[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?
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
[peirce-l] Re: Panopedia
I have no interest in trying the list's patience by drawing this out further, but I did want to supply one further piece of information. Steven Zenith raises the question about the transparency of the Digital Universe (i.e., if I understand it correctly, whether we will require the use of real names and identities). In fact, we have been projecting for over a year that real names and identities *will* be required. They already are required for all work done by those building the Encyclopedia of Earth and the Earth Portal. In a forthcoming monograph about the DU, I have argued at some length that this policy is indeed advisable. I won't bore you with the arguments here, since I assume we're rather off-topic from Peirce, but suffice it to say that I have long thought that some of Wikipedia's problems can be laid down to the fact that many participants do not take responsibility for their own work by connecting it to their real-world identities. Moreover, we will of course (and already do) have contributor biographies that will help develop a sort of reputation system. Steven, if you have further questions, I'd appreciate it if you'd simply ask rather than making uncharitable assumptions about a project on which I've been working hard for over a year. --Larry Sanger --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Panopedia
is essentially an academic/professional project a commercial appearance. But that, again, is being changed. I didn't mean to be unnecessarily defensive or long-winded in the above, but I fear I might have been. If so, that would be because, as a philosopher myself, I value the opinions and potential support and participation of anyone who is a fan of Peirce. --Larry Sanger Director of Distributed Content Programs, Digital Universe Foundation 100 Enterprise Way, Suite G370, Scotts Valley, CA 95066 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.digitaluniverse.net/ --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
