Reply to Jason Stanley's The Crisis of Philosophy

What surprises me of Jason Stanley's interesting article on Inside Higher Ed is that he starts with a long complaint about the fact that philosophers don’t matter anymore, they are marginalized, not invited at cocktail parties, ignored by artists, intellectuals and politicians and doesn’t give any solution about our possible re-integration in the civilized world outside there. He seems to conclude that, ok, that’s it, philosopher’s role is to talk about the meaning of fundamental concepts, it has always been difficult and hard to understand for the general public and it is going to be so in the future.

He then mentions the Vienna Circle as responsible of having introduced such a “dry” method of reasoning and inquiry about the grounds of our knowledge. That was sad but necessary. As a caveat, he adds that these were civilized people nonetheless, with sporadic contacts with the Bauhaus movement. But he forgets to mention that Logical Positivism was also a deeply political and ideological movement whose aim was to have an autonomous grip on truth that was not controlled by politics and institutional ideologies. In this perspective, the spirit of the Vienna Circle was not so different from that of Frankfurt School, another independent and privately funded institution whose aim, 15 years later, was to assure a critical stance towards society and power. Both were aware of the critical role of intellectuals towards power, both endorsed the moral responsibility of taking a different stance vis-à-vis the world they were living in and fight for better standards of knowledge and understanding.

I think that this stance is what any responsible thinker today, philosopher or not, has to take in front of our world: a vigilant stance that doesn’t accept the received view about how things are, but fights for better epistemic and moral standards of inquiry. What I find irresponsible today in philosophy is not the fact the people use abstruse arguments, but that they use them just for the happy or unhappy few crowd they use to meet at summer workshops in nice locations in which they spend their holidays without any thought, any insight about the possible impact of their words and ways of conceiving reality on the society of knowledge that dominates our lives today.

An epistemic vigilant attitude, a bias for hard work in getting things right, is what distinguishes us from other disciplines and what makes us proud of being intellectuals in this world. Without this attitude, without a capacity to evaluate the impact of a more fine-grained analysis of a concept on the overall conception of a scientific or social question that matters in this world, philosophy becomes an empty game, no more interesting than chess playing or tennis, but much less paid.

Freeman Dyson: Climate Change Predictions Are “Absurd” | Freeman Dyson | Big Think

Freeman Dyson: Climate Change Predictions Are “Absurd” | Freeman Dyson | Big Think

La loi d’Obama sur la reforme de l’assurance maladie : une promesse à sa mère

Stanley Ann (at the center) playing with some friends in Indonesia

« Aujourd’hui, je signe cette lois au nom de ma mère, qui a du se battre avec les compagnies d’assurance pendant les derniers jours de son combat contre le cancer ». C’est ainsi que Barack Obama a parlé le 23 mars 2010, lors de la signature du Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, une loi historique qui donne l’accès à l’assurance maladie aux Etats Unis à 32 millions de citoyens américains qui en étaient dépourvu.

Pendant sa campagne et après son élection, il n’y a pas eu un seul discours sur la reforme de l’assurance maladie qui ne mentionnait pas sa mère, Stanley Ann Dunham, anthropologue, idéaliste et militante du microcrédit, morte à 52 ans en 1995 d’un cancer aux ovaires. A’ l’époque du premier diagnostic, Stanley Ann était en train de changer de travail, et après des années de collaboration avec la Ford Foundation, elle allait rejoindre le Women World’s Banking qui finance des projets de microcrédit visant à sortir les femmes de la misère dans différents pays du monde. Un contrôle de routine à New York releva un problème aux ovaires. Après des années de travail à l’étranger, et dans un moment de transition d’un emploi à l’autre, Stanley Ann était dépourvue de couverture sociale aux Etats Unis. Elle repartit donc en Indonésie où elle pouvait se permettre de se faire soigner. Mais les médecins firent là-bas une erreur de diagnostic. Rentrée aux Hawaii, la où ses parents résidaient, déjà très malade, Stanley Ann mourut après un douloureux combat contre la maladie, mais aussi contre les compagnies d’assurance qui lui niaient l’accès aux soins dont elle avait besoin. Une blessure que Barack Obama, à l’époque avocat des droits civils et professeur de droit à Chicago, n’oubliera jamais.

C’est en 1995 que son premier livre, Les rêves de mon père (Paris, Presses de la Cité, 2008) sort aux Etats Unis, un drôle de titre pour une autobiographie en grande partie consacrée au souvenir de sa mère. Il écrit : « La plupart des personnages de ce livre font toujours partie de ma vie, mais il y a une exception : ma mère, que nous avons perdue brutalement, à la suite d’un cancer […] Elle voyageait à travers le monde, travaillant dans de lointains villages d’Asie et d’Afrique, aidant les femmes […] Je me dis parfois que si j’avais su qu’elle ne guérirait pas j’aurais peut-être écrit un autre livre, j’aurait rendu davantage hommage à celle qui était la seule constante de ma vie. Je ne sais pas essayer d’exprimer à quel point je pleure encore sa mort. Je sais qu’elle était l’être le plus noble, le plus généreux que j’aie jamais connu, et que c’est à elle que je dois ce que j’ai de meilleur en moi »

L’engagement d’Obama vis-à-vis de cette reforme a été crédible pour les gens car c’était un engagement non seulement au nom d’une vision politique, d’une idéologie, mais un engagement profondément personnel, une promesse faite à sa mère dans le désespoir de sa perte. La partie la plus vraie, sincère de ce brillant politique est enracinée dans son histoire, dans les valeurs de justice et de communauté que sa mère lui a inculquées tout au long de son enfance. Une femme libre, visionnaire, courageuse au point d’épouser un étudiant africain en 1960 et avoir un enfant avec lui, un choix qui était puni encore par la loi dans plus de la moitié des Etats Unis. Une vie d’études – sa thèse de doctorat en anthropologie vient d’être publiée (Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia. Duke University Press, 2009), mais aussi d’engagement auprès des femmes pauvres, d’amitié et de solidarité avec les démunis, les malades, les enfants.

Les étapes de l’histoire sont écrites très souvent pour rendre des comptes à son histoire personnelle. La loi historique qu’Obama a fait passer au prix d’un dur combat politique s’inscrit dans l’histoire de sa vie, dans sa dette humaine et morale vis-à-vis de cette femme unique.

Disgrace

Draft. Do not quote. Submitted to IRIDE

Vergogna, il libro più filosofico di Coetzee, è l’illustrazione di un paradosso morale, di come qualsiasi posizione morale non possa che restare muta davanti alla violenza della terra, del sangue e della generazione. La traduzione italiana del titolo inglese Disgrace non rende pienamente giustizia dell’atmosfera di disgrazia che permea il racconto: la vergogna è un sentimento consapevole, un passo avanti della coscienza di sé che, secondo il filosofo Bernard Williams, ha un ruolo fondamentale nella formazione del senso di colpa occidentale (cf. B. Williams, Shame and Necessity, California Academic Press). La disgrazia è invece un concetto cristiano sottile: è la condanna dell’azione malvagia perché priva di grazia divina e terrena. E’ la traccia dell’anti-aura sull’anima e sul corpo del disgraziato, una specie di malformazione morale. Il disgraziato è già in parte discolpato perché il suo misfatto è causato dalla sua insufficienza morale, sgraziata e miserabile.

Il libro è una storia di disgraziati. Disgraziato è il protagonista, David Lurie, professore di letteratura di mezza età, che si trova coinvolto nello scandalo provocato da una relazione sessuale con una sua studentessa ed è costretto a dare le dimissioni. Disgraziata è la figlia di Lurie, Lucy, omosessuale solitaria e ideologica, che cerca conforto negli animali e nella coltivazione di un fazzoletto di terra ostile, circondata da una comunità locale che non può che vederla come una diversa, una colona bianca animata da sentimenti pacifisti fasulli nel mondo spietato della lotta razziale sudafricana. Disgraziati sono i malvagi del racconto: i tre uomini che compiono il misfatto, la violenza carnale su Lucy, l’aggressione efferata al padre e l’uccisione dei cani della fattoria: tre delinquenti poveracci, insufficienti moralmente perché vittime della loro sciagura umana. Disgraziate anche le bestie, quei cani abbandonati sacrificati nell’inceneratore della clinica veterinaria vicina alla fattoria dove David Lurie si rifugierà a lavorare, forse perché solo nelle bestie prive di tutto, di diritti, di rispetto e di pietà, può ormai riconoscersi. Disgraziata è Bev Shaw, la veterinaria grassa e ottusa che passa le sue giornate a iniettare l’ultimo veleno a quei poveri randagi, quietando le loro ansie mute con qualche gesto di conforto, con una pacata richiesta di fiducia che gli animali le concedono facilmente per consuetudine e vengono immediatamente traditi.

“Devi essere abituato a un altro tipo di vita” dice Bev Shaw a David Lurie, stupita della solerzia con la quale il professore l’aiuta nella macabra impresa della clinica.
“Un altro tipo di vita? Non sapevo che la vita si distinguesse in ‘tipi’” risponde sarcastico Lurie. Eppure a Salem, sulla strada tra Grahamstown e Kenton, dove si trova la fattoria di sua figlia, la vita sembra darsi in ‘tipi’, in specie differenti e inconfrontabili, ognuna circondata da una spessa cerchia di valori propri, sordi alle ragioni dell’altro.

Così il professor Lurie aveva difeso il suo diritto a essere un tipo differente nel suo processo improvvisato all’università per la sua vicenda carnale con Melanie Isaacs. Non era il tipo da chiedere il perdono pubblico, e aveva preferito la condanna all’umiliazione di rinnegare pubblicamente il suo desiderio per la giovane preda. Dunque sì, a volte la vita si dà in tipologie e bisogna sapere di che tipo si è.
Ma, una volta arrivato alla fattoria della figlia per scappare al tipo di vita che non voleva rinnegare pubblicamente, David Lurie non può capitolare per intero, non può cedere completamente a quel nomos della terra, dell’etnia, che governa il fragile equilibrio della campagna di Salem. Lurie è un intellettuale, uno specialista di Wordsworth e di Byron, un uomo di ragione, benché vittima, come spesso accade a quel tipo umano, del suo esasperato narcisismo maschile, che lo fa credere attraente agli occhi di una ragazza ventenne e nevrotica in cerca di conferme intellettuali e ancora inconsapevole dell’immenso potere del suo giovane corpo. La debolezza di Lurie rientra in un tipo di umanità ben repertoriato dalla morale pubblica, facilmente identificabile e condannabile.

E invece, nella sospensione dalla civiltà che la fattoria di Lucy rappresenta, David Lurie per la prima volta fa esperienza di un altro ordine di conflitto: l’attacco alla fattoria è una guerra combattuta tra forze ctonie, incontrollabili e irredimibili da qualsiasi valore morale, una guerra di sangue e terra, di morte, generazione e di conquista.
Tre uomini si avvicinano al territorio di Lucy: i cani abbaiano, la figlia cerca di tenerli lontani. Chiedono di fare una telefonata. Lucy li fa entrare incauta in casa, la porta sbatte, David Lurie si ritrova chiuso in uno sgabuzzino, le grida della figlia nell’altra stanza gli danno alla testa, uno degli uomini lo cosparge di benzina e gli dà fuoco: il tempo di dibattersi tra le fiamme e il misfatto è compiuto. Lo spregio dei conquistatori della nuova terra è sparare sui cani, guardiani inerti dello scempio razziale di quei tre disgraziati. La sequenza è rapida, cinematografica, Lurie si dimena tra le fiamme, cercando di spegnere il fuoco che divampa sul suo corpo immergendo la testa nella tazza del water. Non sa se si salverà, la vita non è mai stata così “qui e ora”, non sa nulla di quel che sta succedendo se non che nulla sarà mai più come prima.

La sua prima reazione, riavutosi dallo choc, è di proteggere Lucy: bisogna delimitare il territorio, costruire un recinto, mettere un allarme: Lucy non può vivere più sola in quel luogo: Petrus, il suo vicino aiutante, deve vegliare su di lei. Bisogna andare alla polizia, dare tutte le informazioni necessarie per rintracciare i colpevoli. Ma Lucy non reagisce. Inebetita dagli eventi, si piega al suo destino di dominata: lei, bianca, è in minoranza in quelle terre, non c’è morale né legge che tenga. Come un animale docile, come quei cani randagi che si piegano all’inevitabile fine che li aspetta, Lucy non parla, non accusa, si lascia andare alle leggi selvagge del mondo che ha scelto: come le piogge, le epidemie, i raccolti magri, anche il suo stupro è una disgrazia naturale.

David Lurie non riesce a capire, i suoi valori si confondono: nello stupro di Lucy riconosce la violenza del desiderio carnale che lo ha rovinato all’università. Proteggere sua figlia è anche riparare il suo danno su Melanie Isaacs. Quella vicenda apparentemente banale, se non per le conseguenze estreme sulla sua vita materiale, ora gli appare sotto una nuova luce. Ma il suo non è un pentimento: è il riconoscimento di un istinto così profondo e animale che la sua lettura della vita non aveva mai fatto emergere: l’istinto della copula, del mating: un mate, ossia un partner per l’accoppiamento, lo si riconosce dall’odore, dalla fisionomia che corrisponde alla nostra per i fini riproduttivi. Lurie non ha potuto evitare infatti, nei pochi secondi che precedono il misfatto, di notare la bellezza fisica di uno dei tre uomini che si accaniranno di lì a poco su sua figlia. Così, andando a teatro per cercare di rivedere Melanie Isaacs, si chiede sapendola a qualche fila di distanza da lui, se lei senta la sua presenza, se riconosca l’odore del suo partner che si è infilato nella sua pelle.

Nella confusione morale che segue lo stupro, Lurie decide di andare a trovare il padre di Melanie. Il signor Isaacs, padre di famiglia religioso, lo accoglie e lo perdona, sicuro del suo pentimento. Ma Lurie avrebbe voluto spiegare al signor Isaacs ben altro: avrebbe voluto fargli capire che quel che è successo era inevitabile: è stato il mutuo riconoscersi di due animali adatti ad accoppiarsi. Isaacs non lo capisce, lo perdona e lo incoraggia ad affidare tutta la vicenda nelle mani di Dio, a capire il messaggio che Dio ha voluto inviare attraverso questa disgrazia.
Nel dialogo tra i due uomini c’è anche una sottile complicità di ‘tipo’, di specie, come se il padre della ragazza, benché timorato di Dio, non potesse che identificarsi facilmente in quel desiderio maschile per un corpo giovane. Allo stesso modo, la complicità femminile fa scudo contro Lurie intorno allo stupro di Lucy. Sono le donne che consolano sua figlia. La violenza carnale, così come il sangue mestruale, la gravidanza, il parto, sono cose da donne, abituate da millenni a essere violate, soggiogate dai corpi massicci e pericolosi dei loro copulatori.

Le insistenze di Lurie perché Lucy si difenda e accusi i colpevoli, protetti in realtà da tutta la comunità locale, compreso il fedele aiutante Petrus, incrinano la convivenza tra padre e figlia. Il bisogno di giustizia legale di Lurie si scontra con l’accettazione passiva della legge di natura da parte di Lucy. A una festa organizzata da Petrus, Lurie riconosce uno dei tre criminali. Si infuria con Petrus, che risponde a mezze parole alle domande agitate del professore. Pollux, il giovane stupratore, è della famiglia di Petrus, è un protetto, non si tocca. L’ira di Lurie contro il ragazzo non serve a nulla. Ormai Lucy ha accettato il destino e la gravidanza che quella violenza ha portato con sé. Non era uno stupro dunque, ma un accoppiamento, un’estensione del territorio dei tre conquistatori fino alle viscere di sua figlia. Nascerà un bambino dal misfatto, e la terra si ricomporrà nel calore del sangue mescolato in quella nuova vita.

Lurie, a passeggio con la cagna fedele di Lucy, unica sopravvissuta alla strage, incontra il giovane Pollux, lo insulta, lo fa aggredire dalla cagna, gli urla “Suino!”, Swine in inglese, nome di ‘tipo’ appunto, di categoria, non di un animale preciso. Pollux non è un maiale: è della specie dei suini, perché in questa lotta ancestrale non ci sono identità, né responsabilità individuali, ma tipi, specie di azioni che ci fanno essere parte passivamente di un genere umano.

Come sempre è l’esperienza, non la morale, che ci dà occhi nuovi: la visione campestre della figlia piegata sul raccolto, con un cappello di paglia, un vestito largo e la pelle chiara e trasparente della sua specie, lo emoziona esteticamente come un quadro di Sargent o di Bonnard. Come se per la prima volta vedesse qualcosa di bellissimo che era sempre stato lì, sotto i suoi occhi. Così le poesie di Wordsworth lette in classe agli studenti, prendono un senso nuovo. Il sentimento del poeta davanti alla maestosità del Monte Bianco nel sesto libro di The Prelude, di colpo diventa evidente: anche Wordsworth è soggiogato dall’immensa forza muta della natura, dal potere della terra, eternamente pronta a eruttare e sconvolgere ogni nostra certezza morale.

Comment Internet modifie-t-il notre rapport au réel ?

omment l’internet transforme-t-il la façon dont vous pensez ?", telle était la grande question annuelle posée par la revue The Edge à quelque 170 experts, scientifiques, artistes et penseurs. Difficile d’en faire une synthèse, tant les contributions sont multiples et variées et souvent passionnantes. Que les répondants soient fans ou critiques de la révolution des technologies de l’information, en tout cas, il est clair qu’Internet ne laisse personne indifférent.

L’INTERNET CHANGE LA FAÇON DONT ON VIT L’EXPÉRIENCE

Pour les artistes Eric Fischl et April Gornik, l’Internet a changé la façon dont ils posent leur regard sur le monde. "Pour des artistes, la vue est essentielle à la pensée. Elle organise l’information et permet de développer des pensées et des sentiments. La vue c’est la manière dont on se connecte." Pour eux, le changement repose surtout sur les images et l’information visuelle ou plus précisément sur la perte de différenciation entre les matériaux et le processus : toutes les informations d’ordres visuelles, quelles qu’elles soient, se ressemblent. L’information visuelle se base désormais sur des images isolées qui créent une fausse illusion de la connaissance et de l’expérience.

"Comme le montrait John Berger, la nature de la photographie est un objet de mémoire qui nous permet d’oublier. Peut-être peut-on dire quelque chose de similaire à propos de l’internet. En ce qui concerne l’art, l’internet étend le réseau de reproduction qui remplace la façon dont on fait l’expérience de quelque chose. Il remplace l’expérience par le fac-similé."

Le jugement de Brian Eno, le producteur, est assez proche. "Je note que l’idée de l’expert a changé. Un expert a longtemps été quelqu’un qui avait accès à certaines informations. Désormais, depuis que tant d’information est disponible à tous, l’expert est devenu quelqu’un doté d’un meilleur sens d’interprétation. Le jugement a remplacé l’accès." Pour lui également, l’internet a transformé notre rapport à l’expérience authentique (l’expérience singulière dont on profite sans médiation). "Je remarque que plus d’attention est donnée par les créateurs aux aspects de leurs travaux qui ne peuvent pas être dupliqués. L’authentique a remplacé le reproductible."

Pour Linda Stone : "Plus je l’ai appréciée et connue, plus évident a été le contraste, plus intense a été la tension entre la vie physique et la vie virtuelle. L’internet m’a volé mon corps qui est devenu une forme inerte courbée devant un écran lumineux. Mes sens s’engourdissaient à mesure que mon esprit avide fusionnait avec le cerveau global". Un contraste qui a ramené Linda Stone à mieux apprécier les plaisirs du monde physique. "Je passe maintenant avec plus de détermination entre chacun de ces mondes, choisissant l’un, puis l’autre, ne cédant à aucun."

LE POUVOIR DE LA CONVERSATION

Pour la philosophe Gloria Origgi (blog), chercheuse à l’Institut Nicod à Paris : l’internet révèle le pouvoir de la conversation, à l’image de ces innombrables échanges par mails qui ont envahi nos existences. L’occasion pour la philosophe de rappeler combien le dialogue permet de penser et construire des connaissances. "Quelle est la différence entre l’état contemplatif que nous avons devant une page blanche et les échanges excités que nous avons par l’intermédiaire de Gmail ou Skype avec un collègue qui vit dans une autre partie du monde ?" Très peu, répond la chercheuse. Les articles et les livres que l’on publie sont des conversations au ralenti. "L’internet nous permet de penser et d’écrire d’une manière beaucoup plus naturelle que celle imposée par la tradition de la culture de l’écrit : la dimension dialogique de notre réflexion est maintenant renforcée par des échanges continus et liquides". Reste que nous avons souvent le sentiment, coupable, de gaspiller notre temps dans ces échanges, sauf à nous "engager dans des conversations intéressantes et bien articulées". C’est à nous de faire un usage responsable de nos compétences en conversation. "Je vois cela comme une amélioration de notre façon d’extérioriser notre façon de penser : une façon beaucoup plus naturelle d’être intelligent dans un monde social."

Pour Yochaï Benkler, professeur à Harvard et auteur de la Puissance des réseaux, le rôle de la conversation est essentiel. A priori, s’interroge le savant, l’internet n’a pas changé la manière dont notre cerveau accomplit certaines opérations. Mais en sommes-nous bien sûr ? Peut-être utilisons-nous moins des processus impliqués dans la mémoire à long terme ou ceux utilisés dans les routines quotidiennes, qui longtemps nous ont permis de mémoriser le savoir…

Mais n’étant pas un spécialiste du cerveau, Benkler préfère de beaucoup regarder "comment l’internet change la façon dont on pense le monde". Et là, force est de constater que l’internet, en nous connectant plus facilement à plus de personnes, permet d’accéder à de nouveaux niveaux de proximité ou d’éloignement selon des critères géographiques, sociaux, organisationnels ou institutionnels. Internet ajoute à cette transformation sociale un contexte "qui capte la transcription d’un très grand nombre de nos conversations", les rendant plus lisibles qu’elles ne l’étaient par le passé. Si nous interprétons la pensée comme un processus plus dialogique et dialectique que le cogito de Descartes, l’internet permet de nous parler en nous éloignant des cercles sociaux, géographiques et organisationnels qui pesaient sur nous et nous brancher sur de tout autres conversations que celles auxquelles on pouvait accéder jusqu’alors.

"Penser avec ces nouvelles capacités nécessite à la fois un nouveau type d’ouverture d’esprit, et une nouvelle forme de scepticisme", conclut-il. L’internet exige donc que nous prenions la posture du savant, celle du journaliste d’investigation et celle du critique des médias.

MONDIALISATION INTELLECTUELLE

Pour le neuroscientifique français, Stanislas Dehaene, auteur des Neurones de la lecture, l’internet est en train de révolutionner notre accès au savoir et plus encore notre notion du temps. Avec l’internet, les questions que pose le chercheur à ses collègues à l’autre bout du monde trouvent leurs réponses pendant la nuit, alors qu’il aurait fallu attendre plusieurs semaines auparavant. Ces projets qui ne dorment jamais ne sont pas rares, ils existent déjà : ils s’appellent Linux, Wikipédia, OLPC… Mais ce nouveau cycle temporel a sa contrepartie. C’est le turc mécanique d’Amazon, ces "tâches d’intelligences humaines", cet outsourcing qui n’apporte ni avantage, ni contrat, ni garantie à ceux qui y souscrivent. C’est le côté obscur de la mondialisation intellectuelle rendue possible par l’internet.

Pour Barry C. Smith, directeur de l’Institut de l’école de philosophie de l’université de Londres, internet est ambivalent. "Le privé est désormais public, le local global, l’information est devenue un divertissement, les consommateurs des producteurs, tout le monde est devenu expert"… Mais qu’ont apporté tous ces changements ? L’internet ne s’est pas développé hors le monde réel : il en consomme les ressources et en hérite des vices. On y trouve à la fois le bon, le fade, l’important, le trivial, le fascinant comme le repoussant. Face à l’accélération et l’explosion de l’information, notre désir de connaissance et notre soif à ne rien manquer nous poussent à grappiller "un petit peu de tout et à chercher des contenus prédigérés, concis, formatés provenant de sources fiables. Mes habitudes de lecture ont changé me rendant attentif à la forme de l’information. Il est devenu nécessaire de consommer des milliers de résumés de revues scientifiques, de faire sa propre recherche rapide pour scanner ce qui devrait être lu en détail. On se met à débattre au niveau des résumés. (…) Le vrai travail se faire ailleurs." Il y a un danger à penser que ce qui n’apporte pas de résultat à une requête sur l’internet n’existe pas, conclut le philosophe.

Hubert Guillaud

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Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl - Philospher's Song

A fundamental contribution to Philosophy of Wine.

EDGE ANNUAL QUESTION

HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?

Every year the NY literary agent John Brockman asks a question to a bunch of scientists and intellectuals around the world. Here is my reply to this year's question.

THE POWER OF CONVERSATION

I spend more than half of my working hours doing my email: I have 4407 messages in my Gmail Inbox today: stuff that I haven't read yet, that I have to reply to, or that I keep in the Inbox just to take advantage of the search facilities and be able to easily retrieve it when needed.

Each time I find myself in the end of the afternoon still writing messages to friends, colleagues, perfect strangers, students, etc. I have the guilty feeling of having wasted my day, as the weakness of my will had prevailed on any sense of duty and intellectual responsibility. Psychological reactions can be harsh to the point of inflicting myself various forms of punishment such as imprisonment in a dusty Parisian library without Internet connection or voluntary switching off of the modem at my place. That is because I have the precise idea that my work is NOT writing emails: rather it is a matter of writing papers and learned essays on philosophy and related issues.

But what is philosophy? What is academic work in general, at least in the humanities? One of my mentors once said to me: Being an academic just means being part of a conversation. That's it. Plato used the dialogue as a form of expression to render in a more vivid way the dialectic process of thinking and constructing knowledge from open verbal confrontation. One of the books that influenced me most during my undergraduate philosophical studies in Italy was Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems. I read on the Edge site that Edge is a conversation. So, what is so bad about email conversations that are invading my life? What is the big difference between the contemplative state in front of the blank page of a new paper and the excited exchange through Gmail or skype with a colleague living in another part of the world?

My intellectual life started to get much better when I realized that the difference is not that much: that even papers and comments to the papers, reviews, replies, etc. are conversations at slow motion. I write a paper for an academic journal, the paper is evaluated by other philosophers who suggest improvements, it is then disseminated to the academic community in order to prompt new conversations on a topic or launch new topics for discussion. That is the rule of the game. And if I make an introspective effort and try to visualize my way of thinking, I realize that I am never alone in my mind: a number of more or less invited guests are sitting around somewhere in my brain, challenging me when I claim with overconfidence this and that or when I definitely affirm my resolution to act in a certain way.

Arguing is a basic ingredient of thinking: our way of structuring our thought would have been very different without the powerful tool of verbal exchange. So, let's acknowledge that the Internet allows us to think and write in a much more natural way than the one imposed by the written culture tradition: the dialogical dimension of our thinking is now enhanced by continuous, liquid exchanges with others.

The way out of the guilty feeling of wasting our time is to commit ourselves to interesting and well articulated conversations, as we accept invitations to dinners in which we hope to have a stimulating chat and not falling asleep after the second glass of wine. I run a Website that keeps track of high-level, learned conversations between academics. I find that each media produces its wastes: most books are just noise that disappears few months after the first release. I don't think we should concentrate of the wastes, rather, we should try to make a responsible use of our conversational skills and free ourselves from unreal commitments to accidental formats, such as the book or the academic paper, whose authoritative role depends on the immense role they played in our education.

If it happens that what we will leave to the next generation are threads of useful and learned conversations, then be it: I see this as an improvement in our way of externalizing our thinking, a much more natural way of being intelligent in a social world.

Vertige du numérique : Qui lit quoi ?

Au moment où le Kindle d’Amazon débarque dans cent pays et Google annonce à Francfort la création de Google Editions, Umberto Eco choisit comme thème d’un cycle des conférences au Louvre - et de son dernier ouvrage - la liste, le catalogue, comme forme fondamentale de représentation culturelle (cf. U. Eco, Vertige de la liste, Flammarion, 2009). Ce penseur éclectique, qui sait si bien articuler son érudition avec les obsessions du présent, n’aurait pas pu choisir meilleur sujet : l’angoisse qui accompagne le basculement au numérique de notre culture écrite est très étroitement liée à un sentiment de perte de contrôle sur l’ordre des choses, à une expropriation d’un droit inaliénable que chaque civilisation ressent comme justification même de sa propre existence, à savoir le droit d’imposer une hiérarchie, une catégorisation à ce qu’il faut savoir et ne pas savoir, aimer ou ne pas aimer, retenir dans la mémoire collective ou oublier.

Au delà des risques d’exploitation commerciale du patrimoine culturel, mis bien en évidence par l’article de Roger Chartier dans Le Monde du 26.10.09 (L’avenir numérique du livre), ce qu’on craint du catalogue de 360 000 titres d’Amazon et des millions de livres de Google books qui seront mis en vente par les nouvelles éditions Google, c’est qu’ils se présentent comme des listes globales, des collections universelles d’objets culturels dont la logique nous échappe pour plusieurs raisons. Prenons le cas de Kindle : sur quelle base Amazon a sélectionné - parmi les millions de livres dans sa bibliothèque - les 360 000 titres téléchargeables ? Une note du service commercial sur la page web de vente du Kindle est censée nous rassurer : « Nous avons de la chance car nous disposons de millions de clients Amazon, et, comme résultat, nous savons quels livres vous aimez lire et rendrons disponibles ceux-ci en priorité ». Voilà la logique du catalogue : grâce au système filtrage collaboratif mis à disposition par Amazon, celui qui produit les recommandations du type : « Les internautes qui ont acheté ce livre ont acheté aussi… », le catalogue s’élargit en prenant en compte les préférences de lecture des consommateurs. Mais pour les consommateurs à venir, pour nos enfants qui commenceront leur expérience de lecture directement sur Kindle, ce catalogue sera le seul canon culturel à leur disposition.

Voyons alors comment Google procède dans sa création des listes : eh bien, ici on est encore plus dans l’arbitraire : les livres qui sont tombés facilement dans la numérisation « sauvage » de Google books, se retrouvent ensemble car ils partagent les propriétés intéressantes de ne pas avoir de lecteur, d’être hors commerce ou d’appartenir à une maison d’édition qui a conclut un accord inconnu avec Google. Des critères qui ne relèvent pas exactement de la bibliothéconomie la plus sophistiquée…

Ce qu’on craint d’un monde de listes universelles, générées par les nouveaux algorithmes sociaux ou par le hasard des accords commerciaux, c’est de s’égarer, de perdre le sens même du pourquoi on lit. Certes, ces nouveaux créateurs de canons défendront la démocratisation de leurs sélections par rapport aux filtrages de la tradition imposés par le haut. Et n’oublions pas que les sélections d’information produites par chaque tradition culturelle sont elles-mêmes le fruit des choix parfois arbitraires, des caprices de l’histoire et des relations de pouvoir qu’on a pas toujours d’intérêt à maintenir. Mais, comme le dit bien un bloggeur sur slashdot.org : If everyone has a voice, no one really has a voice… c’est à dire, un monde sans autorité culturelle a l’air, tout simplement, d’un monde sans culture.

Mais laissons le temps à ces nouvelles listes et classifications du monde : c’est l’usage qui imposera des nouvelles stratégies de filtrage intelligible : peut être il faudra abandonner l’unité de mesure du livre, ou de l’article pour donner du sens à notre lecture : peut être le tri entre ce qui mérite d’être lu et ce qui est à oublier se fera de manière « liquide », dans le flux d’un seul texte universel qu’on peut parcourir et réassembler à l’infini grâce aux recherches ciblées. Il y a un espace de sens à construire, comme lecteurs responsables, entre les autorités culturelles traditionnelles et les catégorisations imposées par les robots de Google, un espace que chaque appropriation des textes, pour le plaisir, l’enseignement, la diffusion, contribue à créer si elle laisse une trace à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur du Web qui nous rappelle le pourquoi de ce choix.

Un livre dans cette culture liquéfiée ne sera alors ni plus ni moins qu’une unité minimale de sens qui vaut la peine d’être préservée, transmise, mis à jour et diffusée génération après génération : une place dans une liste qui gardera une certaine stabilité de sens et non pas de format, d’une génération à l’autre.

Le désintéressement. Review of Jon Elster

(Jon Elster has just published (in French) the first volume of a trilogy: Le désintéressement : Traité critique de l'homme économique Tome 1 (Paris, Le Seuil, 2009). I wrote a review in Italian for the peer-reviewed journal IRIDE, published by Il Mulino. Here is an English version translated by Dan Sperber for the Cognition and Culture blog.

In one of his perfect narratives, Heinrich Von Kleist tells the sad story of two secret lovers separated and condemned to death just before the earthquake that was to destroy
Santiago de Chile in 1647. Having miraculously survived, they enjoy for a few days the mercy of an enchanted social atmosphere. Their judges and executioners, transformed by the tragedy and the ensuing chaos, multiply gestures of altruism and generosity. The blissful mood persists for a short while, but soon the rules and norms of civil life are being reinstated and a Mass is celebrated during which the crime of the two poor lovers is denounced as the cause of all the evil. The lovers, unable to escape the fury of collective condemnation, are clubbed to death. The reciprocal altruism and the disinterested society that the cataclysm had spawned turns out to be ephemeral, unnatural, as if the ferocious end were a way to compensate for the uncanny sense of self that the people had experienced when acting in such a disinterested manner.

Jon Elster’s latest book (Le désintéressement, Paris, Seuil, 2009, 377 pp.), based on his Collège de France lectures in 2006-2007, discusses the very possibility of disinterested action. Is it possible for a human being to act in a truly disinterested manner? Do disinterested actions have a psychological unity or are they the mere product of circumstances? Is disinterestedness an individual or a collective phenomenon? From a strictly rational point of view, that of the kind of utilitarian economic rationality, to the critique of which Elster had devoted an important part of his work, disinterestedness looks irrational. It violates the rules of maximisation of utility. As if human action without the kind of rational and interested motivation that optimise the individual utility was bereft of justification, irrational or at least a-rational. Elster’s aim, in this first volume of a trilogy that will be dedicated to the critique of the classical theory of Homo Oeconomicus, is precisely to combine a critique of the motivational model of interest with a methodological individualistic approach, and not to go along with holistic explanation in terms of superstructure characteristic of other social science traditions such as Marxism and structuralism. Pierre Bourdieu for instance reduces the possibility of disinterested action to the social mechanics of distinction, assuming that it only occurs as a means of increasing one’s symbolic capital in an economy where not all exchanges are material. Elster, on the contrary, seeks individual motivations for disinterested acts, disinterested reasons to act that are moreover independent of the social superstructure.

There are two defining features of Homo Oeconomicus that disinterested actions may undermine: rationality and interested motivation. Elster's approach saves rationality at the expense of interested motivation. Actually, if classical economic theory insists on the univocity of interested motivation, it is first and foremost for reasons of simplicity and elegance. Leaving out interest, the theory gets lost in thousand directions since, writes Elster paraphrasing Tolstoy, "if all interested agents are interested in the same manner, disinterested agents are so each in its own way." Still, rational choice theory is so equipped that, while it could not do without the presupposition of rationality, it could do without interested motivation.

So Elster, equally familiar with French XVIIth century moralists and with current experimental research in behavioural economics, gives up on a univocal explanation and sketches a taxonomy of disinterested motivations that are, all the same, rational. Altruistic and disinterested action is typically suspected of, in fact, having other motivation: self-pride, desire for the approval of others, awareness of the benefits of a good reputation. To these essentially ‘allocentric' social motivations that could be reduced to a form of indirect egoism, Elster adds motivations that are not egoistic but that may be ‘egocentric', for instance, 1) disinterested consideration for others' welfare (altruism, egalitarianism, everyday Kantianism), and 2) internal approval of disinterestedness, that is, the desire we have to appear in our own eyes, rather than in the eyes of others, as motivated by disinterested consideration of the interest of others. For Elster, these motivations are independent of the mechanisms of social recognition and intrinsically disinterested.
A series of case studies complements conceptual analysis: the mechanisms of disinterest are being brought to light in behavioural economics experiments on cooperation and reciprocity and people are shown not to maximize their own utility in exchanges, in intergenerational donations, in reparation among countries, in decision processes in assemblies, and in the motivation of kamikaze terrorists, all cases that Elster had analysed in previous work.

The width of the array of phenomena analysed and of explanations is typical of Elster's style, who, to reductionist social sciences that aim at being "exact", opposes a model of vectorial explanation that proceeds by articulating a variety of causal mechanisms. There remains a doubt regarding the unity of the phenomenon: if so many forms of disinterestedness are possible, and so many different motivations may underlie it, are we still talking about one and the same thing? Is there then a unitary theory, a mechanism that explains in an integrated way this "ivresse du désintéressement," and that provides the phenomenology of this ecstatic freedom from our egoistic drives, that Kleist illustrated so clearly with a few strokes?

On the Epistemic Value of Reputation. The place of ratings and reputational tools in knowledge organization

Submission for the Eleventh International ISKO Conference 2010
Paradigms and conceptual systems in KO
February 23, 2010 – February 26, 2010

by Gloria Origgi and Judith Simon


Abstract: In this paper we want to explore the epistemological relevance and value of reputation understood as evaluative social information. Using reputation to classify and assess an agent or an item can be epistemologically useful in the absence or - as is especially relevant today - overabundance of information. However, in order to be and remain epistemically useful and ethically just it has to be open to constant scrutiny and revision. We will introduce a model of rational consensus as an example for the rational use of reputation for epistemic purpose before analyzing different reputational tools on the web. We will conclude our paper with a critical comment on the potential danger of using social information to evaluate information and knowledge claims, resp. to warn from epistemic injustices on the web and elsewhere.

1: Introduction

What is that scarlet piece of tissue in the shape of an A sewn on Hester Prynne's gown in Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterpiece The Scarlet Letter? Is it a symbol of her sin, a "badge of shame", an indelible sign of her community's contempt? Is it a cruel reminder of her past, a succinct history of her misdeeds? Imagine that in the same colonial New England village, you do not have just a badge for the poor Hester, but each member of the community wears a letter that represents some past records of its owner. We can also imagine sets of identical badges worn by members of the community who have similar records: sinners, heroes, drunkards....Imagine that the elders of the community have the right to attach these labels to the villagers. Their judgments, based on their purported wisdom, become an easy way for the villagers to dispose of a basic classification of social types within the community that will allow them to manage their relations with others, to make inferences and predictions about their behavior, that is, construct a basic "social map" that will help them orient in their society. Morally this may be questionable, but epistemologically it can be useful.
We want to explore in this paper, the epistemic value of this type of social information, that is, reputation, while being aware of the ethical and political problems that might come with using it for epistemic purpose. Using the judgment on past records to classify an agent or an item can be epistemologically useful in the absence or - as is especially relevant today - overabundance of information. But it has to be and remain open to constant scrutiny and revision to be epistemically useful and ethically just.

2: Reputation as Evaluative Social Information

Reputation is a special kind of social information: it is social information about the value of people, systems and processes that release information. We want to explore here the relationship between this special form of social information - that implies an evaluative stance - and the processes of knowledge organization and evaluation. More precisely, we want to argue not only that (1) we make use of other people's reputations to evaluate information, but also (2) within systems, like the Web, that make possible the easy and dynamic organization and re-organization of knowledge, our own rankings may determine new content and generate new categories.

Reputation is the informational track of our past actions, it is the credibility that an agent or an item earn through repeated interactions. We would like to defend an epistemological perspective according to which relying on reputational cues is an efficient way of shaping the too rich informational landscape around us by creating new relevant categories. Experts and authorities not only bloom where information is scanty, but also, and most crucially, in an information-dense world in which filtering out relevant information is our prominent cognitive activity. The epistemological enquiry we are advocating here implies that reputation and rating systems are an essential ingredient of collective processes of knowledge and play a cognitive role in extracting information. In an information-dense environment, where sources are in constant competition to get attention and the option of the direct verification of the information is often simply not available at reasonable costs, evaluation and rankings are epistemic tools and cognitive practices that provide an inevitable shortcut to information. We assume that there is no ideal knowledge that we can adjudicate without the access to previous evaluations and adjudications of others. No Robinson Crusoe’s minds that investigate and manipulate the world in a perfect solitude. Our modest epistemological prediction is that the higher is the uncertainty on the content of information, the stronger is the weight of the opinions of others in order to establish the quality of this content.
Of course, this opens the epistemological question of the epistemic value of these rankings and reputation mechanism, that it, to what extent their production and use by a community changes the ratio between truths and falsities produced by that community and, individually, how an awareness of rankings should affect a person’s beliefs. After all, rankings introduce a bias in judgment and the epistemic superiority of a biased judgment is in need of justification.

3: Rational Model for the Epistemic Use of Social Information

To illustrate how reputation understood as social information that comes with an evaluative stance can rationally be used for epistemic purpose, we introduce a formal model of rational consensus. In “Rational Consensus in Science and Society” Keith Lehrer and Carl Wagner develop their formal theory of consensus that rests upon the employment of consensual probabilities, utilities and weights and is meant to provide a model for rational decision making processes in science and society more generally ((Lehrer and Wagner 1981))). To our mind, this model is actually a model of how to quantify and use reputation for epistemic purpose.
Lehrer & Wagner argue that for decision making processes to be rational, it is central that all relevant information for the topic of concern has to be used ((Lehrer and Wagner 1981)). However, this spectrum of available information - for instance concerning disputes on scientific theories - is not limited to experimental information, but should also include the opinions of experts on other experts in the field. Lehrer calls this second type of information social information ((Lehrer 1990)) – and we call it reputation, i.e. social information that comes with an evaluative stance.
To illustrate how this social information might be used for epistemic purposes, Lehrer uses the so-called “expert dilemma” as a scenario. The expert dilemma describes the frequently encountered situation in which a decision has to be made despite the fact that evidence for answering a question is inconsistent and different experts recommend different options. An example would be whether or not to release a new medication or vaccine before all clinical trials are completed when facing the threat of an epidemic. The basic question of Lehrer & Wagner ((Lehrer and Wagner 1981)) is the following: If scientific dissent is prevailing, but suspension of judgment is not an option, how should the conflicting information be used to reach a consensual conclusion? “Consent on the reputation of the experts in order to decide on the issue” could be the motto of their approach. Social information is used here as a crucial factor to decide on content information.
Using reputation as a decisive factor for factual matter rests upon the assumption that each expert in a certain community might be more or less reliable or competent with respect to the specific question at stake. If that is the case, it would most rational to include each expert’s answer weighted by his competence regarding the issue. And the best way to assess the competence of each expert would be to use the aggregated reputation judgment of all other experts because they are most likely in the best position to judge the competence of their peers.
Lehrer & Wagner develop a quite complex mathematical model that describes an iterative and collective process to reach quantitative values for the reputation of each scientist ((Lehrer and Wagner 1981)). The basic idea however, is quite simple. The first step in this model consists in each expert giving a weight to all other experts summarizing all his information about the other’s expertise and reliability concerning the issue at stake, in other words: he gives a quantitative indicator of what he considers to be the reputation of the scientist with respect to topic at hand. In a second step, the average reputation values for each scientist are calculated with a specific algorithm and then laid open. Then in the second round, each expert has to reassess the reputation value he has given to all other members of the community, i.e. she has the chance to revise his or her judgment taking into account the average weights which the other members of the community have given to their fellows. Similarly to Delphi-studies in the social sciences, this process is then ideally repeated until finally a consensual weight for each member of a community is achieved ((Linestone and Turoff 2002)).
The idea is that, if you are less secure about the reputation of a certain researcher, you might tend more towards the group average in your second vote. If you are very sure about the reputation of someone, however, you will not let yourself be influenced by this average. If everyone acts this way, that is considered to be most rational, then the consensus that is finally achieved is considered to be the most rational consensus. Crucially, once these consensual weights are achieved, they can be applied to answering the question of concern by weighting each member’s vote on the issue with their consensual personal weight of reputation.
So, what should be obvious is that reputational cues, i.e. social information about other people that is evaluative, are being used – and that they are useful. Clearly, not all epistemic usage of reputation cues has to follow such a formal method. Quite on the contrary, ratings and other reputational tools might be used in a variety of different ways on the Web and our everyday life more generally. Nonetheless, Lehrer & Wagner’s model delivers a clear example of the potential that reputation understood as social information from an evaluative stance, can have for epistemic tasks ((Lehrer and Wagner 1981)).

4: Reputational Tools on the Web

What the Web makes possible today is an algorithmic treatment of methods of gathering social information to extract knowledge. Ratings and rankings on the Web are the result of collective human registered activities with artificial devices. However, the control of the heuristics and techniques that underlie this dynamics of information may be out of sight or incomprehensible for the users who find themselves in the very vulnerable position of relying on external sources of information through a dynamic, machine-based channel of communication whose heuristics and biases are not under their control. Thus, the reputational tools that are proliferating on the Web should be scrutinized by epistemically responsible users who do not want to accept too naïvely the outcome of a process they do not control.
The role of these reputational tools to filter information is getting more and more central in our Web-based epistemic practices ((Origgi 2009), (Origgi 2007)). And even more explicitly, we state that those systems that embody an access to others’ judgments and rankings are rapidly outperforming, in terms of reliability, the random aggregation of multiple judgments and preferences on which many systems were based, as it is shown by the growing impact of the Web 2.0 on our epistemic practices. A growing number of examples of architectures on the Web show how these rankings work to produce new arrangements of information.
The Web 2.0 has provided the underlying networking structure to share ranked preferences. If you take the Web of the early years of 2000, one of the main feature that attracted much attention and criticism was the possibility to "customize" information for each user in order to fit each one's special needs and purposes of navigation. The endless potential of re-organization of the new, dynamic, information architectures based on the aggregation of chunks of contents according to specific rules (in contrast with the rigid tree-structures of the first-generation of web pages) opened the opportunity to create and organize "content on demand". News websites, online stores, search-engines, etc thus started to provide "My-" features to the users, that is, easily arranged customized pages with targeted news and other information for the users, personalized lists of products, personalized recommendations etc. This gave rise to a series of positive expectations and negative warnings, such as the risk of neglecting other people's points of views and perspectives by concentrating only on personally relevant information (cf. (Sunstein 2002)). Now, thanks to the social Web, these systems are evolving into systems of shared preferences, in which people can rely on someone else's preferences and ranking to construct their own categorization of information. Examples of this preferences-sharing are website such as Del.icio.us in which you can share your bookmarks with other people, or Flickr, in which, for each uploaded photo, not only you can see who uploaded it, but also who are the profiles that added it among their favorite pictures. Combining information about who comments on an image, who adds it as favorite, who tags it and how, Flickr now provides a new feature for browsing images: interestingness, http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/ which is an example of preference-based tools of categorization. As a Flickr user, I can decide to generate new categories of contents on the basis of an interestingness scale. A new category of the most interesting images on Flickr today is thus generated by sorting others' preferences. The success of this "fluid" way of constructing concepts and categories may depend also on the fact that it matches our cognitive capacities: it has been shown by cognitive psychologists (cf. (Barsalou 1995)) that concepts and mental categories are flexibly constructed in context.
In this perspective, the EC project LiquidPublication, (http://project.liquidpub.org/) in which both authors are involved, aims at developing "liquid" architectures for producing, accessing and gathering scholarly information on the Web. Take for example the very concept of an academic journal: it is a selection of content based on a series of criteria of categorization: ISBN number, date of issue, etc. What we are working at in this project is a model of "Liquid Journal" which easily allows people to create selections of papers, articles, blog entries as a "My-journal" and then share them on the Web. One can imagine that, with the diffusion of such a model, the very category of "academic journal", or "journal issue" will be re-created by this particular form of information sharing, in which a user X can "conceptualize" a journal issue as for example: "all the content that the user Y is selecting in her journal". Here again, preferences of a user can be used by other people to re-organize information in a creative way. Virological examples of information diffusion based on a Twitter-logic of followers and leaders may be another example worth mentioning of reputational tools that create new categories of information.
Although the information-dense environment provided by the Web is the obvious locus in which examples bloom, we do not think that our analysis should be restricted to the case of the Web: in many other domains where information about the items at stake is very costly or difficult to obtain, reputational cues become an unavoidable way of organizing knowledge. Different cultural domains such as wine labeling systems and academic citation systems are based on rating devices that classify the underlying information by evaluating it (see (Origgi 2007), (Origgi 2009)).
5: Epistemic Injustices: On the Dangers of Using Social Information for Epistemic Purposes
The model of rational consensus as well as the Web applications that we have introduced are clearly examples of how reputation can be used to decide on content information, resp. on how social and content information might be productively merged to achieve better epistemic results. However, where there is use, there also is potential misuse. And in the case of reputational cues, these dangers might be inherent in the very concept of reputation as the “recognition by other people of some characteristic or ability” ((Merriam-Webster-Online-Dictionary 2009)).
More precisely there are two threats. First of all, the use of reputation to assess content can be epistemically beneficial while being morally questionable. This problem already becomes obvious in the first example we chose to open this article: Hawthorne’s A-shaped scarlet piece of tissue. Although classifying someone as a sinner, hero or drunkard – or as an expert, layperson or lobbyist - based on some cues might prove epistemically useful in certain situations, we would have to decide whether we are willing to pay the moral price of possible discrimination that comes with such stereotypical evaluation. More generally, once social information is taken into account to rate the quality of content, the door is open for social biases, prejudices and discrimination, which are as prevalent on the Web as in the societies that have developed and maintained it. These problems are not new and have long been identified for science and other epistemic fields by feminist epistemologists. In addition to raising awareness about these problems, various scholars have also developed tools and strategies to counter these epistemic injustices ((Fricker 2007), (Scheman 2001), (Alcoff 2001)). Miranda Fricker for instance distinguishes between testimonial and hermeneutic injustices as two instances in which someone is wronged in his capacity as a knower based on his social position. According to her “testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word, whereas hermeneutic injustice “[...] occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretative resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experience” ((Fricker 2007) 1). Clearly, both forms of injustice are easily conceivable when reputational cues and their epistemic usage are not critically reflected upon and kept open for constant scrutiny and revision.
The second problem concerns the limits of the epistemic usefulness of this type of information itself. The first question is how you calculate the reputation of someone else in the first place, resp. which proxies you use. Do you use the person’s academic development, his institutional background, some form of communal evaluation, such as ratings or recommendations that he has received from other people as a cue to assess someone’s reputation? Do you rely on your own experience with her? On some indicator of the quality of his former research? On her track record of different academic achievements? Her H-index or impact factor? Which of these proxies are valid and which are not? The second crucial questions concerns the stability of reputation, resp. the way you deal with evidence that supports or contradicts your view on the reputation of others. When, under which conditions and up to which point of counter-evidence or you warranted in keeping your reputation value for someone or something? Clearly, these issues as crucial as they are cannot be answered given the brevity of this paper. However, if we want to explore the utility of reputation for epistemic purposes, we have to analyze the potentials and possible dangers very carefully. That reputation is used to assess information and epistemic claims goes without saying – and it comes with benefits as much as with problems. So the question should be less how to avoid using reputation as epistemic tools, but rather how to use them wisely.
6: Conclusion
Our preliminary analyses indicate that ratings and reputational tools in knowledge organization have epistemological, cognitive, practical as well as ethical implications. From an epistemological point of view, a priority of rating tools and reputational scales over classification leads to a re-conceptualization of the “facts/values” dichotomy. Another epistemologically pressing question concerns the validity of reputation mechanism as epistemological tools. How epistemically warranted is the use of these tools? Is it just based on blind and imperfect heuristics that have a serendipitous effect on our search of information, or is it possible to conceive second order epistemic criteria that allow us to pry apart “good” and “bad” practices of trust and reliance on these reputational metrics?
For cognition, this implies to take into account a pragmatically oriented way of creating concepts and categories (i.e. the most “valued”, items preferred by “x”), as it has already been argued in some works in cognitive psychology (cf. (Barsalou 1995)). From a practical point of view, this perspective may help to rethink the bottom up/top down distinction in designing categories by suggesting ways in which rating systems can serve as middle-ground categorizations that are neither imposed from above, not completely generated from spontaneous tagging. Rather they are user-driven meta-categorizations that inform the users.
The ethical and political aspects become obvious when taking feminist critique concerning the danger of epistemic injustices into account. Miranda Fricker’s emphasis of the danger of testimonial and hermeneutic injustices are particularly pressing when reputational cues are used uncritically. It is especially when reputation mechanisms become automatized in algorithms, there is a clear danger that epistemic injustices are inscribed in and reinforced by technology. Such an entanglement between ethics and epistemology in information design has been shown for trust-aware recommender systems((Simon 2008; Simon 2009)). Different trust metrics not only yield to different search results, but that they also correspond to different views concerning the organization as well as even more fundamentally the very concept of knowledge. Moreover, different trust metrics value different people differently and depending on the algorithm, some users are automatically silenced and “sorted out” ((Bowker and Star 1999)), while others “count”. Thus, when developing reputational tools, the possibility of injustices has to be accounted for.
This example suggest that a purely epistemological or cognitive analysis of using reputation for epistemic purposes will not suffice for knowledge organization: the goals and standards for knowledge organization and epistemic practices have to be discussed and decided upon taking political and ethical considerations into account. Reputational tools open up new possibilities for knowledge organization, but they also bring with them their own problems. Raising awareness for the values as well as the dangers of using reputational cues for epistemic assessment will be the major goal of our talk.

References

Alcoff, L. M. (2001). On Judging Epistemic Credibility: Is Social Identity Relevant? Engendering Rationalities. N. Tuana and S. Morgen. Albany, SUNY Press: 53-80.
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Bowker, G. C. and S. L. Star (1999). Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MIT Press.
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice. Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
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Robinson 2009 - Perché è davvero difficile scomparire

Tutti i diritti riservati. Scritto per il supplemento Robinson 2009 - Il Sole 24 Ore


Fuggire, godersi la calma del non essere per qualche tempo, come fare, cosa c’è di veramente difficile nel lasciarsi dimenticare ? Chiedete a qualsiasi pensionato, a qualsiasi puerpera incarcerata in casa dal lattante, a qualsiasi malato costretto al letto per mesi, di come in realtà sia facile cadere nell’oblio, essere piano piano dimenticati non solo dagli altri esseri umani, ma anche dalle macchine.

Mi riconnetto dopo mesi sul mio blog e scopro che la procedura di connessione è cambiata. Vado sul sito della banca, e, a causa della mia lunga assenza, la password non è più valida : devo chiederne un’altra per lettera e aspettare la risposta cartacea. Apro la posta elettronica e scopro che l’operatore del mio cellulare è stato acquisito da un altro. Ora devo cambiare i codici, altrimenti il mio abbonamento non varrà più. Esausta, cerco di connettermi al mio sito preferito di social networking per riprendere i contatti con gli amici. Ma il sito non c’è più : si è trasformato in un servizio di vendita online, i miei contatti sono stati inglobati nel database insieme agli altri, anonima lista a cui inviare promozioni…

Insomma, la nostra presenza forzata al mondo è caduca : le nostre tracce virtuali incerte, abbozzate ed eliminabili molto più facilmente di quanto crediamo. Se non ci pensiamo noi a farlo, ci pensa comunque la mano invisibile del ciberspazio e le spietate leggi del mercato.

Cosa c’è di così complicato allora nello scomparire ? In un romanzo di Pascal Quignard, Villa Amalia, da cui il regista Benoît Jacquot ha tratto l’anno scorso un bel film omonimo con Isabelle Huppert e Maya Sansa, la protagonista, Ann Hidden, decide di far perdere le sue tracce. Pianista e compositrice di successo, con una vita apparentemente riuscita a Parigi, Ann organizza con molta determinazione la sua fuga: mette rapidamente in vendita la sua casa, annulla i concerti, chiude i conti in banca, apre una casella postale a nome di un vecchio amico di scuola, ritrovato per caso proprio la sera della sua risoluzione a scomparire. Parte in treno, getta via il telefonino, studia un percorso tortuoso, attraverso diversi paesi d’Europa. Sbarca così a Ischia, dopo molto girovagare, già assuefatta a quella nuova vita, al silenzio opaco di quel mondo estraneo che non la riconosce più, affitta una casa isolata, con una meravigliosa vista sul mare, ricomincia pian piano ad essere, a tessere una tela intorno a sé nuova, diversa, ma anche più umana e sincera, come se quella rottura di sé, quel desiderio di fuga repentino e inspiegabile, sia stato un modo di riscoprirsi, di scendere a patti infine con un’autenticità di sé stessa che nella sua vita parigina ormai regolata dalle aspettative degli altri le era irraggiungibile. Ann Hidden, nascondendosi si ritrova e si apre a sé stessa. Il suo coraggio, il coraggio di qualsiasi Robinson, è trovare la forza di rompere lo specchio in cui gli altri ci riflettono, disattendere le aspettative routinarie, le lente e rassicuranti induzioni che il mondo intorno a noi ci getta addosso sottoforma di richieste di fiducia.

Tradire la fiducia di essere domani la stessa persona di oggi agli occhi degli altri è il vero passo difficile per ogni Robinson, come lo fu per quel signor Stevenson, fatto di sogni, che dalla sua fredda Scozia ritrovò il tesoro di sé stesso a Samoa.

Tréma, dieresi.. .. .. ..

.. .. .. .. .. ..

Petite histoire du tréma, à usage exclusif de mon fils Raphaël

Piccola storia della dieresi, a uso esclusivo di mio figlio Raphaël

A short story of the tréma, for Raphaël

Cos’è quel cosino sospeso sopra la e del tuo nome, Raphaël ? Come fa a restare lì a mezz’aria, come un moschino, una farfalla che gironzola inquieta attorno al pistillo di un fiore ? Oppure è il tuo nome che è sospeso a quel cosino ? O non possono fare a meno uno dell’altro, come quegli animali simbiotici che vivono appresso uno all’altro per farsi del bene reciproco.. Sai che nelle barriere coralline ci sono gamberetti piccolissimi che puliscono e lucidano i pesci che passano? Mangiano quel che trovano sulle squame dei pesci, e quelli tutti contenti attraversano i coralli e si ritrovano dall’altra parte della barriera belli e lucenti, come nuovi. O mi hanno detto di certi uccellini coraggiosi che si posano su lunghissimi coccodrilli, per pulire i loro denti affilati : si mangiano i resti del pasto del coccodrillo, e quel bestione si ritrova contento, pacificato e con i denti luccicanti. Quei due puntini sulla tua ë fanno un po’ così : si fanno dare un passaggio dal tuo nome e in cambio lo fanno vibrare, tremare come un sonaglio, gli dànno un suono differente. Quel cosino è una dieresi, si dice tréma in francese, è un piccolo segno, un segno diacritico direbbero i maestri, il che vuol dire un qualcosa che non è nelle parole, ma come uno spiritello dell’aria permette di dare alle parole delle piccole scosse, di separarne le lettere, insomma un folletto alato che si intrufola tra le lettere e detta un suono speciale al tuo nome. Quei due occhietti furbi che fanno capolino sopra la tua ë scostano la a del tuo nome dalla e, dividono quelle due vocali per impedire loro di fondersi in un dittongo. Bisogna quindi dire ra-pha-ël, tre sillabe differenti, la a e la e ben distinte, tenute separate dalla dieresi che agisce come una calamita al contrario, che stacca invece di attaccare. La dieresi in italiano si usa pochissimo. In francese invece, ci sono tante parole con il tréma sospeso sopra, canoë, foëne, maërl, moëre, Azraël, Gaël, Ismaël, Israël, Joël, Judicaël, Michaël, Nathanaël, Noël, Raphaël, Staël, aïeul, ambiguïté, amuïssement, stoïle, naïf, païen, pagaïe, baïonnette, coïncider, stoïque, archaïque, haïr, ouïe, ouïr, astéroïde, maïs, voltaïque, laïc, Loïc…


E’ nel Medioevo, verso il XII secolo, che gli instancabili monaci anglo-normanni cominciarono a usare il tréma sulle parole, prima nella forma di due piccoli accenti acuti, poi stilizzati in due puntini. Le parole, così scosse, come quando scuoti un albero carico di frutta, diventano musica, traballano e prendono ritmo, proprio come in quei primi manoscritti musicali nello stesso periodo, in cui le note sono solo accenti, virgole, svolazzi, segni che servono solo a guidare il suono, non a fissarlo.

Mi raccomando : non confondere la tua dieresi con un altro segno, la umlaut, che si scrive uguale, ma che ha degli altri poteri sulle parole : la umlaut serve per cambiare il modo in cui una vocale viene pronunciata, non per separare un dittongo : allora ü sarà diverso da u, la prima modificata dalla umlaut sarà più acuta, chiusa, acida, come certe u del dialetto di Milano. Ma la storia della umlaut è tutta un’altra : non lasciare mai nessuno dire che sul tuo nome c’è una umlaut !! E’ una dieresi, un tréma e basta !!


Quel tréma sul tuo nome, che ti accompagnerà tutta la vita, ti dice che la lingua è viva, che i nomi servono per parlare, non per fissare con il piombo eterne identità, che quel che è scritto è solo un manuale d’istruzioni per l’uso di ciò che è detto, che i nomi sono solo suoni che svolazzano liberi nell’aria, senza peso, leggeri e delicati come piume, come i richiami degli animali, gli strilli degli uccelli la mattina sugli alberi, i miagolii vellutati dei micini che cercano la mamma. Come i tuoi strilli aerei e rochi che mi svegliano la notte, che mi fanno alzare dal letto e venire a prenderti tra le mie braccia.

Raphaël

Mon fils Raphaël Ottavio Colonomos est né le 16 Août 2009. Evviva.

Obama's mama

Do not quote without permission This is the English version of an article appeared in Italian on Micromega and in French on La vie des idées

Translated into English by Stash Luczkiw

The American presidential election was won by a woman: Stanley Ann Dunham. Born in 1942, she died of cancer in 1995, shortly after turning 52, and thus without having seen her visionary dream realized: the election of her son, Barack Hussein Obama, as 44th President of the United States. The male name was imposed on her by Stanley Dunham, her father, who would have preferred a boy. As the only child of Stanley and his wife Madelyn Payne, Stanley Ann was nonconformist young girl and a solitary mother, convinced that she could raise her children in a way that would prepare them for a new world, globalized and multicultural, a world that certainly didn’t exist in her daily life as a middle-class girl in an anonymous little town in Kansas. Barack – or Barry, as she called him – is her creation, the fruit of a patient, attentive and loving education that was the commitment of her life, as she saw in her two racially mixed children the reflection of a better future, one in which the warm commingling of blood pacifies the false oppositions and odious attachments, the “unreal loyalties,” as Virginia Woolf called them, that reassure us in the desperate need for social identity to which our species falls prey.

When Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961, he was still considered in half the American states the criminal product of miscegenation, or the interbreeding of races, a heinous biological hybrid whose existence simply wasn’t taken into consideration while those who committed it were punished with incarceration. Today it is a hard-to-pronounce word that was coined in the United States in 1863, with a specious Latin etymology, from miscere (mix) and genus (race), to indicate the supposed genetic difference between whites and blacks. The question of miscegenation became crucial during the Civil War and subsequent emancipation of the slaves. It was fine to grant civil rights to non-whites, but to allow intimate relations between whites and blacks was another story. The term appeared for the first time in the title of a pamphlet published in New York, Miscegenation: The Theory of Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, in which the anonymous author promoted the idea of racial mixing as the project of the Republican Party, which supported the abolition of slavery. By encouraging the interbreeding of whites and blacks, racial differences would be progressively attenuated until they disappeared altogether. It was soon discovered that the pamphlet had been created by the Democrats in order to frighten American citizens faced with the intolerable Republican project of encouraging racial mixing. The crime of miscegenation was definitively abolished in 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the anti-miscegenation laws to be unconstitutional in response to Loving vs. Virginia, a case in which a racially mixed married couple was sentenced to a year in prison – with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia – for having been found in bed together under the same roof. The marriage certificate hanging above the nuptial bed wasn’t considered valid by the police – who, armed with rifles, broke down the entry door and beat the humiliated couple – because it was obtained in another county, one in which miscegenation wasn’t illegal. This occurred in 1959, and the couple had to wait eight years for the moral indecency of their ordeal and their own innocence to be recognized.

One must try to imagine that America in order to understand the courage of Stanley Ann, who was 18 years old and 4 months pregnant when she married the brilliant young Kenyan student Barack Obama Sr., the first African to be admitted to the University of Hawaii. He was 25. He’d arrived in Hawaii in 1959 thanks to a scholarship from the Kenyan government, which was also sponsored by the United States to help some of the more gifted African students get an education at an American University so they could return to their native country and become part of a new, competent, modern elite.

Stanley Ann was a shy, studious girl with dreams. She was born in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where her father served in the military. Her parents, both Kansans, met in Wichita, the state’s largest city, in 1940. His mother came from a respectable family, folks who never lost their jobs, not even during the Great Depression, and lived decently thanks to a concession on their land given to an oil company. The father came from a more problematic and economically modest family. Raised by his grandparents, he had become a particularly rebellious and impetuous adolescent because of his mother’s suicide. The tough character stayed with him forever. He was strict and sarcastic with Stanley Ann, who detached from him early on and began displaying intolerance with regard to his severe, overly rough manners, his excessive intellectual simplicity, and his sometimes obtuse, sexist way of relating with the family. Stanley Ann’s childhood was full of moves: from Kansas her parents went to California, then back to Kansas, then to various places in Texas, then to Seattle, where she spent her adolescent years, and finally to Honolulu, where they decided to stay. Her father had gotten into businesses of various kinds, alternating successes and failures, to finally sell furniture in Hawaii. Her mother always worked in banking, and in Honolulu she became a branch manager. The couple didn’t have much interest in religion, even if the father tried to enroll his wife Toot, as he called her, into the Unitarian Universalist congregation, a religious group that mixed the scriptures of five different religions, arguing from an economic standpoint: “It’s like having five religions for the price of one!” But his wife was not persuaded, saying that religion was not like a supermarket. The numerous moves had turned Stanley Ann’s parents into typical “ordinary outsiders,” normal people who move for financial reasons; they feel profoundly American in their values, while not feeling rooted to any particular place. They were nevertheless a tolerant couple; the father considered himself a bohemian because he listened to jazz, wrote poetry on Sundays, and wasn’t afraid to count a few Jews among his dearest friends. The racial question never came up in their lives. The lives of blacks and whites in the cities they encountered in their peregrinations were so segregated that for them, as for most Americans of that generation, it was a non-existent problem.



Stanley Ann grew up solitary, spending entire afternoons reading books borrowed from the neighborhood library. She loved foreign languages and European novels.
At 12 she had her first traumatic experience of social intolerance. Having arrived in a small town in Texas, she became friends with a black girl who lived next door. Stanley Ann’s parents didn’t object, but her schoolmates began making fun of her. The derision increased until she was marginalized. Toot, Obama’s grandmother, remembered the time when she had found the two girls lying in the yard, staring at the sky, while the neighborhood kids stood behind the fence calling them all sorts of names, insulting them. They called Stanley Ann a “nigger lover,” insinuating that their friendship had sexual overtones – the only reason to be attracted to someone different, as if contact with a black person could only represent some sexual fantasy, a wild alterity and a repressed desire latent in America’s 1950s WASP Puritanism.

Her parents didn’t like the conformist, intolerant and violent atmosphere of Texas either, and they decided to move to Seattle, the new economic frontier of America’s Far West. The city was more open and welcoming, and Stanley Ann went to high school there. Marine Box, her best friend at the time, remembers her as the brightest student, not so much for her grades, but for her ability to think on her own and not buckle under the clichés and conformism of her country. Once, she declared herself to be an atheist, for example, scandalizing her classmates.

When her parents moved to Hawaii, Stanley Ann registered at the University of Hawaii Manoa. Notwithstanding her father’s severity, her relationship with Barack Obama Sr. wasn’t hindered by her parents. They invited him to dinner immediately, thinking that the young man must have been lonely living so far from home. Obviously there were many gaffes – not surprising since they’d had such little interaction with black people. For example, her father asked him right away if he could sing or dance, and her mother said he looked so much like Harry Belafonte. But Barrack Sr. didn’t allow himself to be intimidated. In fact, one night at a party he sang in front of everyone, despite not having a great voice; but his self-assuredness and charisma were noticed by all. He was a man proud of his African origins, the son of a chief, who had never been subjected to the humiliations black Americans had had to deal with; he didn’t feel the weight of the color of his skin in that violent, segregated America – though still naïve with regard to racial questions, an America which hadn’t yet confronted the Black Panthers and other revolutionary movements that helped build the African-American identity.

Shortly after the birth of Obama Hussein, his father was accepted into the best American universities and chose to study at Harvard. Stanley Ann didn’t want to follow him to Massachusetts; she was happy with her baby, fully satisfied, but she couldn’t see herself as the wife of a Kenyan politician. She knew that her husband’s fate was sealed, that he would return to Kenya because his success in the United States would be an example for the entire nation, which was why he was sent to study in America. They decided to separate amicably. Barack Sr. came from a polygamous culture, so she knew that his life as a husband and father would not end with her. Stanley Ann was self-confident and happy enough with her mulatto baby that she returned to Honolulu without any complexes in order to continue her studies. She managed to get a degree Mathematics and a Master in Anthropology. That same year she met another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro, a small, dark and kind Indonesian young man, and he began coming over to Dunham’s house. Toot, Stanley Ann’s mother, would play chess with him every evening and kid him about his name, Lolo, which meant “crazy” in Hawaiian. But there was nothing crazy about this young man; he was extremely courteous, affectionate with little Barry, and decidedly in love with the young, extravagant and adventurous woman. He asked her to marry him and to move to Jakarta with him. Stanley Ann accepted and went with her son to Indonesia at the end of 1967, during the years of Suharto’s unstoppable climb to power and the attendant purges and decline of Sukarno, the old president and founder of the state. Stanley Ann found work at the American Embassy, where she often brought her child with her; he would spend his days in the library reading Life magazine. She talked to him about politics, geography, and international relations. Lolo told Barry the stories of Indonesian mythology, about the great Hanuman, the invincible monkey-god demon-slaying warrior. The Sukarno government’s atheistic communism would soon be supplanted by a new religious wave under Suharto. At school, Islam was studied, since Indonesia was (and still is) the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Barry was exposed to all these influences and all these cultures. He had no problems with regard to racial belonging. He had no race. Rather, he was a citizen of the world, curious like his mother, interested in differences, self-confident and completely at ease in the ordinary everyday life of the multiethnic clan that was his family. His sister Maya Kassandra Soetoro was born in 1970. He went to school, but the alarm clock rang at three in the morning, when his mother would enter the room to the music of Mahalia Jackson, or read him the biography of Malcolm X, or make him listen to the Reverend Martin Luther King. She was forcibly inculcating him with a sense of belonging to the African-American culture gaining traction in the United States, taking a political shape, with a common identity and language. Barry had to know how to be everything: American, black, white, cosmopolitan – because this was his future, the recklessly audacious and visionary dream of his mother. When her marriage to Lolo began to waver, Barry was sent back to his grandparents in Hawaii. It was she who left Lolo because he wanted to have more children. Soon Stanley Ann and Maya would return to Honolulu, and the family was put back together, minus any husband, with two children and the Dunham grandparents. Stanley Ann’s parents dedicated themselves with love to Barry, but contrary to what could be read in the newspapers, they weren’t the ones to educate him; his mother looked after his education. And as soon as she got back to Hawaii, she continued her own studies in order to work on a doctorate that she would complete in 1992, at the age of 50. Her field of research was rural Indonesian society, which gave her the opportunity to return often to Indonesia so that Maya could see her father, with whom she still had a friendly relationship. In 1977 she decided to go on a longer trip for research, but she only took Maya with her because Barry preferred to finish up high school in the United States.

Meanwhile, Stanley Ann’s career developed in a new direction. She began to deal with rural development and microcredit projects aimed at Indonesian woman for various agencies and international banks. Her life, her experience as a woman and mother of two children became the ground for her intellectual growth; they allowed her to understand things she would otherwise not have been able to see about social and cultural differences, about the condition of women and ethnic minorities. Her field of experimentation was her own life; she was at once an observer and protagonist in the world that was transforming and globalizing. But her enthusiasm and career would be cut short by ovarian cancer, which eventually killed her in 1995; she was 53.

One must ask how much of this independent, authoritative and courageous woman there was in the Obamamania that gripped the whole world during the American elections. What is new is not just his dark skin, but also his profound ability to understand and reconcile oppositions in a way that only a man who has accepted the example and authority of a woman could. Obama is of a new generation because he’s the son of an intellectually authoritative woman, because he was able to have a woman as an example instead of a father, because he was steeped in the feminine values of tolerance and communion. Obama is the product of this woman, and that’s his greatest success. Of course, during the electoral campaign it was better to keep the memory of Stanley Ann far from the spotlight and tell the story of this black boy raised by his Kansan grandparents. But now that Obama is president, there will finally be the opportunity to honor the creator of this perfect son, the woman who brought him up and molded him into the icon of a world to come, a world she won’t see.