[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 vagariesof 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
[peirce-l] Re: Are there authorities on authority?
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 caseof dictionaries in particular to make your point, Steven, sinceI understand dictionaries to be nothing more than attempts to provide information aboutpresently and previously prevailing word usage, which information the users of the dictionary can put to whateveruse they wish. I would agree thatdictionary entries should be signed so that theauthor can be held responsible, but it seems to me that yourpointis better made with referenceto encyclopedias rather than dictionaries, where the entries purport to convey information about thesubject-matter ofwords rather than about their usage. Perhaps you expressed your point with reference to the case of dictionaries because of the special interest recently shown herein 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 ofthe quality of the entries as accurateaccounts of the generally prevailing usage of the wordsdescribed in the entry but rather becausePeirce's entries help to provide us with a glossary of his own terminology, regardless of whether or nothis usageconforms 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 "theperceived competence of a given individual to present a given subject so that we may judge to what degree we can trust the information presented" isa promising one,because it makes it possible to think of authority as a matter of being more or less authoritative, which is important because itsucceeds in working the concept of fallibilityinto the concept of authority in just the right way.Thinking of it that way it then makes sense to sayin reference to anything(person, document, procedure) identified asbeingauthoritative "okay, I won't argue about that, but I do want to know how muchweight should be put upon his so-called authorityin taking it into account in decision-making". As authority is usually understood at present the identification of someone or something as an authorityis 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 trustwhen it follows upon an intuitive assessment providedthe trust is not givenbecause we are deliberately turning away from recognition ofobvious reason for distrust (i.e. provided we are not "in denial"of the obvious, as we say).Trust shouldbe 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, andI agree with you in your suspicion that this is what Larry may bedoing -- 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 willnow turn in my response to him in another message, which will take me a few hours to compose. Joe Ransdell - Original Message - From: Steven Ericsson Zenith To: Peirce Discussion Forum 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
[peirce-l] Re: Are there authorities on authority?
Thank you Joe. My reason for focusing on Dictionaries is simply that they are the degenerate case, and not because of recent discussion here regarding the Century Dictionary. It's the memeio party line :-) Dictionaries have many of the properties of non-attributed NPOV encyclopedias and are mistakenly treated as authorities - despite our awareness of their true character. Dictionary entries are meaningless since they do not represent the embodied intent of an author. However, for all practical purposes the public treat dictionaries as definitive - and they are subject to all the complaints and dangers I have made concerning non-attributable encyclopedias. They capture a state of collected fancy and serve to artificially maintain it. If authors sign entries in dictionaries and we permit multiple entries by different authors - then you essentially have a glossary. The principle difference is that glossaries communicate the definitions used by authors - they are the product of the embodied intent of those authors. Then at least the public can pragmatically build consensus and say - "I use A's definition" - or explicitly build their own refinement. This requirement of familiarity and open development builds a coherent and creatively productive comprehension of authority while promoting the creative refinement of concepts. Which gets me to where I want to be: the instantiation of constructive, innovative, environments of knowledge development. With respect, Steven Joseph Ransdell wrote: 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 caseof dictionaries in particular to make your point, Steven, sinceI understand dictionaries to be nothing more than attempts to provide information aboutpresently and previously prevailing word usage, which information the users of the dictionary can put to whateveruse they wish. I would agree thatdictionary entries should be signed so that theauthor can be held responsible, but it seems to me that yourpointis better made with referenceto encyclopedias rather than dictionaries, where the entries purport to convey information about thesubject-matter ofwords rather than about their usage. Perhaps you expressed your point with reference to the case of dictionaries because of the special interest recently shown herein 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 ofthe quality of the entries as accurateaccounts of the generally prevailing usage of the wordsdescribed in the entry but rather becausePeirce's entries help to provide us with a glossary of his own terminology, regardless of whether or nothis usageconforms 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 "theperceived competence of a given individual to present a given subject so that we may judge to what degree we can trust the information presented" isa promising one,because it makes it possible to think of authority as a matter of being more or less authoritative, which is important because itsucceeds in working the concept of fallibilityinto the concept of authority in just the right way.Thinking of it that way it then makes sense to sayin reference to anything(person, document, procedure) identified asbeingauthoritative "okay, I won't argue about that, but I do want to know how muchweight should be put upon his so-called authorityin taking it into account in decision-making". As authority is usually understood at present the identification of someone or something as an authorityis 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
