[peirce-l] Re: Are there authorities on authority?
List, Here's the opening and conclusion of a New York Times article today on an aspect of the subject of this thread. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/business/yourmoney/12digi.html?ex=1142830800en=30176f24d523ea78ei=5070emc=eta1 March 12, 2006 The New York Times Digital Domain: Anonymous Source Is Not the Same as Open Source By RANDALL STROSS WIKIPEDIA, the free online encyclopedia, currently serves up the following: Five billion pages a month. More than 120 languages. In excess of one million English-language articles. And a single nagging epistemological question: Can an article be judged as credible without knowing its author? Wikipedia says yes, but I am unconvinced. Dispensing with experts, the Wikipedians invite anyone to pitch in, writing an article or editing someone else's. No expertise is required, nor even a name. Sound inviting? You can start immediately. The system rests upon the belief that a collectivity of unknown but enthusiastic individuals, by dint of sheer mass rather than possession of conventional credentials, can serve in the supervisory role of editor. Anyone with an interest in a topic can root out inaccuracies and add new material. At first glance, this sounds straightforward. But disagreements arise all the time about what is a problematic passage or an encyclopedia-worthy topic, or even whether a putative correction improves or detracts from the original version. The egalitarian nature of a system that accords equal votes to everyone in the "community" middle-school student and Nobel laureate alike has difficulty resolving intellectual disagreements. Wikipedia's reputation and internal editorial process would benefit by having a single authority vouch for the quality of a given article. In the jargon of library and information science, lay readers rely upon "secondary epistemic criteria," clues to the credibility of information when they do not have the expertise to judge the content. Once upon a time, Encyclopaedia Britannica recruited Einstein, Freud, Curie, Mencken and even Houdini as contributors. The names helped the encyclopedia bolster its credibility. Wikipedia, by contrast, provides almost no clues for the typical article by which reliability can be appraised. A list of edits provides only screen names or, in the case of the anonymous editors, numerical Internet Protocol addresses. Wasn't yesterday's practice of attaching "Albert Einstein" to an article on "Space-Time" a bit more helpful than today's "71.240.205.101"? What does Wikipedia's system offer in place of an expert authority willing to place his or her professional reputation on the line with a signature attached to an article? When I asked Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, last week, he discounted the importance of individual contributors to Britannica. "When people trust an article in Britannica," he said, "it's not who wrote it, it's the process." There, a few editors review a piece and then editing ceases. By contrast, Wikipedia is built with unending scrutiny and ceaseless editing. He predicts that in the future, it will be Britannica's process that will seem strange: "People will say, 'This was written by one person? Then looked at by only two or three other people? How can I trust that process?' " The Wikipedian hive is capable of impressive feats. The English-language collection recently added its millionth article, for example. It was about the Jordanhill railway station, in Glasgow. The original version, a few paragraphs, appeared to say all that a lay reader would ever wish to know about it. But the hive descended and in a week, more than 640 edits were logged. If every topic could be addressed like this, without recourse to specialized learning and without the heated disputes called flame wars the anonymous hive could be trusted to produce work of high quality. But the Jordanhill station is an exception. Biographical entries, for example, are often accompanied by controversy. Several recent events have shown how anyone can tamper with someone else's entry. Congressional staff members have been unmasked burnishing articles about their employers and vandalizing those of political rivals. (Sample addition: "He likes to beat his wife and children.") . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . As the project has grown, [Wales] has found that he no longer necessarily knows anyone in a group. When a dispute flared recently over an article related to a new dog breed, he looked at the discussion and asked himself in frustration, "Who are these people?" Isn't this precisely the question all users are bound to ask about contributors? By wide agreement, the print encyclopedia in the English world reached its apogee in 1911, with the completion of Encyclopaedia Britannica's 11th edition. (For the fullest tribute, turn to Wikipedia.) But the Wikipedia experiment need not be pushed back in time
[peirce-l] Re: Are there authorities on authority?
Larry: Thanks for the extensive reply to my criticisms. Sorry for the delay in responding but it will take me a few days more before I am ready to do so properly. I've been reading the various material by you that provides background understanding in some depth for what you say in your messages here, and I am increasingly intrigued by the issues implicit in this project, though not yet convinced that -- as presently conceived -- it is either viable in principle or achievable to a significant degree in practice without turning into something else that you will eventually want to dissociate yourself from. But your attempt to develop a philosophically sound conception of it, and to do so both by extensive dialogue and by practical involvement and experimentation in actual implementation of it is the last thing I would wish to discourage in any way, as long as the idealism is still there and you stay open to criticism. The reason I am so slow in response is that I don't want to present only a negative view of your project but to suggest a somewhat different perspective to entertain, if I can describe it properly, which might be of some help in developing a more profitable understanding of its prospects and problematics than achieved thus far. I don't mean to be speaking as if from some superior vantage point but only from a somewhat different one, in virtue of different experience acquired in pursuit of what seem to be relevantly similar goals. Let me explain one reason why I say this, though I should apologize in advance for the length of it. I don't expect a response in detail. It is mainly just FYI. Hopefully, I will be able to come up with something of more value to you later. The interest I have in the sort of thing you are concerned with stems from two distinct but related aims. The first is one which has gradually formed itself over the years in connection with the standing problem in Peirce scholarship posed by the fact that Peirce's philosophical work still remains largely entombed in a vast quantity of unpublished manuscript material which is available, as a practical reality, only to a privileged few, and even for them in a largely unordered form that often defeats the possibility of shared access to it convenient enough to build effectively on the basis of it. The recent developments of computer-based information and communication technology make it possible to solve the problem of universal access to it and to develop instruments of organization and analysis and scholarly communication that could do justice to it, but attempts to do this have yet to be successful, and my own efforts in this direction thus far have caused me to think of the practice of scholarship and of philosophy rather differently than I otherwise would and in ways that seem to me to bear on what you are trying to do, too. More to the point, though, is the second aim, which is one which I acquired more or less by accident in virtue of my philosophical interest in the role of communication and publication in the process of inquiry motivated by the purpose of getting at the truth about something. From the Peircean perspective, which regards the inquiry process as fundamental in understanding epistemological matters, inquiry is to be understood as a essentially of the character of a dialogical process, which means that one has to be concerned with the question of what the role of publication is in that process, which is usually just ignored by philosophers of science because they think of publishing as something one does only to communicate results after they have been arrived at and already recognized as being acquired knowledge. In working out the implications of this I was led to the question of what is or can be meant by peer review, which is supposedly a validation process that occurs in the process of attempted publication, justifying the publication by somehow certifying or validating the document submitted as worthy of publication. But how can It do that if the judgment of a peer is logically on par with the judgment of the author, as is implicit in the concept of a peer? A second opinion is just another opinion nor can any piling up of further peer opinions change the logical status of the opinion reviewed, regardless of whether they agree or disagree. Omitting the reasons here, let me just say that I came to the conclusion that the common understanding of this practice is seriously flawed, and what is usually referred to as peer review is actually only a degenerate form of it at best since authentic peer review is something that can occur only in consequence of publication rather than being something that occurs prior to it that can justify it, as it is usually but mistakenly conceived. But at about this time I discovered that something had been happening in certain of the hard sciences which also lent support to this conclusion, namely, the movement,
[peirce-l] RE: Are there authorities on authority?
Larry Sanger wrote: This question--who authorizes the authorities--really lies at the heart of social epistemology, and reminds me of an essay I read in grad school, Egoism in Epistemology by Richard Foley (in *Socializing Epistemology*--I just pulled the book off the shelf). Among other things Foley distinguishes derivative and fundamental authority, which is roughly the difference between authority for which I have reasons to believe a person is a reliable source of knowledge, and authority for which I have no such reasons. A central issue in social epistemology is whether--at some point--we must simply take what others say on trust, or whether it is always possible in some deep way ultimately to justify our reliance on testimony. Epistemic egoists (Foley's term) say it is possible. Dear Folks- Peirce speaks of reliance upon authority as one way of fixing belief . But I believe he recommends the method of science as perhaps the better way to settle questions of fact if one's goal is primarily to learn the truth of the matter. Unfortunately we are not always in a position to conduct scientific investigations and must rely on less direct ways of acquiring the sort of information science can provide. In such case it would be nice to have access to some representative sample of scientific results succinctly summarized in a way we could understand them without ourselves having the scientific background and resources necessary to do the research ourselves. Similarly it would be nice to have access to information about all sort of topics categorized and summarized in a felicitious and transparent way -- by which I mean accessible, comprehendable and traceable to its source so that we could make a judgment as to its bias (deliberate or otherwise). I say bias because this what we seem to fear --- that the information will be distorted or falsified because of some prejudice or ulterior motive of those who have provided it. But what I really want to say is merely POV. The usefulness, comprehensiveness and ultimately truth of all information is limited by the fact that it represents from a particular point of view. What we seek (and what the scientific method is expresessly set up to provide) is a representative sampling of all possible points of view. There are no priviledged points of view. Truth is that which is common to all points of view. What we seek from so called experts is their access to this common knowledge or POV. What makes one an expert is not that they know something unique to a special POV but that they know what is common to all points of view of a particular topic. This, it seems to me, is the uncommon common sense we speak of as being the domain of wisdom. An expert knows a lot about a particular topic. What's rare about an expert's knowledge is its scope. The expert distills the conceptual essence of a subject matter from many points of views. Expertise is a reliable access to truth, not because it is based upon a unique or rare POV, but precisely because it is not dependent upon or limited to a particular point of view. And the measure of what is not dependent upon a particular POV (or of POV in general) is that which is common to all points of view. What all POVs have in common is the truth. What is unique to every POV is error. What is unique to the truth is that it is what is common to all POVs. What is common to all error is that it uniquely expressed in every POV. Truth and error are common and unique in exactly opposite ways. And how do we collect and provide access to the sort of expertise we seek? I'm not sure but I would look to the scientific investigation of the question as the best way to provide answers. What is the most reliable way to collate scientific information, or expert summation of scientific information, in a easily accessable fashion is itself a scientific question. Does some sort of citation count procedure (such as google etc) provide the most representative sampling of the information domain? And what sort of expert information domain do we want to sample -- maybe some way of providing more transparancy about the domain sampled coupled with broad and representative sampling is the best way to categoriize and make accessible what folks are seeking. Somehow though, I doubt that committees selected on the basis of academic standing (judged by some committee of academics) is going to provide the sort of broad and comprehensive expertise we deseve and are capable of providing with the tools of the internet. Seems to me we need to come up with some less value laden selection criteria. Something more tied to the mere quantitative dimensions of the information domain being sampled -- as opposed to being tied to the particular values of those designing the information system. Ha -- I suppose my values rather than the values of those doing the work! In any case I agree that
[peirce-l] Re: Are there authorities on authority?
Prof. Ransdell, I actually think I and others at work on the project need this sort of dialogue, frankly, because we have been heads-down in making it happen and haven't often come up for air, so to speak. So I very much appreciate this critique. Thanks also for the plug about my dissertation. 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). On that precise question, interestingly enough, I might say that there is. I know one personally: my old dissertation adviser George Pappas. He's written a number of articles about expertise and what it is. Of course, if I say that he is an expert about expertise, I am perfectly aware that all I mean is that he's a philosophy professor who has thought and read and written quite a bit about the subject. Whether he really *is* an expert in some deeper sense, I really have no idea. 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. That's OK, but I reserve the right to disagree. :-) 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. Well, what knowledge claims do you take us to be making? (Just to be clear, you should know that I am not personally in charge of the project. I'm just one of many people at work on it. Bernard Haisch, an astrophysicist, is President of the DUF, and he answers to a Board of Directors.) What we claim, I suppose, is simply that we aspire to be a neutral and expert source of information--not necessarily a source of objective truth. We know, and no doubt will say again and again *that* we know, that experts, according to our very conventional conception of them, can be wrong, and frequently are. 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. I'd like to understand what you're saying here, so I have some questions. By the problem do you mean the problem of meta-justification here? Possibly we don't understand it in the same way. At any rate, my own position in Ch. 4 of my dissertation is that there is a benchmark set of mental abilities we have--reason and common sense, in brief--the reliability of which we are perfectly rational in taking for granted despite having justificatory grounds for doing so. Is that what you mean by what you know from your philosophical understanding of the problem at the theoretical level? Or something else? Then I guess you are saying that, based on my understanding of the problem (or of its solution, right) I ought to see that there is something fundamentally flawed about our current approach to the DU project. So, what exactly is fundamentally flawed about it? Well, I think you give some elaboration further down. So let's go on. I said: ... the most it can hope to do is to represent the state of the art in each field. You responded: 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. ... 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. Well, perhaps to be clearer, instead of state of the art, I should have used a different metaphor, like the lay of the current dialectical landscape. Joe Firmage, one of the co-founders of the project, conceives of the DU's mission as making room for all more or less academically credible approaches in a field--not just that of the reigning orthodoxy. I could not agree more with him. I am
[peirce-l] Re: Are there authorities on authority?
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,
[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 vulnera
[peirce-l] Re: Are there authorities on authority?
e 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 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
[peirce-l] Re: Are there authorities on authority?
Joe, I think you raise some very important points in this post. I'm not going to address any of them myself at the moment, but I do look forward to hearing Larry's response to your question about the basis for determining authorities. I would, however, like to give an example of the kind of misrepresentation of authority that goes on these days, and which perhaps that the WWW is especially vulnerable to. Although not precisely about the issues you've raised, Joe, it is related to your comment that: . . . 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. I recently received an email from what looked to be a legitimate source (a Prof.Nagib Callaos, KCC 2006 General Chair) inviting me to participate in activities relating to the conference (I've copied the message below my signature). It turns out that this is bogus. See the Wikipedia article on Callaos: http://wiki.fakeconferences.org/index.php/Nagib_Callaos_conferences which includes the comment that: If you're working in academia and on computer scientific subjects, you've probably been spammed by these guys. In 2005, their WMSCI conference accepted a randomly generated paper, which brought these conference organizers a lot of international critique, both from the scientific community, as from the mainstream news media. The article goes on to list about 20 bogus conferences created by Callaos in the past two years. Also an article describing this spam can be found at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4449651.stm I had heard of this a while back, although I didn't associate Callaos name with it immediately. I had earlier thought it was mainly an issue concerning standards for acceptance of conference papers, but it's really much more about spam and fake conferences. Gary Dear Gary Richmond: Based on your participation in conferences, we would like to consult your opinion and your possible contribution regarding the idea of collecting, in a multiple-author book or symposium proceedings, reflections and knowledge regarding conferences organization and quality standards/means. It will only take you about 30 seconds to give us your opinion and your potential support as a reviewer and/or paper contributor. To do so please visit the web page: www.iiis.org/kcc/a.asp?t=a11[EMAIL PROTECTED] As you know, an increasing number of books and papers have been written regarding knowledge communication via journals, but very few have been written regarding knowledge communication via conferences, workshops, etc. Consequently, we would like to invite you to share your ideas/research in this area by submitting a paper and/or organizing an invited session in KCC 2006 to be held in Orlando, FL on July 16-19, 2006. Please visit KCC's web site for further information: http://www.iiisci.org/KCC2006 Organizers of the invited sessions with the best performance will be co-editors of the proceedings volume where their sessions' papers are to be included and of the CD electronic proceedings. You can find information about the suggested steps to organize an invited session in the Call for Participation and in the conference web page. If the deadlines are tight and you need more time, let me know about a suitable time for you and I will inform you if it is feasible for us. Best Regards, Prof.Nagib Callaos KCC 2006 General Chair --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] RE: Are there authorities on authority?
Joseph, This question--who authorizes the authorities--really lies at the heart of social epistemology, and reminds me of an essay I read in grad school, Egoism in Epistemology by Richard Foley (in *Socializing Epistemology*--I just pulled the book off the shelf). Among other things Foley distinguishes derivative and fundamental authority, which is roughly the difference between authority for which I have reasons to believe a person is a reliable source of knowledge, and authority for which I have no such reasons. A central issue in social epistemology is whether--at some point--we must simply take what others say on trust, or whether it is always possible in some deep way ultimately to justify our reliance on testimony. Epistemic egoists (Foley's term) say it is possible. Wikipedia illustrated this issue beautifully--I've long wanted to write about this, but just never got around to it. Under current rules, one can never really know whether an editor on Wikipedia is who is says he is, or whether he has the qualifications he says he does. Therefore (or so we can say as a rule of thumb), if you want to trust Wikipedia at all, either you trust any given piece of information based on its coherence with your own knowledge, or you take it on trust simply because people are more likely to say true things than not. It's impractical (difficult and time-consuming) to try to confirm the reliability of the specific sources that write for Wikipedia. Now, personally, I tend to agree with Foley (if I remember right, but with Thomas Reid in any case), that we *must* ultimately rely on what others say without having any *specific* reason for thinking they are telling the truth. (A lot is packed into ultimately there.) But we can certainly try to *improve our odds*. That is something I think the social epistemologists who take raw testimony as a basic source of justification sometimes forget. Wikipedians also seem to forget this. We can bootstrap our way up to greater levels of confidence. And, of course, society has already done the bootstrapping. Observe that long study of a subject tends to increase the reliability of one's opinions about the subject. After studying a subject a long time, a person is given a degree in the subject. Somebody with a degree in or significant experience with a subject can be *presumed*, everything else being equal, to be more *likely* to get something right on the subject than someone without a degree in or significant experience with the subject. Furthermore, the higher the degree, study, training, background, etc., the greater the presumption of reliability (and even if it's never a very strong presumption, it's a *greater* presumption). Some such bootstrapping process no doubt led to the modern conventions on who is and is not an expert. But, as everybody knows and as non-experts endlessly delight in observing, there are some alleged experts who have all the credentials but who are actually quacks, ignoramuses, whack-jobs, or otherwise unreliable despite their credentials. Never mind that this obvious fact does not undermine the *general* claim, that modern conventions of expertise *tends to increase the credibility* of a source. There are bound to be statistical outliers. More interesting for practical purposes, such as those of the Digital Universe, is the fact that experts, when gathered together, can actually (in time) identify the outliers. Prof. X is really just a whack-job, even though, outside the community of experts in the field, he might appear to be just as expert and just as reliable as anyone else in the field. So (I hope) the Information Coalitions (as they are and will be called) that make decisions about who is and who is not an expert will be well-positioned to exclude the Prof. Xs. (The Environmental information Coalition already exists; see earthportal.net/about. Others under active development are a Health Information Coalition and a Cosmos Information Coalition. A full complement of coalitions will be kick-started hopefully sometime this spring--which will be very exciting, and we think big news.) The trouble, however, comes when the whole field is unreliable. You'll forgive me for not citing any examples, but you might wonder how the Digital Universe will handle this problem in general. 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
