[peirce-l] Re: Are there authorities on authority?

[Steven Ericsson Zenith]

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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com