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 case of dictionaries in particular to make your
point, Steven, since I understand dictionaries to be nothing more than
attempts to provide information about presently and previously
prevailing word usage, which information the users of the dictionary
can put to whatever use they wish. I would agree that dictionary
entries should be signed so that the author can be held responsible,
but it seems to me that your point is better made with reference to
encyclopedias rather than dictionaries, where the entries purport to
convey information about the subject-matter of words rather than about
their usage.
Perhaps you expressed
your point with reference to the case of dictionaries because of the
special interest recently shown here in 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 of the
quality of the entries as accurate accounts of the generally prevailing
usage of the words described in the entry but rather because Peirce's
entries help to provide us with a glossary of his own terminology,
regardless of whether or not his usage conforms 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
"the perceived competence of a given individual to present a given
subject so that we may judge to what degree we can trust the
information presented" is a promising one, because it makes it possible
to think of authority as a matter of being more or less authoritative,
which is important because it succeeds in working the concept of
fallibility into the concept of authority in just the right
way. Thinking of it that way it then makes sense to say in reference
to anything (person, document, procedure) identified
as being authoritative "okay, I won't argue about that, but I do want
to know how much weight should be put upon his so-called authority in
taking it into account in decision-making". As authority is usually
understood at present the identification of someone or something as an
authority is 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 trust when it follows upon an intuitive
assessment provided the trust is not given because we are deliberately
turning away from recognition of obvious reason for distrust (i.e.
provided we are not "in denial" of the obvious, as we say). Trust
should be 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, and I agree with you in your suspicion that this is what
Larry may be doing -- 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 will now turn in my response to him
in another message, which will take me a few hours to compose.
Joe Ransdell
----- Original Message -----
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
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
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