable content of any kind - are sociologically dangerous from the memeio point of view.
And this applies in the small and in the large; to creative teams in
corporations and societies at large.
Dictionaries are dangerous because
they allow two things to happen.
First, and most obvious, the
clever propagandist can mislead and manipulate the group using the
dictionary. Second, a backdrop of fancy takes control of
convention. No individual provides intent, the result is arbitrary and
literally meaningless. IOW: Common usage, or common knowledge, is no
authority.
This latter case is most common and the most severe situation - and it is the
situation that prevails today. No-one can control it but the smart and unscrupulous can use it
to manipulate perception. It is continuously subject to the
vagaries of
deconstruction. It evolves by the refinement of fantastic
invention.
As
individuals we know innately how to deal with other individuals and the
development of authority comes directly from that development of
familiarity. The notion
of FAMILIARITY is primary to my notion of AUTHORITY. We only trust or distrust B initially because of
our familiarity with A.
The only way
out of the second case is to ignore all claimed authority and rely solely upon
construction and the development of familiarity. I believe firmly that we must
challenge ALL claims of authority and that authority is reliable only in
proximate groups where familiarity is strongest.
Credentials are that
social pragmatic which allows us to to deal with the unfamiliar. Hence,
"Doctor" or "Nurse." This pragmatic is only as as solid as the
convention that maintains it.
I agree with your skepticism of an
group that gathers credentials and I believe that this is widely held
skepticism. The public is rightly suspicious of groups that gather
credentials to establish authority, with the explicit intention of asserting
it.
Of course, all organizations gather credentials initially to
fill the void left by a lack of familiarity with the new organization.
But they rarely do so with the explicit intent of asserting that authority
directly as the primary asset of the product as Digital Universe appears to
intend.
My objection to Wikipedia is not addressed by the Digital
Universe offering as Larry has described if the intent is simply to assemble a
credentialed board or credentialed group
of stewards to rubber stamp ghost writers. I also rebel against the
elitism I hear in Larry's comments - segregation is unnatural and unlikely to
serve the project well in my view.
The fact is that I applaud the
familiarity that Wikipedia permits, but - as I think I have said here before -
the implementation is fatally flawed; primarily by its lack of transparency
and choice of license.
In PANOPEDIA I have corrected these
flaws, they can be implemented with only minor changes to the Mediawiki
software. Unfortunately for Wikipedia, it requires a new start, none of the
content that exists in the Wikipedia can be recovered.
Wikipedia, I believe, may become familiar as a tabloid among
encyclopedias - and it will be maintained for the same reason that the tabloid
press continues to exist. But no-one should be using it as an authority
- and I continue to be alarmed.
With
respect,
Steven
Joseph
Ransdell wrote:
Larry and Steven:
I am trying to get clear on the relationship of your respective projects --
the Digital Universe and Memeio -- to one another, which seem to be
competitive in some way relative to the common aim of upgrading the
intellectual quality and value of the web-structured world communicational
network. In that respect both of your projects seem to be comparable as well
to Berners-Lee's "semantic web" and the later idea of the "pragmatic web"
(which I know of via Gary Richmond and Aldo de Moor), though whether there
is a competition in that respect as well I am not sure.
In any case, one particular matter that especially interests me in this
connection is your respective conceptions of what I will call "the problem
of authority" (meaning intellectual or cognitive or epistemic or
informational authority) and how that is to be identified. This is of course
closely connected with the issue of transparency of authorship, i.e. the
ability to identify who the author of given documents and the views
expressed in them actually is. It seems that there may be no basic
disagreement between you on the importance of being able to identify the
author in order to be in position to assess the value and reliability of the
information (including possible misinformation) available in the documents
available on the web, but what is not clear to me is how such assessment is
to be made which does not involve capitulation to an authoritarianism of the
sort which both of you presumably want to avoid.
Putting it as simply as possible, the problem is that whenever someone, A,
affirms that someone, B (who might be A, in the special case), is a
legitimate or real authority (or expert, if you like) on the matter in
question, the question immediately arises as to the authoritative character
of A as someone purporting to legitimate B as authoritative. (The same
problem arises in the case of legitimating a document or a knowledge claim.)
For example -- and I address this to Larry in particular, for the moment --
you say somewhere, I believe, that "the purpose of the Digital Universe (DU)
is to aggregate and organize the world's reliable free information in one
place", and it seems that the way in which this is to be done in the DU is
by selecting only experts or authoritative persons to be stewards in charge
of providing expert or authoritative informational resources for this or
that particular subject-matter or field of interest. This no doubt means
something like selecting only "recognized" authorities. But there are many
areas of concern where one would be hard-pressed to identify anybody with
such a status, and for matters where there is indeed some such person or
persons so recognized, the supposed "authorities" will sometimes not in fact
be worthy of such recognition, whether because they are frauds or are simply
incompetents, who happened to be successful in persuading others that they
are something which they are not. On the basis of what authority do those in
the DU who select the supposed authorities make that selection? Is there a
class of persons -- those in positions of authority in DU -- who are
authorities on authority?
If not -- and I anticipate that you would not want to claim that there
are -- then why should anyone sceptical of the reliability of the
information available on the web regard the situation as likely to be
improved by such screening for authorities as your project seems to be
promising to provide?
There may be a similar question to be raised in connection with Steven's
Memeio project. I am not sure of that at the moment. But this seems to be a
question that ought to be raised to you, Larry, and I hope you will
understand that I am not raising it in a merely negative and carping spirit
but rather because I foresee it as being the major conceptual problem which
your enterprise -- which I regard as admirable in intent -- has to come to
grips with effectively if it is to be successful. I raise it to you before
raising it to Steven simply because I do find him addressing the question of
what authority is in an explicit and straightforward way in a couple of
places on one of his websites -- though I am not sure that he answers the
question as I pose it -- but I can't find anyplace where the corresponding
question about expertise or authority is addressed on the DU website.
Joe Ransdell
Joseph Ransdell
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