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 strands of expert opinion in any given field. It then remains to be observed that nearly an entire field can, after all, be unreliable, because so much work in the field is based on bad assumptions. That has happened. Just look at, for example...well, I'd better not go there. Nevertheless, an information resource that exhaustively and reliably describes the state of the art in an *ill-founded* field would still be useful. It helps to know exactly where we are before we can improve. I might think (to put it colorfully) that all Wonkologists are whack-jobs, but I might also want to know the state of the art in Wonkology. Here's something relevant you might find interesting--from the current draft of the Terms of Reference of the Digital Universe Foundation Interim Steward and Coalition-Building Program. QUOTE Application review rules and procedure General rules for selecting Interim Stewards. As a general rule, a minimum qualification for being granted an Interim Stewardship over some specialized field is the ability to publish in first- and second-rank professional or academic journals in the field, or to teach an upper-division college course in the field. In other words, the work done by the person is regarded by his or her peers as meeting a basic professional standard. Tenured and most non-tenured professors, as well as senior research scientists, are expected to meet this qualification with respect to their specializations. Other research personnel, independent scholars, and some graduate students, particularly when writing about very narrow specialties, might also meet this qualification. "Hobby" subjects. There are a number of subjects about which there is much hobbyist interest and little or no academic or research interest; there might not be, for example, any upper-division college courses taught in the subject at all. Such subjects, and people applying to Steward them, will be dealt with on an ad hoc basis; but the DUF must confirm that the topics really are "hobbyist" subjects, about which there are few or no credentialed experts. In any case, a hobbyist must be recognized by those highly proficient or knowledgeable in the field as a peer: being an experienced instructor, authoring a manual, or interest group association leadership might be taken as a relevant credential. (The DUF would like to assure non-academics reading this that we deeply respect the specialized knowledge of uncredentialed people, and we will help new Coalitions set up a system that fully leverages your knowledge. We apologize in advance that the Interim Steward Program will tap only those with more "traditional" kinds of expertise; but please bear in mind that the central mission of the DU is to provide a source of free information that the general public can be regarded as truly authoritative.) UNQUOTE I should add that there will be room at all levels of accomplishment in the DU. The above rules are intended to define only who may be a *Steward*, which is just the top tier of participants. The general public will be able to participate too, if they can do at least (roughly speaking) college level work, we think. --Larry --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
