Draft. Do not quote without permission
I see the temples of the deaths and the bodies of
Gods. I see the old signifiers.
Walt
Whitman, Leaves of Grass,, 1856.
C’est ça ma tradition, j’en ai pas d’autre
J.P.
Sartre (1980, last interview, March 10)
So far, I have
attributed my analysis of reputation to persons, labels and institutions that
deliver those labels. I have defined the epistemological idea of reputation as a relation between an X (object or agent), an authority and an evaluation. The
way in which the authority evaluates X influences X’s reputation. The idea that
I have developed in the cases studies I have discussed, such as the one of wine
labels reputation, is that reputation indicators crystallize social and
historical information that are then used as shortcuts for trusting items and
people.
In a sense, this
vision of reputation provides an analysis for the external reputation that is socially attached to things and people
by authorities and then perceived by other through the filter of these
authorities. Here, I would like to pay more attention to the internal reputational dynamics, that is:
once an item – an object, an idea, a person - earns a certain authority in our
minds, it has to fight to maintain its reputation and there may be interactions
with other items that crucially determine its reputational dynamics. What I
would like to do here is to change the scale
of the approach: once a reputation is acquired through an extended social
network of practices, evaluations, cultural values etc., how it stabilizes and
evolves in a narrower network of insiders.
Reputation, in its
external sense, is an historical property. People and things earn reputation
through time. Reputation condensates past action in seals of approval. People
care about keeping their reputation because they care about trust relationships
they want to endure. Things such, labels, prices, etc. keep their reputation
because of their historical record.
So far, I have
paid attention to the way people’s reputation is constructed and maintained.
Even when I have talked about ideas and theories, I have presented their
reputation as connected to the authority of those who promulgate these ideas.
Here I will look at how ideas in themselves acquire reputation and, in doing
so, contribute to changing or keeping paradigms in mainstream theories. This
analysis, although it will explore the “life” of an idea inside a theoretical
framework, how it blooms and how it loses its spell, will use also a different
temporal scale: I won’t explore the encrustation of its prestige through time,
but the shorter temporal dynamics of its rise and fall, the vagaries of its
success and failure in the minds of its supporters.
This will link
some of my concerns on reputation to more classical debates in philosophy and
sociology of science on paradigm changes in sciences and theory constructivism.
I think that the dimension of prestige, how it affects the fortune of an idea,
is most lacking in these classical analyses (Kuhn, Fayerabend, Fleck, Hacking).
What is the
prestige of an idea? Where does it display itself? It is not in the manners of
Mme. de Cambremer , or in the personal charisma of Robert Opennheimer. It is
neither through moral qualities of disinterestedness and trustworthiness that
an idea can earn its prestige, because ideas don’t have neither manners, nor moral
qualities. But ideas have
style.
The notion of
style of ideas or thought styles has been scatteredly approached in philosophy
and in sociology of knowledge.
Oswald Spengler
talks about the “Western style of thought”, but the German word Stil is not
always translated into English with the word “Style”.
Husserl speaks of
Galilean style of reasoning as “making abstract models of the universe to which
at least the physicists give a higher degree of reality the they accord to the
ordinary world of sensation” (Weinberg, 1976).
In his essay on Language, Truth and Reason, Ian hacking
defines the notion of style of reasoning as “what brings in the possibility of
truth and falsehood” (Historical Ontology, p. 167). In the end of the article,
Hacking makes five statements about style:
1. There are different styles of reasoning. Many of these are
discernible in our own history. They emerge at definite points and have
distinct trajectories of maturation. Some die out, others are still going
strong.
2. Propositions of the sort that necessarily require reasoning to be
substantiated, have a positivity, being true or false, only in consequence of
the styles of reasoning in which they occur
3. Hence, many categories of possibility, of what may be true or false,
are contingent upon historical events, namely, the development of a certain
style of reasoning
4. It may then be inferred that there are other categories of
possibility that have emerged in our tradition
5. We cannot reason as to whether alternative systems are better or
worse than ours, because the propositions to which we reason get their sense
only from the method of reasoning employed. The propositions gave no existence
independent of the ways of reasoning towards them.
Arnold Davidson
raises the question of “the style of reasoning” in his reconstruction of the
emergence of psychiatry as a scientific corpus. In an essay entitled Styles of Reasoning, Conceptual History and
the Emergence of Psychiatry, he characterizes the notion of “style of
reasoning” trying to find a compromise between Hacking’s characterization and
Foucault’s idea of regime of truth: “truth”
is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production,
regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. Truth is
linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain
it, and with the effects of power which it induces. A regime of truth.
Wisely, he points
out that neither conception implies a strong cultural relativism. What they
both say is that we are in the boat we are building and nothing is visible or
even speakeable from outside that boat.
Wölfflin's classical work on style in art bring about the idea of polar
concepts: styles in art, contrast baroque style vs. classical style.
The most
comprehensive work in history and philosophy of science on styles of thoughts
is the three volumes essay by A. C. Crombie (1994) Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition. The work
is an exercise of “internal” history of science, that is, an explanation of the
dynamics of styles of thinking in the Western tradition that is kept
independent from external social influences and psychological shifts in
conceiving paradigms. As Ian Hacking says “Crombie’s idea is less about the
content of the sciences than about their methods”. It is mostly a taxonomical
work that Crombie has developed through almost 30 years. He distinguishes 6
typical styles of scientific reasoning: 1. Postulational, 2. Experimental, 3.
Hypothetical, 4. Taxonomic, 5. Probabilistic and Statistical, 6. Historical or
genetic.
On the other
extreme of the spectrum, you may rank Foucault’s ideas on the order of speech,
the episteme as a “style” of thought that is regulated, formatted, produced and
controlled by a system of power. :
La production du discours est à la fois controlee, sélectionnée,
organisée et distribuée par un certain nombre de procedures qui ont pour role
d’en conjurer les pouvoirs et les dangers, d’en maîtriser l’événement aléatoire,
d’en esquiver la loured, la redoubtable matérialité. (L’ordre du discours : 11)
Probably the most
elaborate theorization of thought-style is to be found in Ludwik Fleck’s work.
It is ironic, even if sad, that Fleck’s life and work are examples of an
unstylish intellectual adventure. Born in Poland in 1896, he was trained as a
doctor and developed a particular interest for bacteriology. Although he was
fluent in German he developed ideas on the sociology of knowledge independently
of
Ludwik Fleck:
Thought style is a tradition of shared assumptions, invisible to members and
rarely questioned. These shared assumptions define which questions are
significant and prefigure appropriate answers (Harwood: 177) Role of
perception. The thought-style gives us the categories for organizing a confused
perception of the world.
Thought styles are
gate-keepers. They filter information the gets into and is thus credible.
“We look with our
own eyes. We see the eyes of the collective” (Fleck: 154)
Human reason is
not static but socially and historically variable. Thought styles are the way
in which human reason expresses itself through time and places.
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