Here at the Rotman conference on Climate Science, Paul Edwards is talking about "knowledge infrastructures" and how the production of knowledge has radically changed over the last 20 years from a much more individualistic enterprise, with pyramids of expertise, peer review, etc to a much more distributed model. He mentioned this popular book Too Big to Know. I wonder if this sort of transition is hiting philosophy and is being fought out in the various debates about the PGR and its possible more distributed alternatives. Is this a fight about whether Philosophy should be preserving its pyramids of expertise, or be moving to more distributed model of credibiility sanctioning?
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4 responses to “Too Big to Know–is Leitergate a microcosm of a much larger phenomenon?”
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In his book, Weinberger (who holds a PhD in philosophy, as an fyi) focuses more on how computing and WWW has changed what and the way we know things. So, I think the more philosophy meets the Web, the more distributed knowledge in philosophy is inevitable, including distributed approaches to rankings systems. But I am not sure how well this explains the particulars of the Leiter backlash (for lack of a better term). Rather, I think we might focus on phenomena like open peer review or open access articles or journals, or developing more supportive UI for repositories that allow for “filtering down” and not out (Weinberger also discusses this in his book) — and how philosophy could (continue to) benefit from them. But this doesn’t really answer your question so much as ask different ones that perhaps Edwards already discussed re: climate science.
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It’s an interesting comparison, but I don’t think I see it, once we go further into the details of Edwards’ talk.
As I interpreted it, the narrative of the talk wasn’t (so much) about a shift from individualism to distributed, but rather from small, closely-knit communities to a large, diffuse society. When there are maybe a couple dozen people building climate models, everyone knows pretty much everyone else; when there are hundreds or thousands of people involved, most probably any two people are connected only through two or more intermediates. Plus, there are external challenges to the expertise and authority of climate scientists as a whole, calls for climate science to be more accountable and transparent, etc.
I think the story in philosophy is more about struggles over power as the demographics of the field change.LikeLike
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Thanks for that Dan. I wasn’t so much referring to the whole of Paul’s talk (I think I threw this up before he was done speaking) but to his summary of Weinberger’s stuff at the beginning about pyramids of expertise being replaced by something else. “Power struggles as the demographics of the field change” seems to me to be completely consistent with being part of that narrative. But anyway, it was just a quick thought about how to connect something people were talking about here with things that are of interest in the Philosophy Blogosphere of late.
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I don’t know Edwards’ work, but one relevant question in the “knowledge becomes distributed” debates is that the distribution of nodes along the internet is not at all even (which most of early work assumed – it was one of the main assumptions behind the ‘internet radically democratizes knowledge production’ thesis). So certain super-nodes are a lot more connected than others; getting to many of others basically requires that a super-node links to them, etc. Maybe one way to think about the Leiter backlash – and there is clearly more to it than this – is that the supernode status of the PGR and his blog with regard to assessment and ranking of graduate programs is being challenged by the increasing, independent accessibility of alternatives.
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