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TO: Larry Sanger Larry: Before explaining to you what I find questionable in the way you are presently conceiving the task of developing the DU, I want to say first that I am looking forward to reading with care your dissertation on epistemic circularity and the problem of meta-justification which I discovered last night. I browsed through it quickly but read enough of to see that it is of interest not only to me but well worth recommending to people on PEIRCE-L generally because of the skill with which you handle the issues there and because the view you defend as your own, which is akin to Thomas Reid's common-sensism, is also akin to Peirce's critical common-sensism, which was so called by him to suggest that it is Scottish common-sensism as modified by Kantian considerations. The URL for it is: http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/essays/text/larrysanger/diss/preamble.html It is, of course, much concerned with the problematics of the question I posed to you in my earlier message about whether or not there are authorities on authority (or experts on expertise, as you might prefer to put it). In stating my critical points, I will ask you to put up with the kind of bluntness that helps in stating things as briefly as possible -- though the message as a whole is hardly brief! -- with the understanding that there is no implicit intention of being in any way disrespectful in stating it in that way. I will of course be willing to elaborate further on any points which you or anyone else finds questionable. That said, let me start by remarking that after discovering that the problem of authority is something which you have had a special interest in yourself, I was puzzled at first as to why I did not see in what you seem to be doing or planning to do in the development of DU any obvious signs of your understanding of the difficulties that are implicit in making knowledge claims of this sort. But then it occurred to me that the reason for this probably does not lie in your not being willing to apply what you know from your philosophical understanding of the problem at the theoretical level but rather in an understanding of the way academic life works which is, in my opinion, too far from the reality of it to provide you with a basis for a viable plan. You say: ==========quote Larry Sanger======== Ultimately, and "pragmatically" speaking, I imagine it will come down to academic respectability, or consistency with the scientific method and other very widely-endorsed epistemic methods (which vary from field to field). Basically, if the Digital Universe aims to cast its net as widely as possible, and to include the bulk of academe, the most it can hope to do is to represent the state of the art in each field. It cannot, in addition, hope to be selective about persons or fields or institutions (etc.) in a way that is identifiably contrary to the already-existing standards of credibility in various fields. It can at best hope to be fair to all strands of expert opinion in any given field. ===========end quote================== The phrase "state of the art" may have misled you. There are many fields (and philosophy is surely one of them) in which there is nothing that even roughly corresponds to the phrase "state of the art". (The "state of the art" articles that appear from time to time in the journals are nothing more than summary accounts of positions taken, distinctions drawn, and arguments given in recent years on some topic of interest as that is understood within one of the many traditions of philosophy -- the so-called "analytic" tradition -- which are currently flourishing.) "Current opinion in the reigning orthodoxy in a field " would be the more accurate description once you get outside the hard sciences, and even there, where much is settled, you tread on dangerous ground in thinking that you, as an interested outsider, eager as you may be to do justice to the situation in the field, can get into position to make a wise decision about who is represent that to the world -- or to have that decided for you by delegated authority from you -- without spending far more time and energy than you could possibly commit to it. Moreover, It seems to me that you might as well have said that your intention is to favor the reigning orthodoxy and do what you can to reinforce it by publicizing it as being what it is not. But do you really want to do that? The fact is, Larry, that you cannot reasonably hope "to be fair to all strands of expert opinion in any given field" -- the idea of achieving such fairness or even roughly approximating to it is just implausible as a practical proposition, and you are merely contradicting what you are saying about favoring the reigning orthodoxy, in any case, and to no good purpose. What you will be bound to do, in lieu of what you aim at doing, is only to add to the misinformation already available, and be doing so, moreover, in a way that will subject you to resentment and fierce discreditation to the extent that the DU is in fact successful in the sense of getting people to make use of it, since that will be to the advantage of some in the field and to the disadvantage of others whom you will be choosing to ignore. Knowledge is power, and you are mistakenly attempting to get into the game of power by exerting control over intellectual life from a position external to it, when you should instead be acting in the interests of the general public by providing non-prejudicial access to it, which is surely what the DU is intended to do. Don't misunderstand me, Larry. I think there is something worthwhile in the aspirations of the DU, conceived as vaguely as it must originally have been conceived, and I admire your audacity and respect the intent of your endeavor; but it looks to me as if at some point in fleshing out the originally vague conception to turn it into a viable practical plan a wrong track was taken, when you ceased to conceive it primarily and essentially as aiming at providing systematic topical access to the cognitive resources available or capable of being made available on-line -- "aggregating and organizing the world's reliable free information in one place," as you put it earlier -- and began to think of the DU instead as being encharged with the duties of a gatekeeper, deciding for the public in general what is and what is not fit for them to access because of some supposed assurance which you can provide that it is intellectually sound. You cannot do this with any credibility to people in the research disciplines and cannot deputize any such task to others and it is most unwise to attempt it. Perhaps this goes back to the time of adoption of the word "steward". The term is offensively presumptuous and bound to arouse suspicions as to your motives. A steward is an entrusted manager of someone's interests, acting in their behalf in doing so. Now whose interests are you entrusted with the management of? What science or research discipline or other creator of informational content appointed you or anyone else connected with the DU to manage their interests in this way? The interests you aim at serving are not those of the people in the research disciplines but the interests of the general public in being able to access such knowledge and informed opinion as may exist about whatever happens to interest them, and the word "steward" is not appropriately used for this. "Guide" might be an appropriate term for it, and it is surely legitimate for you to choose people willing to collaborate with you in providing guidance to people interested in effective access to the cognitive resources available in the given field. But in choosing people to provide guidance you should not be looking for some one person or some unified group to whom you can simply delegate the role as official guide and gatekeeper but rather be bending over backwards to avoid even the appearance of choosing and setting up official gatekeepers for access by appointing as many different guides as there are people who are willing to add further guidance for the field, provided they are willing to cooperate with other guides to the field who have other things to show to whomever they provide guidance. If they refuse to cooperate with others in an ongoing process of knitting together the various strands of guidance insofar as they can be systematically related, which would be a part of the task before you, you can leave them available as guides but under the description of being uncooperative competitors to the others and let people decide for themselves whether or not to make use of their guidance. If you have reason to believe that they are dishonest or criminal or insane or fanatical or with a hidden agenda that is contrary to the general aim of providing helpful guidance, you are under no obligation to treat them even as alternative guides, but the most prudent way of handling such cases is simply to explain to anyone who raises a question about why they are not a part of the guidance DU provides that you simply do not regard them as appropriate in the role of a guide but point out that nothing precludes use of them as such if the inquirer wishes to do so: there is no law which requires that only DU can provide guidance for accessing the resources available on the web. My general point is that you want to avoid any impression that you are deciding what people should be able to access. My impression -- derived from reading some of the things you have said on the web about what you have learned from the wikipedia experience -- is that you believe that the reason why so little creative effort to develop and extend the effective use of the web as a cognitive resource is because people are afraid of being exposed to the junk that supposedly litters the web wherever you turn: it is an unsafe cognitive environment, and you have come to conceive the task of the DU to be that of providing a sanitary version of it. That is, you have come to reconceive your task from that of being a provider of effective access to cognitive resources to being a protector against contamination from error and other cognitive evils, insofar as that is feasible. It is understandable that you would think this. It is, after all, the stock complaint of the academic faculty that the web is just too full of junk to be tolerated, which would be the excuse given for not making any real effort to take advantage of the opportunities it offers to transform scholarship and research in the many ways that are possible if there were a will to do so, and it is understandable that you might take this for granted as the explanation of why the general tendency in academia for the past decade has not only been somewhat less than progressive but -- I would say myself -- even reactionary in this respect. But supposing I am right about that being more or less how you would regard the matter, I have to say that I think you are mistaken about that being the reason. I can only state this disagreement dogmatically at the moment "for what it is worth" because it would take too much time for me to explain to you the basis for my view on this, and it would still be only a matter of explaining a hunch rather than a demonstrable fact, but I believe that the real reason for academic reaction is not this fear of contamination by error but rather a fear of loss of personal security and status because of the changes in professional life which might follow upon adoption of any radical changes in the communicational and research practices of the scholarly world. Academia is structured as a hierarchical top-down system in which the top of the faculty hierarchy is composed of people whose powers of determining the course of institutional development insofar as the faculty controls it -- I am speaking of the tenured faculty -- are all but absolute and without effective constraints on their rationale for admission or denial of admission of new members to its rank. Apart from a handful of exceptional institutions and, within institutions, exceptional departments, there has been and continues to be little willingness outside of the hard sciences to knowlngly accept new members with any interest in experimental development of the new technologies for research purposes other than as instruments for typing, powerpoint presentations, and email, and for teaching purposes such uses as these technologies have for the "efficient" mass processing of students by graduate students and adjunct --which is to say, futureless -- faculty. The yearly tenure sweep, when those on the tenure track who are not accepted as continuing colleagues of the tenured are re-directed into academic oblivion, thus has the effect of nullifying what would otherwise be a normal progression of institutional innovation. It is, in short, a systemic property of academia that it should undergo petrification in whatever respects the tenured faculty wish to remain unchanged. That they have in fact wished to remain unchanged in the respect we are concerned with here is surely indisputable, and the diagnosis of the cause of this particular petrification -- which has petrified the faculty in general because of the power of the tenured faculty -- as being due to nothing more than fear of cognitive contamination seems to me quite implausible when the more obvious explanation would be that the real fear is of having to undergo the radical change in professional practices and relationships that might very well be consequent upon serious attempts at taking advantage of the opportunities for innovation provided by the new technologies. Old dogs can learn new tricks, but the fact is that not many are interested in doing so. If I am right about this -- and I can only suggest it here -- it is a mistake to think that the solution to the problem of realizing the liberating potentiality of the technologies of digitization and computer networking lies in a project devoted primarily to cognitive policing and sanitation. Thus the DU project as you now seem to conceive it is not only an impossible one, as a practical proposal, but even if it were feasible it would contribute little toward the development of the web as an instrument of progressive value but only help instead to further entrench the orthodoxies of the academic world, which surely is no part of the aim of the DU. But the DU need not be conceived in that way. You need only return to the view of it which you had when you regarded it as aiming at "aggregating and organizing the world's reliable free information in one place" and focus on the systematic development of guidance and -- as I think you should add to that -- the enabling of access to cognitive resources not presently open or available to access on the internet at all. There is much that could be done along that line. Thanks for putting up with the inordinate length of this, Larry. I very much appreciate your willingness to subject yourself to this sort of criticism here. Joe Ransdell |
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