On Thursday 13 January 2005 01:11, Tim Starling wrote:
This is a bit more abstract, but I was recently exploring some concepts with
respect to Wikipedia and intelligent design as well.
http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/culture/epistemological-authority
2005 Jan 06 | Epistomological Authority
Two recent discussions have prompted me to return to question of
epistemological authority. In the case of the online collaborative
Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, a founding participant, lamented the
inability of the community to accept and retain contributions from
"experts." Also, creationists have re-factored their doctrine into a
pseudoscientific "theory" of intelligent design and advocate that it
be taught alongside, or instead, of evolution. I believe both of
these cases share the conditions that there is such a thing as
expertise, but that all views are potentially ideologically biased.
Can the community at large distinguish authoritative arguments, or
must we be cynical and believe that all arguments are biased but
some are only more eruditely presented? (In fact, I've realized that
the bulk of continental social "theory" is about identifying such
biases: Boudieu's doxa and symbolic violence, Hall's naturalization,
Gramsci's hegemony, Marcuse's and Adorno's technological veil,
Weber's symbolic violence, Foucault's episteme, Barthes'
exnomination ('unnaming') etc.).
In An Introduction to Reflexive Sociology Pierre Bourdieu (1992)
discusses a couple of his conceptual contributions which may be of
use in understanding these debates. A field is a cultural domain in
which participants have a stake in and compete with each other for
the accumulation of some sort of capital (i.e., social capital).
Like any social universe, the academic world is the site of a
struggle over the truth of the academic world and of the social
world in general. Very rapidly, we may say that the social world
is the site of continual struggles to define what the social
world is; but the academic world is a peculiarity today that its
verdicts and pronouncements are among the most powerful socially.
In academia, people fight constantly over the question of who, in
this universe, is socially mandated, authorized, to tell the
truth of the social world (1992:70).
One of Bourdieu's preferences is that fields be true to themselves
and operate autonomously and in a "scientific" manner.
A scientific field is a universe in which researchers are
autonomous and where, to confront one another, they have to drop
all nonscientific weapons -- beginning with the weapons of
academic authority. In a genuine scientific field, one can freely
enter free discussions and violently oppose any contradictor with
the arms of science because your position does not depend on him
or because you can get another position elsewhere. (1992:177)
My own understanding is that scientific does not equal academic:
academic authority is based on a hierarchical application of
judgment to those who allegedly know less; while closely associated
with the academic, scientific assessments should be discernible to
those who know the same or even less. Above, Bourdieu introduces the
notion of "scientific arms": legitimate means of dispute. In
Jonathan Sarfati's response to the creationist book Teaching About
Evolution, he notes that the creationists claim that the National
Academy of Sciences "resorts to arbitrary, self-serving 'rules' to
determine what qualifies as 'science' and what doesn't." Of course,
and presently in America we have the confounding situation that a
great majority of the members of the National Academy of Sciences
accept evolution, but a frightening proportion of Americans don't.
A field is all the more scientific the more it is capable of
channeling, of converting unavowable motives into scientifically
proper behavior. In a loosely structured field characterized by a
low level of autonomy, illegitmate motives produce illegitimate
strategies and, furthermore, strategies that are scientifically
worthless. In an autonomous field such as the mathematical field
today, by contrast, a top mathematician who once to triumph over
his opponents is compelled by the force of the field to produce
mathematics to do so, on pain of excluding himself from the
field. Being aware of this, we must work to constitute a
Scientific City in which the most unavowable intentions have to
sublimate themselves into scientific expression. This vision is
not utopian at all, and I could propose a number of very concrete
measures designed to make it come true. For instance, where we
have won a national referee or evaluator, we can institute an
international panel of three foreign judges (of course, we must
then control for the effects of international networks of mutual
knowledge and alliances). When a research center or a journal
enjoys a situation of monopoly, worked to create a rival one. We
can raise the level of scientific censorship by a series of
actions designed to upgrade the level of training, the minimal
amount of specific competency required to enter the field, etc.
In short, they must create conditions such that the worst, the
meanest, and the most mediocre participant is compelled to behave
in accordance with the norms of scientificity in currency at the
time (1992:177).
Interestingly, Bourdieu is advocating censoring "nonscientific"
claims. Which, while not very democratic, can be meritocratic --
though I think his proposals for committees implausible. Yet, while
Bourdieu is sympathetic to the autonomous operation of a field he
does not want to focus on a particular methodology or bureaucracy,
but the almost anarchistic competition under an already agreed to
metaphysical system.
There is in history what we may call, after Elias, a process of
scientific civilization, whose historical conditions are given
with the constitution of relatively autonomous fields within
which all moves are not allowed, in which there are immanent
regularities, implicit principles and explicit rules of inclusion
and exclusion, and admission rights which are being continually
raised. Scientific reason realizes itself when it becomes
inscribed not in the ethical norms of a practical reason or in
the technical rules of scientific methodology, but in the
apparently anarchical social mechanisms of competition between
strategies armed with instruments of action and of thought
capable of regulating their own uses, and in the durable
dispositions that the functioning of this field produces and
presupposes. (1992:180)
But, in the case of the creation/evolution debates, what is at stake
is the metaphysical system of judging what is and is not science; in
Wikipedia, what is and is not good, neutral, and authoritative
content? Creationists object to natural science as a baised
metaphysical system, or even a religion, like their own supernatural
literalism. It is at this point, that I find their position simply
incoherent and can no longer sympathetically engage in the debate.
The divine, supernatural, and the ineffable may exist and be
revealed to some, but these are not legitimate discourses in a
public sphere in which others do not have access to the inspired
source. The alternative that I can understand is as Robert Pennock
(2001:84) wrote in Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics,
"The methodological naturalist does not make a commitment directly
to a picture of what exists in the world, but rather to a set of
methods as a reliable way to find out about the world -- typically
the methods of the natural sciences, and perhaps extensions that are
continuous with them -- and indirectly to what those methods
discover."
As I discussed in Scandal and The Politics of Science and Vice
Versa, "We can never know everything. We haven't the capacity nor
time to give informed consideration to every important issue. So we
rely upon labels and personalities to set the default values of our
opinion." A claim of authority is a claim of being worthy of being
deferred to. In the case of Wikipedia, if people are to accept it as
an Encyclopedia, it seemingly must prove itself as an authority
being worthy of being deferred to. Such proxies are often determined
by the judgments of peers, judgement of superiors, method,
majorities, personal experience, and results. And the difficulty
with both the Wikipedia and debate on evolution is that the best
method, results, is not immediately apparent. If we stop teaching
evolution now, the effects would be long-term and confounded with
many other social variables. And how does one "objectively" judge
the quality of Wikipedia?
Two of the key differences between Wikipedia and open source
software development are that with questions of protocol and code
one can easily make authoritative claims based on the results, and
consequently such communities tend to be meritocratic. As I wrote in
Why the Internet is Good, "With the cacophony of ideas, proposals,
and debates, and a lack of a central authority to cleave the good
from the bad, how does one sort it all out? It sorts itself out. ...
The success of any policy is based simply on its adoption by the
community." Encyclopedia making is not so fortunate, and Wikipedia
strives to be more open, accepting anonymous contributions even,
than most all open source projects. Nor can we simply rely upon the
naked authority of expertise and academia: expertise should be
supported, but to be accepted the results of expertise must also be
widely perceptible to the larger public.