Epistemic Injustice and Epistemic Trust - Social Epistemology - Volume 26, Issue 2

Taylor & Francis Online :: Epistemic Injustice and Epistemic Trust - Social Epistemology - Volume 26, Issue 2

Abstract: Miranda Fricker has introduced the insightful notion of epistemic injustice in the philosophical debate, thus bridging concerns of social epistemology with questions that arise in the area of social and cultural studies. I concentrate my analysis of her treatment of testimonial injustice. According to Fricker, the central cases of testimonial injustice are cases of identity injustice in which hearers rely on stereotypes to assess the credibility of their interlocutors. I try here to broaden the analysis of that testimonial injustice by indicating other mechanisms that bias our credibility assessments. In my perspective, the use of identity stereotypes is just one case among many biases in our credibility judgments.

The prestige of ideas. Styles of thought and reputational dynamics

 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 Do not quote without permission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.

The Social Epistemology of Reputation

Draft. Do not quote without permission. Submitted to the journal: Social Epistemology

Abstract We monitor the informational environment and catch reputational cues, gather signals from our informants and develop our trustful attitudes in context. I present here the project of an epistemology of reputation as a way of using social configurations to acquire information. I review the definitions of reputation that exist in social sciences, stress the importance of the relational/social dimension of reputation as a property of entities and put forward a definition of reputation suitable for epistemology. I then sketch some social configurations that allow us to extract reputational information and some typical heuristics we use to navigate the social information around us.

In the first episode of The Newsroom, a new television series released by HBO on June 2012 set behind the scenes of the fictional news channel ACN, Jim Harper is a young producer who is striving to establish his credibility in the eyes of the narcissistic and charismatic Will McAvoy, anchor man and managing editor of the News Night show. He manages to find two key witnesses about a potentially disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but doesn’t want to reveal his sources. McAvoy insists, saying that he is too young and not credible enough yet to avoid unveiling his sources. Jim hesitates. He has been brought to ACN by his boss, McKenzie McCale, executive producer of the News Night show and Will’ ex-girlfriend, who still has a strong influence on Will. Then he says: “You don’t need to trust me. She trusts me and you trust her, that’s enough”. That is, when reality is vague, when checking the facts is difficult, the ultimate objective information you may give about your trustworthiness is your reputation, that is, the information about the social ties that flow towards you and say who you are and what you know. This article is about the role of reputation in knowledge matters, that is, how the social information around us, that defines our role in a hierarchical network of people, things and ideas, can be used to validate or invalidate what we come to know. My choice of this topic for the 25th anniversary of this journal has a double motivation: one that is anchored in the past and the other that is projected in the future. Anniversaries are occasions to think about past achievements and visions of the future. In 25 years, social epistemology has become a mainstream approach to understand how knowledge is produced, disseminated and validated. Nobody would dare to deny today, not even the most traditional epistemologists, that the way in which social factors influence knowledge processes is not an accessory inquiry that complements a more central epistemological concern about how people come to know, but it is an essential aspect of our cognitive appraisal of the world. Without considering the multiple social, cultural and historical dimensions in which our theories of the world are embedded, we simply fail to grasp the reality we want to describe. In my own work during the past ten years, I have explored the role of two special social “forces” in shaping our knowledge: trust and reputation. Our social ties - the way in which we trust each other and manage credibility - are essential ingredients of the way in which we come out believing that the world is as it is. Thus, in my research, social epistemology has been a major intellectual tool in understanding how and what we come to know. Yet, while trust as an epistemological notion [Origgi, 2004, Fricker, 2007, Faulkner, 2011] has become a mainstream concept for social epistemologists, reputation, that is, the role of social networks and rating systems in understanding knowledge processes, is still a very marginal notion in social epistemology and in philosophy in general. That is why, for this anniversary, I would like to project social epistemology in the future and open the discussion around a theme that, in my opinion, will become crucial in this area of inquiry in the following years. In a sense, my interest in reputation is a symptom of the air du temps: As information grows, our distance from reality seems to grow proportionally. Our judgements, evaluations, decisions are the more and more embedded in networked systems, such as the Web but not only, that provide us with ratings, “likes”, recommendations, as if information to be accessible should be “pre-evaluated” by various social networks and rating systems. These devices proliferate in an information-dense society in order to reduce the cognitive deficit caused by a too wide offer of information . Yet, while the explanation of the role of these reputational devices has been object of study in sociological economics [Karpik, 2007, Podolny, 2005] and market theory [Akelrof, 1972], very little has been said so far about their epistemological role in the production and acquisition of information. We are facing a major informational revolution in which the assemblage of information is social and in great part automatic and based on statistical matching algorithms about social behaviour whose functioning is opaque. The fact that Facebook suggests us friends on the basis of our profile information, or that the New York Times suggests us further readings on the basis of the content of the article we are reading are examples of this automatic and yet social filtering of information. We base our judgements on these filters and on the new categories that are generated by the networks of information. The epistemological means available to understand what happens with the organization of knowledge and its classification in such new environments are still quite limited. So, take this essay as a first step towards an epistemology of the present that takes the question of the use and misuse of reputational and rating devices seriously. In the following, I will try to sketch a definition of reputation suitable for my epistemological purposes. I will present then some theoretical background about the notion and try to situate the concept in the literature that is spread around many disciplines: economics, sociology, but also signalling theory, theory of strategic interaction, marketing studies, etc. I will then present a sort of “phenomenology” or reputation by describing some examples of social configurations that are familiar ways to use reputation for extracting information from the world. I will conclude with some remarks about the possibility of a normative stance towards the use of reputation as an epistemic device.

1. What is a reputation?

Reputation, from the verb puto in latin, meaning “counting, considering” plus the suffix re- that indicates the repetition, is the consideration of the value of an agent by other agents based on his or her past actions and creating expectations on the future conduct of that agent. Reputation is a special kind of social information: it is social information about the value of people, systems and processes that release information. Every social interaction brings forth an evaluative dimension of reciprocal judgment, a perception of who we are that we leave in the eyes of others. Every social interaction brings forth also a mastery of this presentation of ourselves, a consciousness of the image of ourselves we want to leave track of through our behaviour. As Hume says, we learn about our conduct as we learn about our bad breath: the reactions of others act as a mirror in which we discover features of ourselves we were not aware of. The evaluative dimension of our social life, the generation of opinions on each other’s actions is reputation. Reputation is commonly seen as the informational trace of our past actions: it is the credibility that an agent or an item earns through repeated interactions. Reputation is a relational property: it is the informational value of our interactions. If interactions are repeated, reputation may conventionalize in “seals of approval” or disapproval or social stigmas [Origgi 2007]. The notion of reputation has surprisingly attracted little attention in philosophy. Much of the literature that revolves around this central feature of our social and cognitive life can be found in economics, social psychology, evolutionary anthropology and theory of strategic interaction. In the following, I will present a review of definitions and uses of reputation in the various social sciences that have approached the notion, criticize them and propose my own definition that I consider more suitable for my epistemological purpose.

1.2. Reputation as an expectation and as a signal

 The notion of reputation in social sciences has been mainly treated in economics. In Adam Smith’s liberal social theory, reputation is seen as a way of coordinating activities in a decentralized social space of transactions. According to Smith, in a free society, markets coordinate diffused knowledge in an asymmetrical way: people have a partial view of what other people know and how they will act. Also, given that most transactions occur over a lapse of time, parties have to trust each other that they will satisfy their reciprocal interest. These informational and temporal asymmetries call for efficient means of storing and retrieving information about possible partners in interactions. Reputation is more than pure information: it is evaluated information, that is, a shortcut of the many judgements and interpretations that people have cumulated about an actor. That is why people are interested in keeping a “good” reputation by signalling to potential business partners their trustworthiness. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith famously states: The success of most people almost always depends upon the favour and the good opinion of their neighbours and equals; and without a tolerably regular conduct these can very seldom be obtained. The good old proverb, therefore, that honesty is the best policy, holds, in such situations, almost perfectly true. (TMS, 63) That is, according to Smith having a good reputation pays in the markets. If you are a reliable player, your business will thrive because your potential clients will form positive expectations about your actions in the future based on your records. Reputation is thus, in this tradition, a cognitive notion: it is the expectation about your future actions that agents form given your past behaviour. Your past records are a signal of your future intentions, a signal on which people can rely if they decide to interact with you. In market theory, reputation is seen as a signal or a set of signals. The Nobel Prize economist George A. Akelrof [1970] has shown that quality uncertainty is such a risky feature of markets, that reputation is needed: “Seals of reputation” in a market are labels, certifications, guides, that is, all the devices that tend to reduce the informational asymmetries between buyers and sellers. A rational agent, according to Akelrof, has an interest in embodying these devices in order to compensate the cognitive deficit of the informational asymmetry. Reputation as a signal is studied within a broader body of work that goes under the name of Signalling Theory [Gambetta 2009]. Signalling Theory aims at solving a fundamental communication problem: Given an interaction in which interests diverge between the two parties, how can a party be certain of the qualities of the other party? Honest signallers will try to signal their good qualities (trustworthiness, accountability, strength), but dishonest signallers will try to do the same, by mimicking high-quality signals. One may try to “make up” a reputation and by signalling past actions that never took place. For example, one may signal his or her wealth by inviting you in a luxury apartment that in fact has been borrowed by a friend. Thus robust signals, that is, signals that are difficult to fake (like having an accent, or having a physical sign of strength) are considered as the most reliable [Zahavi, 1981]. In this tradition, reputation is thus a strategic feature of interactions: it is the set of beliefs/expectations crystallized by the past interactions or elicited by a present interaction, a way for the perceiver to ground his or her trust in the perceived and a way of the perceived to send the appropriate signals in order to enhance the chances to be trusted. Yet, the notion doesn’t say anything about the possible biases in the construction and the maintenance of a reputation. As an expectation, reputation is seen as a transparent record in which all that is known about the perceived agent is what has been revealed through the past interactions or what has been intentionally signalled in a present interaction. Yet, as we shall see, reputation is a much broader social property, that is mutually constructed by the perceiver, the perceived and the social context. As we will see, judgments of reputation involve always a “third party”, that is, a community of peers, experts, or acknowledged authorities that we defer to for our evaluations. Reputation is in the eyes of the others: we look at how others look at the target and defer, with complex cognitive strategies, to this social look. I will come back to these questions later, after having gone through some other uses and definitions of reputation that we find in social science and can be relevant for my purposes.

1.3. Reputation, esteem, recognition and all the passions of glory

 Although Smith endorses a vision of reputation as advantageous cooperation, in other passages of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, he puts forward another view of reputation, based on the human passion for sympathy, and more related to other concepts such as honour, or recognition: “Nature, when she formed man for society, endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his brethren. She taught him to feel pleasure in their favourable and pain in their unfavourable regard. She rendered their approbation most flattering and most agreeable to him for its own sake; and their disapprobation most mortifying and most offensive” (TMS, 116) And again: “It is the vanity, not the ease or the pleasure, that interests us” (TMS, 50) In this second sense, reputation joins another family of philosophical/sociological notions such as honor, glory, esteem, recognition, as the fundamental human social passion to be esteemed and considered by the others. In his Elements of Law and Natural Politics, Hobbes defines “honour” is a similar way: “And according to the signs of honour and dishonour, so we estimate and make the value or WORTH of a man” In the same line, that is the line that sees reputation as a primary motivation not reducible to more fundamental economical motivations such as interest and accumulation of capital, Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit [2004] have developed an “economy of esteem” or kudonomics (from the Greek work kudos, or renown) based on the idea that: “Among the things that may be expected to move people most reliably and forcibly is the desire to be thought well of by their fellows and the aversion to be regarded badly. People […] live under the regime or law of opinion and that regime moulds all that they are and do. It provides a gravitational field that silently shapes their dispositions and their doings, exerting a long insistent influence that can be resisted at the cost of considerable effort and self sacrifice” [Brennan and Pettit: 23] The theory of reputation in classical and modern economics is thus ambivalent between an interpretation of reputation as a mean to achieve an interest and as an end in itself. It is worth noting, although I won’t explore in depth this tradition, that in this second sense, reputation is almost synonymous of recognition, a fundamental concept in social philosophy that, from Hegel to Axel Honneth [Honneth 1992], is used to explain the motivations of the self in terms of a “struggle for recognition”, that is, a struggle to be recognized by the others along a series of dimensions. This permanent struggle among subjects for the recognition of their identity generates - according to the authors - the most fundamental pressures to societal changes. A tradition that puts together elements of the theory of reputation as a signal with a conception of reputation as a fundamental motive of social life is the theory of social distinction, a line of thought that that goes from the works of Thorstein Veblen [1905] to those of Pierre Bourdieu [1984], especially in his critique of taste and aesthetic judgement as a way of a social class to distinguish itself from another. These sociological theories can be seen also as a critique of the Marxist conception of the class conflict, which is seen in this tradition as a product of a struggle for reputation and status and a symbolic positioning in the social hierarchy more than a consequence of economic determination. Veblen writes that in the pursuit of accumulation “the struggle is substantially a race for reputability on the basis of invidious comparison” [Veblen, 1905: 32]. I will come back to these positions in the discussion of reputation as status, but let me sketch briefly how reputation as a social resource has been modelled in rational choice and evolutionary theory. 1.4 Reputation as an evolutionary strategy: indirect reciprocity The economic notion of reputation as an expectation about the future behaviour of an agent has been modelled, in the rational choice tradition, as a repeated game [Axelrod 1984]. Repeated games have been introduced in order to study cooperative strategies. As Axelrod has famously shown, the deceptive equilibrium of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game can be overcome. If the game is reiterated, people prefer to cooperate instead to defect because they are able to see possible gains in the future for having adopted a cooperative strategy. In a sense, by repeating the game, people earn a reputation of “nice” players that encourages the parties to reciprocate. Reputation has been considered in evolutionary theory as an important ingredient for solving the social dilemma of human cooperation. Not only people can overcome the Prisoner’s Dilemma, as mentioned above: they go beyond pure tit-for-tat strategies and show reciprocal altruism: individuals exchange favours [Trivers, 1971], but the delay of reciprocation may be long, so it is important to keep track of who did what to whom [Boissevain 1974]. The informal economy of reciprocal altruism is sustained by reputation [Nowack & Sigmund, 2005]. The social dilemma reputation is supposed to solve is the following: In a selfish-gene driven world, what can be the evolutionary advantage of complex biological systems such as human societies that base their survival on cooperative and altruistic interactions? Indirect reciprocity is easily captured by this motto: “I help you, someone helps me”. If I help you, I earn a reputation of being an altruistic person and people in the community will be willingly to help me in the future because they know that I will return the favour. The reputation that is valuable for indirect reciprocal exchanges is not “earned on the spot”, compared to the model I presented in 1.2.: it depends on social communication and on how gossip about my good behaviour circulates within the community. This “second-hand” information about our reputation distributed through communication and gossip is crucial for the stabilization of a shared social image on which future interactions and expectations can be based [Cavazza 2012]. In this perspective, reputation is not just an expectation: it is a socially distributed representation that monitors the social identity of individuals. This vision of reputation as a social representation allows me to introduce another concept of reputation in use in social sciences, that of social image.


1.5. Reputation and the “looking-glass self”: the social image

No analysis of reputation is richer than Erwin Goffman’s fine work on ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism. His 1956 book on The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life could be read, from the first lines, as a treatise on reputation: “When an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about him or to bring into play information about him already possessed. They will be interested in his general socio-economic status, his conception of self, his attitude towards them, his competence, his trustworthiness, etc.[…], many sources of information become accessible and many carriers (or 'sign -vehicles ’) become available for conveying this information.” [Goffman 1956: 11] Goffman’s interactionist approach to sociology was a way of describing - with a rare depictive mastery – how we construct our social self in public, how we manage to signal some qualities and hide some flaws of our personality and how our interlocutors use all these aspects of our public performance to get information about us and to interact in a strategic way. Having a reputation, earning or losing it, is the outcome of a social interaction in which our conduct modifies the distribution of opinions in the social environment. Goffman is both one of the fathers of the theory reputation as a signal, especially in his work on strategic interaction [Goffman 1969] and a contributor to the social psychology of reputation [Emler 1990], that is, of the study of how our social identity affects our choices and behaviours. One can describe his books as series of studies in “reputation management” in which he analyses in vivo the properties of the interactions that affect and are affected by our way of dealing with our social image. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life lists all the possible “moves” (performance, front, dramatic realization, idealization, etc.) that are available to the subject in a social setting. Goffman sees these settings as theatrical scenes in which face-to-face interaction follows the rules of a dramatic performance. What is important for our purposes here is his idea is that our social self is not just a “parade”: its phenomenological richness is causally efficacious in determining the outcome of an interaction and what the others will end up knowing about us. Social psychologists have studied the role of social self in the development of our personality. At the beginning of the XXth century, the American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley introduced the concept of the looking-glass self [Cooley 1902] to describe the process through which a person’s self grows out of society’s interpersonal interactions and the perceptions of others. As he says: “I am not what I think I am and am not what you think I am. I am what I think that you think I am”. The way in which we interiorize the others’ gaze and use it to construct our own feeling of who we are is still lively subject of research in social psychology . The limits of this approach is that it mainly deals with the rich phenomenology of face-to-face interactions, but doesn’t say a lot about how reputations constructed in interaction last or decay, modify themselves in time and are used and misused for further cognitive purposes beyond the immediate needs of the ongoing social interactions. We will see in the following that reputation matters even when we are not face to face and even when it is used to evaluate items that are not individuals, such as objects, ideas, etc.

 1.6 Reputation and status

Consider this case. I am attending a conference. I am not an insider of the discipline, but it is a subject that could be relevant for my future intellectual projects and I am eager to learn. During the coffee break, I hang around observing people: I don’t know anybody and feel a bit uncomfortable about whom to approach for a little conversation. I try to read the badges they are wearing on their jackets, try to scrap their origins, where do they come from: Here is a Harvard Professor, encircled by a bunch of groupies who listen to his words as he were the Messiah. I remember I’ve heard his name somewhere. Maybe a paper that I have read on the subject, or maybe it came out when I started to make Google searches in order to learn a little more about the topic. Here is the classical French Professeur d’Universités, with his self-important posture, and with such a strong accent in English that nobody understands what he says. I recognize the usual habits I saw so many times in France: he has conquered the front position at the table of the desserts and won’t leave it until the end of the pause. I use my prejudices, my background information, the reputational cues I am able to infer from their academic status, their age and manners…But what informs me most is the attitude that they have towards each other: the think network of status signals that the social situation provides . Who are the established people? Who the marginal? Who are those everybody want to talk with and those to avoid at any cost? I don’t remember who said that the difference between an important person and a nobody can be measured in this way: if the first one tells a joke, everybody burst out laughing, if the second one tells the same joke, a flustered silence follows. I observe all these signals: at a certain point, the Harvard Professor, who is surrounded by a thick crowd, pronounces the name of one of his young scholars: the circle of fans turns the gaze towards the newborn star: his status leaks, as a magical elixir, from one to the other, and enlightens the young man with a new, brighter voice. All these cues are simultaneously present in my mind, as I explore the environment around me: chunks of rankings of institutions that I have registered in my mind over the years, old and new cultural prejudices that have resided in the back of my mind through my wanderings around the world, quick and dirty heuristics about the dynamics of social networks, conversational commitments and so on. What I am looking for is a readable social map of the environment, a weighted landscape that allows me to orient my first steps in this new domain of knowledge. At the end of the coffee break, as a result of these mental operations, the world around me has a new informational configuration. If anything will be fixed in my mind after the conference, it will be a new, better informed association between a bunch of new ideas and the configuration of epistemic authorities I was able to shape in my mind by using a set of very different strategies and cues. Among the most informative cues, the way in which the insiders look at each other, the invisible yet tangible social network they establish while interacting. Status signals are a reservoir of information about the hierarchical social configurations that define social life. They are a major subject of inquiry in social sciences such as anthropology and sociology. The way in which we perceived authority relations and are embedded in social hierarchies can be seen as the “quintessence” of social sciences. Anthropologists such as Louis Dumont [1971], and Maurice Godelier [1982] have argued that the social world is intrinsically structured in hierarchical relations that are more fundamental than institutions. That is, as Godelier has shown in his study on the construction of Big Men in New Guinea, hierarchical relations don’t come into existence with the introduction of social institutions. A perception of fundamental inequalities and hierarchies within a social group exists even in groups where no institutions (such as money, government, etc) exist. In his analysis of the system of casts in India, Dumont argues that the structural relations in society are fundamentally hierarchical. Karl Manhheim, the founder of the sociology of knowledge, speaks about our “hierarchical appraisal”, as if our way of experiencing the world were essentially hierarchical . Status hierarchies are thus seen in this perspective as omnipresent structural phenomenon of human but also animal societies. Social differentiation leads to the emergence of status hierarchies in animals [Bonabeau & alii, 1999; Chase & alii, 2002]. In sociology, this phenomenon is usually explained with reference to mechanisms of cumulative advantage such as the Mathew’s effect [Merton 1972; DiPrete & Eirich 2006] in which small qualitative differences between individuals get amplified via status-conferring collective procedures. More recently, analytical sociologists such as Gould [2002], Podolny [2005], Manzo and Baldassarri [forthcoming] have developed models to explain the emergence of status hierarchies by showing how reputational rankings greatly overstate quality differences between individuals and crystallize into categorizations whose effects are to further enhance these differences. That is, status differences in society neither depend only on quality differences among individuals nor on structural advantages or disadvantages. Rather, they depend on the effects of amplifications that self-reinforcing reputational rankings (in which people defer to each other’s status by following strategies of reciprocation and fairness) make emerge in interaction. These models are interesting for studying singularities in status attribution as for example, the extreme discrepancies in status recognition in certain professions (such as art, sport or science) [Menger 2002]. But, as the authors insist on, they see status as not the same thing as reputation. According to Podolny, status refers to a “diffused sense of better or worse that is indirectly tied to past behaviours, but it is more directly tied to the pattern of relations and affiliations in which the actor does and does not choose to engae” [Podolny, 2005: 13]. I will challenge his position and propose a definition of reputation that takes into account status relations. The notion of status as defined in this literature is too narrow for my purposes, because it considers only relations among actors (and not, for example, between actors and things or beliefs) and sees status as associated with an immediate perception of the social hierarchy, whereas in many contexts our status attribution depends on hierarchies that we do not directly perceive, but accept from others that we consider authorities in a domain. As a conclusion of this long review of interrelated notions, let me say that the proponents of these notions enter the battlefield of ideas by stating that “their” notion is different from all the others. Thus, Brennan and Pettit spend the first chapter of their book in distinguishing esteem from other notions, such as reputation. According to them, reputation implies the reidentifiability of the object, whereas esteem may accrue even to someone who is not reidentifiable (I mean, I can esteem someone “on the spot” for a certain action without whereas my positive attitude won’t play a role in establishing his or her social identity in the future). As I already said, Podolny too tries to distinguish his notion of status from that of reputation. But, apart from the canonical reasons that pertain to the market of ideas to distinguish notions in order to earn salience in a saturated cognitive environment such as academic research, I think that a general definition of reputation may encompass most of the relevant aspects of these ideas, given that strong family resemblances that I have tried to show among them. I think that the common denominators of these very different intellectual projects lies in the shared intuition that there exists a social dimension of our selves, motivations and judgements that is strongly relational and depends on the judgements of others in an interactive way, that is, neither on a fixed institutional “superstructure”, nor on a completely individualistic attitude, but in the relational constant comparison between ourselves and the others. Now, I would like to turn to the more constructive side of this contribution and propose a definition and some illustrations of reputation as a property that, from the observer’s point of view, can be an epistemic resource to extract information about not only the others, but also the world.

2. Reputation as an epistemic notion

Quality uncertainty and informational asymmetries have become crucial epistemological issues in contemporary information-dense societies. The vast amount of information available on Internet and on the media makes the problem of reliability and credibility of information a central issue in the management of knowledge. Informational items that do not come with some label, or seal of approval from the appropriate communities, are lost in the data deluge of the Information Age. From the evaluator’s perspective, that is, the agent who has to filter information, reputation has an informational value. But what is reputation in this informational sense and how does it relate to the plethora of definitions proposed above? Reputation is a relation between an agent or an item and the set of social and cultural representations of the agent or the item. Cultural representations are distinguished from social representations in this way: cultural representations are metarepresentational , that is, they are socially distributed representations of representations: I judge your reputation through a social representation that is not only generated by our ongoing interaction, but also by culturally stabilized representations that have previously been attached to you, that have circulated about you and that are held by people I trust or defer to. Having a reputation is thus being attached to an evaluative representation of ourselves that is socially and culturally generated and stabilized. A reputation is the shortcut of the many strategies, heuristics, evaluations that have been placed a person or an item in a certain hierarchical configuration. Given that in my definition of reputation I want to include items, having a reputation doesn’t imply being aware of having it, a condition that seems to be implied by many definitions that I have listed above. Also, reputation is not only a cognitive notion (as in the rational choice approach, which is formalized as an “expectation”): it is a social and cultural notion that has to do with the way in which the social environment is organized: it spreads through networks, cumulates through ratings and manifests various effects that are independent of our cognition.

 2.1. Is reputation a Cambridge property? The paradox of Violetta Valéry

The philosopher Peter Geach [1969] coined the term Cambridge change, to distinguish extrinsic from intrinsic changes of an entity: if at time0 I am 175 cm tall and at time1 I am 180 tall, I have changed a property of myself. If at time0 I was taller than Leo, my son, but at time1 I am shorter because he grew taller, nothing really changed in me. Given that reputation is a relational/social property, it may seem to share some features of the Cambridge properties. I can earn or lose a reputation without any change in my essence. Let me illustrate this situation by an example. In the Verdi’s opera, La Traviata the famed courtesan Violetta Valéry is the beloved mistress of the young nobleman Alfredo Germont. Their feelings are so deep that she decides to completely abandon her previous lavish life and go to live with him in the countryside. One day, while Alfredo is out, she receives the visit of Alfredo’s father, Giorgio Germont, who explains to her - in the famous aria Pura siccome un angelo - that the reputation of the family is ruined because of Alfredo’s relationship with her, and that Alfredo’s sister won’t be able to marry the noblemen to whom she is already engaged because her reputation is lowered by this relationship. Violetta finds the argument perfectly compelling and accepts to leave Alfredo. Why so? What is so compelling about a leaking of reputation from her relationship to the marriage of a person she doesn’t even know? What have changed in the life of Alfredo’s sister when she acquired a property of being the sister of Violetta Valéry’s lover? Not so much: she is exactly the same person she used to be. Yet, the leaking of reputation is not inert, like in the case of Cambridge properties: it hurts her life and her feelings and causes the breaking of her engagement. How does reputation leak from an entity to another and how effecting the leaking is? It seems obvious from the example that, although a change in reputation may seem a Cambridge change, even if nothing happens in the person that is “victim” of the change in the reputational configuration, the causal consequences are real. That is because reputation leaks through a social network of deference relations. A good person who judges you good makes you earn status. A bad person who judges you good makes you loose status. Reputation is thus not a Cambridge property. Even when we cannot always control how it leaks from an entity to another, the leaking has causal consequences. It is important to notice that reputation leaks only if the items are linked each other in a network. My reputation is untouched by the physical proximity of a lower-status stranger in the underground. But my reputation as a high-status person may be touched by joining the social network of people who take the underground. A Picasso painting exposed in the same room in a Museum with my painting greatly increases my reputation as an established artist: his reputation leaks towards me. But if the two paintings happened to be close together because a burglar stole in a rich friend’s apartment my painting that I offered her for her birthday and her Picasso, then I won’t acquire any reputation from my proximity with Picasso. Sometimes we can misinterpret physical proximity with linkage in a network. It is a common practice in many milieux to ask for a picture together with a “higher-status” person. I was invited once at a conference on the Web and Tim Berners-Lee, its inventor, was there. I immediately asked him permission to take a picture together and shared the picture on Facebook with impressive (but, of course, bogus) reputational effects. Although we were both invited to the same conference and thus, in a sense, we shared a social network, our ties are very weak and the fact that we were together on that picture is more a happy coincidence of physical proximity than a reliable trace of a strong tie between us.

2.2. Reputation and Classification

As I said, reputation serves the cognitive purpose of making us navigate among things and people whose value is opaque for us because we do not know enough about them. We use seals, scales, grades, indexes, classifications not only to evaluate them, but to create valuable categories that allow us to classify reality. Take this example. 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, etc. 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 behaviour, 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. The A sewn on Hesther’s gown is a seal of disapproval that constitutes a form of classification. In many contexts, we do not classify entities and then evaluate them: the very act of classifying them is to order them according to the reputational rankings that are already available in our culture. Let’s start with the timeline of classification and evaluation. When we think about categorization, it is a common view to see taxonomies as cognitive tools that describe objective relations and properties between classes and objects, that is, they provide an ontological structure for a domain. Evaluative tools come afterwards in order to impose a ranking on these items. Contrasting this classical picture of knowledge organization, I claim that sometimes reputation is prior to classification: in many epistemic practices throughout, we use rating systems in order to classify items. A second important aspect of reputational and rating systems is that they combine two types of information for the sake of knowledge organization and evaluation: information about content and social information, information about people and past interactions. One of the best examples of the interplay between reputation and classification is the system of classement of Bordeaux wines [Origgi 2007]. Bordeaux wines are classified according to a variety of local ranking systems whose best known is that of châteaux that was established in 1855 in response to Napoleon’s III request to rank Médoc wines for the Parisian Exposition Universelle. The ranking was established by wine industry brokers according to the past reputation of the châteaux, calculated in terms of their trading prices in the past 100 years. Thus, in order to establish a classification that has created stable cultural objects such as the Grand Crus, the Premier Crus, etc. reputation was needed. In a word, reputation is not only a way of extracting social information, but also a way of constructing it through the classifications it makes possible. The importance of being included in a classification is that it assures to the item that has been included a long-lasting reputation due to the stabilization of the classification system in a culture. This opens the question of the relation between reputation, effective value and time.

2.3. Reputation and Time

A remarkable feature of reputation is its relation with time. We all know the disappointing experience of having trusted the reputation of a famous touristic spot and, once there, wondering what are we doing in such an awful place. Reputation is more resilient to time changes than the effective qualities it is supposed to represent. Ancient renown of aristocratic names can still emit a “halo” even in a world in which being an aristocrat doesn’t correspond to any effective social privileges. Institutions may benefit of a “position advantage” in a ranking system even if their prestige is much more transient than we think. I remember how people in Parisian cinemas smiled at the Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris, when Inez, Gil’s nervous fiancée, tries to provoke Gil’s jealousy by praising the qualities of Paul, one of her ex-boyfriends, saying that he must be a genius given that he was invited as visiting professor at the university La Sorbonne. The reputation of the Sorbonne, one of the most ancient universities in the world, is related to its glorious past, and an academic outsider as Woody Allen can take this past reputation seriously even if today, if you look at academic rankings of European universities, it is clear that the Sorbonne doesn’t deserve anymore the reputation its name still has. Time is sometimes undoubtedly an advantage in the accumulation of reputation. In the case of academic reputation, that is calculated in terms of impact, that is, citations of one’s own work in the works of others, time is an important factor for earning reputation: citations take time to accumulate, and older papers have more reputation than new ones (up to a “tipping point” at which either they have earned some impact and thus get the more and more chances to accumulate reputation in the future, or they haven’t reached that threshold and disappear within the legions of the forgotten. But time creates reputational lapses that often make us rely on socially established reputational cues that are no more connected with the quality of the person or the item to which these cues are attached. The way in which different reputational devices update their evaluation is multifarious: there are evaluations that are constantly updated, such as guides of the best universities, the best wines or the best restaurants, all mainly controlled by acknowledged experts and evaluations that are based on informal social networks, or culturally embedded local values, that are not revised systematically and can thus display notorious time lapses that make us rely on cues that don’t correlate anymore to any quality. This is typical in domains in which there are no explicit shared rankings, such as for example, when we choose a doctor or a lawyer [Karpik, 1984]. Doctors’ reputation is notoriously resilient because it is based on informal social networks of acquaintances that is not regularly updated and doesn’t have clear criteria of ranking. Have you ever noticed that most friends who suggest you a doctor say that he or she is the “Best specialist in town?”. People defer to social networks in constructing these reputations, but of course networks contain many biases like locality, social class, etc, that make the information circulate in an imperfect way. Also, you don’t ask suggestions for a dentist everyday and people do not update their medical carnet d’adresses very often, so I can end up suggesting you a dentist who was really good 10 years ago even if today she has become lazy, unreliable and doesn’t deserve anymore her reputation. Same thing for holidays. How many times the person who suggests you that wonderful little hotel on the Amalfi coast was at the hotel? Maybe once, twenty years ago. She recommends you that place while today it may have become a too touristic location, with cars, noise and too many people around. Traditions, that is, shared evaluations that are spread in a cultural group and have a special authority for that group, are often based on past renown and on rare encounters: they are difficult to challenge because our deference to them is part of our cultural identity. Yet, they can be biased and make some reputations last far beyond any actual opinion. Reputations and rankings, being, as I said, cultural artefacts, that is, shared deferential attitudes about distilled opinions on a person or an item, can be institutionally enforced (like for example in education, or through public representations such as monuments, or else through act of public recognition such as prizes, medals). That is why they may last long time even if our immediate perceptions of status relations contradict them. Sometimes we may end up in a situation of “preference falsification” [Kuran 1995] in which everybody rely on a shared reputation and endorses it (a public judgement of the sort: “Hegel is the most important philosopher of all times”) while privately organizing his or her preferences in another way.

  2.4. Reputation, epistemic authority and interpretation

In a famous novel written by Jerry Kosinski, Being There - upon which a movie with Peter Sellers was based- Chauncey Gardiner is a mentally retarded gardener who, through a series of fortuitous accidents, becomes a heir of the throne of a Wall Street tycoon, a presidential policy adviser and a media icon. His simple words on how to conduct a garden have great impact on the President of United States, whom Chauncey meets in the house of Mr. Rand, the Wall Street Tycoon he happens to live with. In a conversation with Rand and Chauncey, the President asks: “And you, Mr. Gardiner? What do you think about the bad season on the Street?” Chauncey replies: “In a garden, growth has its season. There a spring and summer, but there are also fall and winter. And then, spring and summer again. As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well”. “I must admit”, the President says “that what you’ve just said is one of the most refreshing and optimistic statements I’ve heard in very, very long time […] Many of us forget that nature and society are one! Yes, though we have tried to cut ourselves off from nature, we are still part of it. Like nature, our economic system remains, in the long run, stable and rational, and that’s why we must not fear to be at its mercy […] We welcome the inevitable seasons of nature and yet we are upset by the seasons of our economy! How foolish of us!” It may seem just one among the millions of examples of misunderstanding, but let us have a closer look of what is happening here from our reputational perspective. The simple fact that Chauncey is in Mr. Rand’s house gives the President enough background information about his reputation as a source of knowledge. The President’s epistemic assessment of Chauncey’s words is based on his reputation, established by the social network they are sharing: a friend of friend who is a reliable person - Mr. Rand- is also reliable. This background assumption, together with the standard processes of interpretation, explains the President’s extra-effort in order to work out a relevant interpretation of what Chauncey said. We may also add a “confirmation bias” in the President’s interpretation, that is, he tends to reconstruct what Chauncey said in a way that confirms what he already thinks and hopes of the economic conjuncture in United States. Of course, he doesn’t simply accept Chauncey’s words under authority: he interprets them in the context of his own thoughts about US economy. What Chauncey said is just further “food” for his thoughts and helps him in coming out with a positive interpretation of the bad season in Wall Street, a message he will repeat immediately after the dialogue on television. Reputation is a powerful tool of information extraction in conversation. It serves interpretive purposes. We use our interlocutors’ reputations as a sort of charity principle [Davidson, 1984] We allocate much more cognitive effort in trying to make sense of what someone says if we value positively his or her reputation. I remember when I was a student struggling so many times in front of philosophy books that seemed to me pure nonsense and trying to make sense of the content just because I was relying on authorities who told me that that philosopher was very well reputed. I have seen lives of intellectuals change abruptly because of their inclusion in a public ranking, like “The best 50 thinkers of the late 20 years”, and their previously ignored theories becoming a subject of exegesis and collective interpretation. Reputation thus plays a role in linguistic interpretation and in the way we manage to make sense of what other people say. Given that what others say informs us on reality, this confirms my hypothesis that reputation plays a role in extracting information about the world. Of course, here also, there are many biases, like the notorious guru effect [Sperber, 2007] according to which people may go on endlessly looking for an interpretation of a nonsense if the source of the nonsense is an authority whose obscure language is perceived as a sign of depth and wisdom.

2.5. The epistemic critique of aesthetic judgement

While travelling in Brazil, where I was giving some lectures at the University of Porto Alegre, I had the chance to have interesting discussions and exchanges with local art critics, wine critics and art collectors. Although I like a lot contemporary art, I am not an insider, and definitely not a connoisseur of contemporary Brazilian art. An art dealer brought me to the MERCOSUR exhibition, an enormous contemporary art fair that gathers every two years artists from overall Brazil. Apart from some traditions that were clearly imported and thus easy to evaluate for me, some of the artists were impossible to classify, to rank in an aesthetic space familiar to me. In order to help me to make sense of my aesthetic experience, my friend art collector tried to provide me with information about important prizes artists had earned, international exhibitions (“This one was exposed in Venice at the Biennale last year…”) and prices of the works in last prestigious auctions. That was a way to start a conversation, to be able to compare our experiences and coordinate our judgements. But for most artists it was clearly not enough for me to have also an associated aesthetic experience. The way in which most artists were addressing the audience was too “local” for me, as if they were part of a too distant conversation that I was not able to join because of my cultural distance. At dinner after the visit, my friend art collector showed me a catalogue of an artist called Adriana Varejao, one of the top-selling contemporary Brazilian painters, whose last auction prices at Christie’s and Sotheby’s are higher than half a million dollars. In a pop-art tradition that reminds Roy Lichtenstein, she paints giant azulejos, that is, the typical white and blue Portuguese tiles that you find in churches and old buildings in Brazil. While looking at her works, I wondered whether her style was so much easier to decode for me than the previous Mercosur artists. It was as if she was referring to a conversation and commenting on traditions familiar to me also: her interlocutors are mine: they are the global artistic authorities of contemporary art, from Warhol, to Lichtenstein or Richter. When we look for indirect cues in order to express an evaluative judgement on a work of art (but also on the taste of a wine and other aesthetic experiences) one of the most informative cue is the reputation of the imaginary interlocutors of the artist. The artist alludes to other artists, comments upon them, judges them thus giving you access to a learned conversation that you are willing to be part of. The aesthetic experience is based on the discovery of sharing with the artist these rankings and authorities and thus being part of the same intellectual world. Contemporary art is not only a question of reputation in the eyes of the observer, as it is frequently said (“I like it because I know it has a good reputation”). The way in which reputation is managed in order to convey an aesthetic experience has to do with the reputations of the artist’s interlocutors, as if he or she were inviting us to share an imaginary circle of authorities whose prestige matters for us. Art works are special conversations in which the artists enacts many past and present voices and puts him or herself in a circle of recognition that we are inclined to share. Here again, the role of reputation is a much more complex process than it is generally acknowledged. It is a way of extracting the relevant information that provides us with the only possible rewarding aesthetic experience: that of being part of the same world the artist is winking at.

  2.6. The Twitter Mind: Social Networks and Collective Intelligence

Collaborative forms of sharing ratings are also relevant in the study of Collective Intelligence. I have explored the relation between reputation and the explosion of the Social Web elsewhere [Origgi 2012], but let me briefly conclude with some reflexions on our use of Web-based social networks to extract information. My point is that the success of these networks is because they are built in a way that facilitates the expression of some of our most entrenched cognitive and cultural heuristics to extract information, like “Follow the right leaders”. While Facebook is a social network aimed mainly at enhancing our looking-glass self (see above p. ??) and encouraging the management of our own reputation, Twitter is pure information extractor based on a simple status hierarchy “Who follows whom”. Choosing valuable informants, that is, being able to exploit social information in the most efficient way, may give striking cognitive advantages. That is true not in the high-tech world of contemporary social networks: the history of human cultural evolution [Tomasello 1999] seems to rely on similar strategies of following the appropriate leaders. Twitter is a reputational device that allows collective intelligent outcomes thanks to its hierarchical social networking. A more democratic network won’t have the same epistemic effects. The analysis of the pernicious effects that may bias the way in which information circulates through these highly hierarchical social networks is at its beginnings. As the study of the pernicious effects of “one to many” forms of influence on decision, like the influence of opinion leaders, is a well-established field of inquiry [Boland et al. 1989; Estlund 2007], the way in which reputation affects judgements in these “many to many” hierarchical networks and, in general, on the Web is still an open question. Conclusion People do not share information: they share evaluated and classified information that creates a “reputational stream” of shared judgements. The epistemological implications of the massive use of shared ratings in networked societies are huge: relying on other people’s judgements and authority challenges our epistemic responsibility. The reasons we trust collectively filtered ratings about an item or an agent are seldom explored. Choosing a doctor, an academic institution or a wine is a way of endorsing a tradition of values, a way of filtering information that is not always transparent and legitimate. Notorious biases in social networks - such as the Matthew effect, investigated by the sociologist of knowledge Robert Merton, according to which the nodes of a network that are more prominent have more probabilities to earn more reputation - create noise in the way reputation is diffused. Other biases need further epistemological and cognitive inquiry. As I have tried to sketch, people tend to form beliefs in order to acknowledge previously established reputations, such as voting for a certain party because a very well-reputed friend votes for that party. Also, as we have seen, reputations are resilient and may last over time even when the facts of the matters they are supposed to signal are no more there. For example, the prestige of institutions and corporations may last long time after their decay. I have defended the idea that reputation is an essential epistemological notion. Reputation is a criterion of information extraction, a fundamental shortcut for cumulating knowledge that is embedded in social networks and an ineludible filter to access facts. In an environment where sources are in constant competition to get attention and the option of the direct verification of the information is simply not available at reasonable costs, evaluation and rankings are epistemic tools and cognitive practices that provide an inevitable shortcut to information. This is especially striking in contemporary informationally-overloaded societies, but I think it is a permanent feature of any extraction of information from a corpus of knowledge. 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. 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. The question of the epistemic value of these rankings, that it, to what extent their production and use by a group changes the ratio between truths and falsities produced by that group and, individually, how an awareness of rankings should affect a person’s beliefs is thus crucial. Rankings may seem to introduce a bias in judgement, that is, a precondition in the way information is categorized and classified, and the epistemic superiority of a biased judgement is in need of justification. There are some biased judgements whose value is superior because they participate in sustaining a tradition of knowledge that stabilizes positive effects in a culture. There are other biased judgements that sustain prejudicial information and should be wiped out. But, if I am right and there is no information that is completely independent of biased judgements, the aim of a social epistemology of reputation, as the one I am advocating here, should be to pry apart the biases worth keeping from those worth eliminating.

Bibliography

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Democracy and Trust in the Age of The Social Web.

Gloria Origgi

CNRS – Institut Nicod

Epistemic Democracy in the Age of Internet. The role of trust and reputation in e- democracy

II seminariodi Teoria Politica

Gloria Origgi

CNRS – Institut Nicod

Democracy and Trust the Age of the Social Web

II seminario di Teoria Politica

Aosta, 28-30 June 2012

1. Introduction

The rise of the Internet within the last 20 years and especially of the social Web in the last 10 years, has deeply transformed our social, cultural and political customs. Internet has revealed one of the most powerful means of communication and networking ever and – like the invention of writing and print - a deep revolution in the production and sharing of information.

The cyber-enthusiasts of the 1990s, saw the Web as the paradigmatic “disruptive technology” one that would overturn all of our practices for accessing information and empower users to collaboratively produce, access, and distribute content in previously unimagined ways[1]. Over the past decade, this enthusiasm has been replaced by a more nuanced attitude. Replacing our practices for accessing reality, aggregating information and creating new forms of public spaces is not simple. Our search of impartial information is notoriously biased by a number of effects such as group polarization, information cascades, and conformity[2]. The world in which we live today is far from being a new land of freedom and democracy. The way in which new technologies of communication are evolving in networked social spaces is not designed by rules that govern the design of democratic decision systems[3]. The potentially infinite and free space of the Web is becoming a corporate space governed by few big companies that control access and make us navigate in a land that we do not own through an architecture that is variable, invisible and impossible to control. This has led some authors to talk about a new “Digital Feudalism” and the need of a new Enlightenment to reach a truly liberal digital democracy[4].

As a result, we face today two opposite tendencies in the appraisal of the effects of the Internet and the Web on our lives. On the one hand, apologists see the Web as the primary global resource to build new forms of civic participation, by democratizing communication and dramatically decreasing costs of participation in various forms of mobilization[5]. On the other hands, critics and pessimists warn about the risks of authoritarian turns of the new, uncontrolled technocracy the Web is making available, and the negative effects of polarization of points of views and informational cascades that discussion through the social networks is creating[6].

Also, while social networks and other communication technologies such as cell phones have played a major role in the rising of important recent political movements and revolutionary awakenings in dictatorial countries, such as the “Arab-Spring” (renamed as the Facebook Revolution), in mature democracies, their general effects on democratic life are more controversial. Internet is one among the multiple facets of globalisation, and it is far from clear today how globalisation is improving democracy. As Habermas points out[7], the disappearing of (economical, cultural, political) frontiers may have pernicious effects on our idea of democracy that is still centred on the State-Nation. What global phenomena such as Internet are bringing about, according to him, is a reduction of autonomy of the single states and hence less protection for their citizens, as well as a progressive delegitimization of forms of control and accountability at the national level.

Yet, apart from the criticisms based on the global dimension of Internet, the way in which the Web is structuring itself today - mainly in privately controlled social networks - although it has enhanced political debate and participation[8] in some areas of the world, is such that it cannot be considered anymore as a public space whose structure and maintenance is in the hands of its users.

That is to say that the relation between IT and democracy is far from being straightforward. Fears and anxieties of uncontrolled forms of new control go together with an irresistible optimistic vision of a freer and interconnected world of global citizens.

2. The Central Puzzle

Among the tensions and ambivalences that characterize the debate over the role of Internet in democracy, I will concentrate on an aspect of these contradictions I am more familiar with, that is, the dimension of trust. Trust has been a central topic in social sciences to make sense of the Internet[9]. Yet, one of the most striking contradictions about our IT-mediated trust relationships has been surprisingly neglected. In this paper, I will concentrate on the following contradiction: while modern democratic societies ground their accountability in a “disenchanted” form of social trust, that is, trust that comes out of a series of procedures of “taming” distrust, such as contracts, law enforcements, transparent procedures (concerning vote, attribution of rights, allocation of resources, etc…)[10] the form of trust that seems to reign over the Internet and, especially, the Social Web, is the most naïve and wild form of blind trust that we have ever experienced in mature societies.

Liberal democracies have emerged as a reaction of distrust to the traditional forms of power and authority such as monarchies and the church[11]. As Mark Warren writes: “More democracy has meant more oversight of and less trust in authorities”. Constructing a political arena in which people may confront their divergent interests and arguments means establishing a set of rules and procedures that allow a “cold” yet guaranteed form of interaction not based on “warmer” social relationships of trust. Furthermore, modern democracies are “inclusive” systems, whose aim is to make more and more people to participate to collective decisions. Inclusiveness implies a transition from “custom to code”, because the more people are included within the same group, the less “thick” relationships can be taken for granted[12]. It has been argued at length[13] that the form of social bond that links mature contemporary liberal democracies is not trust, but a regulated “distrust”, that is, a thick bundle of procedures, codes and rules that guarantee citizens that those who govern them have to be accountable.

Yet, the disenchanted trust that defines our form of political participation doesn’t seem to be the default attitude once we are on the Net. Social networking facilities have developed tremendously since 2007. Studies show that people develop online social networking even when the levels of reciprocal trust and the comprehension of privacy and security issue are low[14]. Most people who register on Facebook do not read the Terms of Service and, if asked, don’t know whether they own or give away the information they make available on their profile pages.

It is as if masses of reasonable individuals, who should be guided in their behaviour - according to the mainstream views in social sciences - by maximisation of interest and considerations of prudence and rationality, are willing to capitulate their judgement and responsibility of choice and join privately owned social networks and companies where they share personal information without the least clue of what these companies will do with these data, follow the first results of a Google search, confident that they will be brought to the relevant piece of content, base their judgements and evaluations on rankings produced by monopolistic companies. People seem willingly to throw away their privacy, their capacity of discrimination, their rights of choice and blindly defer to methods of filtering content and manage participation whose logic is deeply out of their control.

As the cyber-militant Rebecca McKinnon has pointed out: “We cannot assume that Internet will develop in a way that is democracy-compatible”[15]. Sovereignty of the cyberspace is made by private companies that partition it in ways that are the less and less free and determine how information is gathered, structured and presented. The cyberworld of web apps and social networks is far from being a world of free speech and democratisation[16]. The domination of a privately owned social network such as Facebook today is overwhelming. Paradoxically, the only country in which the use of social network is fragmented upon a variety of different providers is China, given the censorship act that blocked the access to Facebook in mainland China in 2009 and, as a consequence, that many different social networks have spread in order to skip censorship[17].

Here is a symptomatic quotation about the trustful feelings that inhabit Facebook users: «This is the promise of Facebook, the utopian hope for it: the triumph of fellowship; the rise of a unified consciousness; peace through superconnectivity, as rapid bits of information elevate us to the Buddha mind, or at least distract us from whatever problems are at hand. In a time of deep economic, political, and intergenerational despair, social cohesion is the only chance to save the day, and online social networks like Facebook are the best method available for reflecting—or perhaps inspiring—an aesthetic of unity.»[18]

A mixture of optimism, credulity and faith seems to be the dominant attitude that underlies the use of social networks, as if questions of privacy and security were not relevant to the development of this particular form of trust. Also, trust is a fundamental ingredient of social relationships, but it is unclear how people can trust millions of other users to make a fair use of the information they decide to share publicly.

So, despite the blatant evidence of the risks on privacy, the control by private companies of most of the features and applications of the web, people seem to resist any form of diffidence or, at least of, prudence, and give away their personal data and relevant information with a unreasonable feeling of being part of a cooperative process of global democratisation of means of expression.

Why is it so? This paper is an attempt to solve the puzzle. I think that much discussion about trust and Internet has revolved around a conception of trust that doesn’t reflect the form of trust relationships we are involved on the net.

3. Relational vs. Epistemic Conceptions of Trust

Trust is one of the most intractable notions of philosophy and social science. That is because a variety of human interactions are pulled in under the heading of trust. Trust is involved in any asymmetrical situation in which one party has to take a risk that depends on the performance of the other party. And risky businesses concern as many different relations as one can imagine, such as commercial transactions between parties who don’t know each other, temporally asymmetrical transactions (I pay you today for a good that I will receive in a week or a month), love affairs, reliance on experts for important decisions about one’s own life and health, occasional conversational exchanges among people in the street, political interactions and, of course, IT-mediated social interactions. Russell Hardin rightly writes: « As virtually all writers on trust agree, trust involves giving discretion to another to affect one’s interests. This move is inherently subject to the risk that the other will abuse the power of discretion »[19].

Much of the discussion of trust in social sciences revolves around its relational dimension. Diego Gambetta’s 1988 anthology on trust and James Coleman’s 1992 work on social theory laid the foundations of a rational-choice approach to the relation of trust. Rational-choice theory and its mathematical counterpart, game-theory, provide various models of social competitive and cooperative relations under the assumption that the parties that are involved in these relations are rational and motivated by interest. In this perspective, trust is a form of risky cooperation. The central question is: « Given that involving oneself in a trust relationship with others is always risky, when it is rational to take this risk? »

Of course, even the most pessimistic players are guided by an optimistic intuition that the risk is worth taking, that is, that being in a relation will improve our situation much more than staying out of it.

In this perspective, trust is an essentially cognitive notion. It is a complex, higher-order belief that takes into account the other party’s beliefs, interests and possible actions. I have an interest in entering a trust relationship if only I have reasons to think that the other party has an interest to reciprocate. Perhaps the most encompassing definition of rational trust in this tradition is that of Russell Hardin, according to whom rational trust is a form of encapsulated interest, that takes the following shape: I believe that it is in the interest of my party to take into account my interests. So there is no risk, no submission to authority, no surrender of reasons: just a rational calculus, or at least, a motivated bet, on the mutual advantages of a cooperative future together. Notice that, given this definition, it can be rational to trust another party even when our interests diverge, because the only thing I have to presuppose is that she or he has an interest to take into account my interests, even when his interest is different from mine. When are we wrong? Well, of course, our estimate of the other party’s interests may be based on limited information, or on a vision of the context of interaction that may be biased by our own perspective. Or, the other party may have simulated an interest in being in a relation with us that was selfishly motivated just in order to have us “on board” and then free-ride on our cooperative stance.

Critics of the “cold” notion of trust in terms of rational choice say that trust involves an emotional dimension and raises normative commitments between parties that go beyond the pure calculus of interests. Karen Jones, Annette Baier[20] and others, insist upon the emotional and moral dimension of trust, as a “thick” relationship that makes one accept the inevitable vulnerability of being dependent on another on a certain matter. The “accepted vulnerability” is, according to these authors, not a matter of calculus: it is based of a “pre-rational” estimation of the trustworthiness of the other party and on the strong feeling that “throwing oneself” in the trust relation creates a positive attitude in the other party and raises the chances to reciprocate. To see one’s willingness to be vulnerable to our actions makes us react in the expected way.

Pure rationalist accounts of trust are seen as a form of reduction of trust to rational distrust. After all, as I have mentioned at the beginning of the paper, liberal political theory was largely founded on distrust[21]. Hume, Madison, and to a certain extent Locke, thought that the only intelligent stance for citizens to take towards government was distrust[22]. Given that I don’t trust the other party, I need to find a rational justification of the interests she or he might have to reciprocate my trust. The transition to Modernity is often depicted as a replacement of “warm” trust relations based on feelings of assurance and moral commitments with “cold” ones based on rational justifications. Trust in governments as “reasoned consent” is assured by procedures of accountability that are ways of dealing with the general distrust of modern societies.

One of the points that is common both to cognitive and moral treatments of trust is the relational and “choice-based” dimension of the trust relation, as if it were always a matter of free choice to trust or not the others. Here is an opportunity to enter in a relation. If I choose this opportunity, I take some risks. I can chose to go on or to stay out, and I can base my decision on a rational calculus of the interests at stake or on an optimistic stance toward the willingness of the other party to honor my trusting him or her. But, in any case, I have a choice. I can choose to vote for this person because I think it is in his or her interest to take into account my interests (for example, because she or he wants to be re-elected in the future) but I can also choose to vote for someone else. 

Even much of the discussion around the specific trust relationships we develop through Internet has revolved around the risks and advantages of relational trust. For example, in a seminal paper on the subject, the philosopher Victoria McGeer warned about the fragility of trust relationships developed through Internet given that people may be dishonest about their identities. And Philip Pettit argues that Internet is not an appropriate environment for developing trust relationships because people won’t feel the obligation to reciprocate trust that we feel in face-to-face interactions[23].

Yet, I don’t think that the notion of relational trust I have tried to outline here says anything about our trust in information-dense environments such as the Internet and the Social Web. Trust in these environments is first of all a form of epistemic trust, that is, trust in persons or systems through which we are able to extract relevant information. Massimo Durante raises a similar point in a chapter of a book on Legitimacy 2.0. and e-Democracy : “In a complex networked society of information consensus is cognitively based on perceived trust more than on experienced trust: this means that, in media democracy, it is not only a question of relational trust, expressed with regards to specific political actors, but it is matter of systemic trust, expressed in relation to the system those actors are part”[24]

Internet has been from the onset a major informational and cultural revolution that has been compared to the invention of writing and printing[25]. The central new feature of the Internet revolution and, especially, of the Web, is the role of social networks in the production, distribution and retrieval of information. The mathematician Jon Kleinberg showed in 2000 that the Web was organized as a giant social network[26]. Information on the Web is essentially social, that is, it depends on the pattern of social relations that informs the search algorithms about where to find it. We do not only develop social relations on Internet: we use social relations to extract knowledge from it. Recent research[27] shows that microblogging sites such as Twitter are the more and more used to extract information through social search facilities and that search based access to tweets is becoming increasingly available through third parties such as Google and Bing[28]. These algorithms use the social information about who knows whom in order to extract information and rank it in order of relevance.

The PageRank algorithm that made the success of Google was based exactly on an automatic reading of the links between the pages in terms of “votes” that a page gives to another one. The new algorithms of the social web, such as Google Social Search and Facebook’s EdgeRank[29], extract social information such as “likes”, “shares” and “re-tweets” to extract information and measure its authority.

Unlike the other two cultural revolutions that I have mentioned, that is, writing and printing, the Web presents a radical change in the conditions for accessing and recovering cultural memory because it introduces new devices for managing meta-memory. The retrieval of information is an epistemic activity that proceeds via the previous classifications of cultural authorities. With the advent of technologies that automate the functions of accessing and recovering memory, meta-memory converges with external memory. What was a central task of cultural organization becomes another outsourced cognition. If I have in mind a line of poetic verse, say, « Let us go then, you and I », but can recall neither the author nor the period and am unable to classify the style, these days I can simply write the line of verse in the text window of a search engine and look at the results. The results are a list of Web sites ranked by an algorithm that considers both relevance and accessibility. This list serves a meta-mnemonic function. The highly improbable combination of words in a line of verse makes possible a sufficiently relevant selection of information that yields the poem from which the line is taken as the first result in the search inquiry.

Search-engines are thus powerful epistemic devices that we trust. We trust their capacity to perform the cognitive function of meta-memory (i.e. navigating through memory) in our place. Today, social networks allow other forms of hierarchisation of authorities, such as the “follow” relation on Twitter, that ranks users’ influence in terms of numbers of followers.

Trusting a result of a search-engine like Google, or trusting information socialy extracted from Twitter is a very different form of trust than the relational form I presented above. It is a form of epistemic trust that is based on different norms and heuristics of justification among which:

-       experience (I have double-checked information retrieved by Google and it was right, so I trust Google in the future),

-       our relation with epistemic authorities,

-       various reputational cues, on cognitive and epistemic properties of communication, and

-       structural features of social networks.

The Web is a “trust machine” that feeds itself with the social information generated by the numerous social networks that exist at different levels: (1) at the structural level structure (the hyperlinks structure), (2) at the level of content (the networks of citations, social bookmarking systems, etc.) and (3) at the level of people (like in social networks in the sense of Facebook or Twitter). The norms and heuristics we apply to each of these levels can be different. At the structural level, we trust the reliability of the algorithms such as PageRank for Google or Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm EdgeRank in sorting the relevant information for us. We can use experience to appreciate their reliability and also social norms: for example, the fact that Google clearly distinguished at its beginnings between advertized content and other forms of content may have been a reason to trust this search engine more than others at its onset. Google used a lot of  cues of honesty as good informant[30], like the public image of “being nice”, the clean homepage of the search engine without any advertisement or extra-information, etc. The PageRank algorithm has also a special status among search algorithms, because it bases its searches on a measure of authority of a website that is fundamentally the same as the measure of “impact” in the academic world. That is, a website is more authoritative if it receives more links from other, authoritative websites. This is exactly the way in which the research community defines its own measure of prestige, or authority: the prestige of a publication depends on its impact, that is, on the number of citations it receives in other publications. The very measure of prestige used by Google has its own prestige and it is therefore a credible cue of being a good informant for the users.

Most of the cues of credibility that users apply to the structural level (1), are applied also to level (2), that is, the level of content. But the Web itself is not the only producer of trustful signs for this level: previous classifications, labels, and titles influence the level of trust of the users. A piece of research content coming from an influential author of from an influential academic journal or institution will be considered more credible than a piece of content coming from the unknown author of a blog. As for the level (3), either we trust people coming from previous, extra-web, trusted networks (our old friends, our colleagues, people coming from the same school, etc.), or we develop new trust relationship through conversational exchanges and mutual exchange of information. The « stance of trust »[31] displayed in social communication through the Web is both fundamental and fragile: we need a minimal trust in order to get in contact with other people and enter new networks and conversations. That is why all the social networks that work well are characterized by the presence of a trustful atmosphere, a “halo” of trust and friendliness that is the trace that people share a stance of trust as a pre-condition for constructing a communicative space.

As we can see, in all these cases, the trust we put at work is an epistemic attitude and not purely a matter of strategic choice: we cannot choose not to trust, because we would not have any alternative access to information. But we can try to develop more sophisticated strategies of vigilance about the norms endorsed by these systems, and, when possible, their technical design. In what follows, I will try to develop the distinction between strategic vs. epistemic trust, by relying on my previous work on epistemic trust and then see how this notion applies to the case of trust online and may help explaining some conundrums of trust in the digital environments.

4. Default Trust and Epistemic Vigilance

Epistemic trust is an even more intractable notion than trust itself. I have tried to elucidate elsewhere what does it mean to trust in epistemic authority[32]. Here I will briefly summarize my main point on epistemic trust. As I said, epistemic trust is not relational: it is deferential, that is, it implies a fundamental asymmetry between the trustee and the truster. It is a form of more or less justified deference to various authorities. In epistemic matters, we do not « transfer » our power to someone else who will represent our will: rather we surrender our reasons to the epistemic authority of someone else whom we judge in a better position to get the information we need to get. We do not choose to trust. In most situations we just do not have the choice. A trustful attitude is thus a starting point, a default stance from which we begin to navigate the thick informational world around us.

The default trustful attitude that I am advocating here as a core element of epistemic trust is not just a gullible attitude, although it may expose us to the risk of gullibility. Many authors have argued for an epistemic justification of trust. In his book on the genealogy of epistemic virtues[33], Bernard Williams, for example, puts trust as a fundamental ingredient in the evolution of the norms of truth-telling. Edward Craig has argued as well that the capacity of trusting a “good-informant” on the basis of some indirect cues of competence and sincerity is epistemically more fundamental than that of seeking directly true information[34].

Most human beings have bits of information from which others may benefit. The Web has revealed this fundamental trait of socially distributed information in a dramatic way. Surfing on what other people know make us learn faster than going ourselves looking for the right piece of content. Emulation and conformism (trust what the others think, and conform your behaviour to theirs) are powerful evolutionary strategies for the survival of groups[35].

Yet, if a trustful attitude is a default condition to start any process of information seeking in information-dense environments, we need strategies to allocate our trust in a balanced way and avoid gullibility. That is, we need to balance trust with a vigilant attitude. A vigilant attitude is in my sense not a pre-condition of trust: it is developed within the trust relationship. For example, paying attention to some cues of consistency in conversation is an example of a vigilant attitude once we have already accepted to share a minimal trust with our interlocutor, that is, to accept to talk to her or him. Evidence shows that social networks’ users have this vigilant attitude, not towards the information they share, but towards the information they acquire through the social interactions. Developing trust of the social Web is a necessary condition to make it a powerful epistemic tool. Without a massive sharing of information, we could not acquire so much knowledge by navigating online. We pay the price of a “blind trust” in sharing to get the advantage of a vigilant acquisition of information[36].

Many of the vigilant strategies are under our control, like monitoring the behaviour of our interlocutors, in order gather information about his or her past records, etc.  but not all. Networked information displays some biases that are difficult to control and to monitor by its users. And the fact that we must share first in order to get something relevant from the social web puts us in an asymmetric situation that can creates pernicious effects that explain the puzzle of trust I have started with.

5. Trust in networks

The social Web enhances strategies of deference and epistemic trust by making information available through social networks. The Twitter mind deploys a follower-leader strategy, by giving epistemic advantages to those who choose the right leaders to follow, that is, the good informants. Yet, trust in these social networks is thus crucially different from trust in social relations as depicted in standard visions of society.

Networks have notorious biases and properties that are not immediately compatible with the construction of a distributed democracy of knowledge, as the Web seemed to promise. First of all, networks such as the Web are aristocratic: this means that information tends to concentrate around few authorities to which everybody refer and the more its concentrates in this way, the more probable is that those few authorities become even more authoritative (the notorious rich get richer effect). Networks are hierarchical, enhance authority asymmetries and encourage the development of techniques of control such as the production of evaluations, rating and ranking systems that simplify the organization of information[37].

We are living is a networked information society: that means that information is organized in networks that display hierarchical properties and authority effects that may not be compatible with a democratic use of information. In order to have a vigilant attitude towards information we receive from the networks, we should be aware of the structural effects of hierarchisation of information that are built-in the system. Collective decisions systems and systems of aggregation of information are usually designed to balance these effects. Is the social web designed in such a way? Unfortunately, the answer is in the hand of few people and it is less than clear that the motivation in designing the connecting features of the web is that of balancing these effects.

5. Solving the Puzzle: Default Trustful Attitude and Reliance on Reputational Cues

Trust in networks is thus a complex epistemic attitude that mixes various social and cognitive competences and is modelled by the belonging of each individual to these reticular structures. Two central components of this complex attitude are worth describing because they may help solving the puzzle I have presented above:

(1)  A default trustful attitude that shapes our communicative practices. As I said, we do not choose to trust others. We are permanently immerged in social relations that make us gain knowledge about the world. We can be vigilant, but without a default trustful attitude that disposes us to learn from others and accepts what they say, we would risk to loose too much relevant information. In epistemic trust, considerations of relevance seem to overrule considerations of accountability.

(2)  A strong reliance on reputational cues that have cumulated through a number of interactions with the networked system over time. Reputation both helps fashion collective processes of knowledge and is a central criterion for extracting information from these systems. It is a fundamental shortcut for cumulating knowledge in processes of collective wisdom. It is also an ineluctable filter. In an environment where sources are in constant competition for attention and direct verification is unavailable, rankings and ratings allow us to have and use information. Our minds can never investigate or manipulate the world in solitude. The greater our uncertainty about the content of information, the stronger our reliance on the opinions of others to evaluate this content. Just as our lore is woven into the fabric of our sentences, our concern for reputation is woven into the fabric of our social network systems. This claim is in part conceptual, in part empirical. Even if not all such systems reflect this passion for ranking, we can expect those that do will generate more epistemically reliable products than those that do not.

These two features of epistemic trust in web-based social networks may help to solve the puzzle of the “enchanted trust” on Internet in opposition with the “disenchanted trust” typical of mature democracies and explain why people so naïvely trust on Internet. As I said, these two forms of trust are deeply different, the first one being a cognitive posture we need to take in order to filter the too thick amount of information we have to parse.

6. Reducing the epistemic deficit: assessment devices and epistemic responsibility

How can we try to reconcile these two radically different trust attitudes? If we want to make of Internet a public, democratic space that enhances egalitarian social relations, we should try to balance the “wild” forces of the social networks by providing devices and techniques that help reducing the epistemic deficit that societies of knowledge are creating between lay-people and IT-based expertise. It is important also to distinguish between the classical deferential relations to experts (human experts) and the new forms of deference generated by “automata-experts” such as search engines and many other IT-based products whose algorithms filter information. People trust search-algorithms, reputation algorithms etc. as if the relevance of the information they get from them was so high that costs of questioning the way in which they got the information were perceived as prohibitive. But they are not prohibitive and there are plenty of ways of “unpacking” the systems and make people more aware of the biases and effects that influence the results.

As democracies have thrived by developing forms of “disenchanted trust”, a democratic networked e-society should encourage the production and spreading of devices whose aim is to assess the credibility of the systems that produce the so-called “trusted information”. Trusted information comes very often packed in rankings. Examples of rankings are: hierarchies of results generated by a search engine, where the results at the top are perceived as “more trustworthy” than those in a lower position; rating systems, such as indicators[38] of quality, that is, a named, rank-ordered, simplified and processed piece of data that purports to represent the past or projected performance of different unit, or a classification system; influence measures, such as the number of “likes” or scores that measure the social impact of an individual or a company on the Web[39]. All these devices, although they constitute a new form of “social objectivity”, have biases and can be potentially manipulated. A responsible use of these devices goes with an awareness of the users of the possible biases and manipulations. A society of knowledge as the one that new technologies have made possible will thrive only if we will develop rules and regulation to protect the epistemic trust of citizens. Rankings should be multiplied on different supports according to different scales, to avoid winner-takes-it all effects and informational cascades.

Furthemore, social networks are today a dangerous cocktail of user-supplied content (what we put online on our profiles), open APIs and client-side code, that is, computer programs that are executed on the clients’ browser and allow thus web pages to be scripted so that their content can change according to the users’ input[40]. The use of these technologies should be controlled and security enhances. APIs and Web applications that abuse users’ trust (for example by diffusing private information or automatically executing programmes on behalf of the users) should be forbidden.

The same thing should be said for the imperialistic use of Facebook and Twitter. Governments and IT-research centers should encourage the construction of a multitude of public social networks and a variety of public search engines, in order to avoid the risks of the monopoly of information within the hands of few big actors such as Facebook, Twitter and Google. Technologies that are designed to protect users’ epistemic trust should be encouraged, while those who “free-ride” on the trustful dispositions of social networks’ users should be sanctioned.

7. Conclusion

I have argued that the trustful attitude that characterizes social networks users should be balanced by a vigilant attitude of epistemic responsibility not only from the perspective of the producers of information, but also from the perspective of consumers of information[41]. We are not condemned to passively trust information crunched by new technologies of expertise. We still have the means to check whether our practices of production and acquisition of information are based on reliable processes, or just on passively accepted social norms or humdrum cognitive habits. We can always ask ourselves: “Why do I trust a Google search, or a Harvard University Press book, or an authoritative voice?”

An epistemically responsible attitude should be encouraged at the individual level and at the institutional one. We should promote the assessment of credible, open-access procedures of endorsement of authority. Wikipedia has been a model of institutionalizing new practices of certification and norms of credibility. Yet, Wikipedia is itself victim of its success and - as a network effect – its weight is growing so much that it becomes difficult to contrast its authority with other similar projects. At an institutional level, a diversity of projects should be promoted in order to balance these pernicious network effects.

A society of knowledge is growing in a way that seems incompatible with a growing demand of open-access, trusted, accountable information. This seems paradoxical, and fixing the paradox is the first step to regain a coherent image of ourselves as free epistemic subjects.

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[1] Bower, J. L.  and Christensen, C. M. (1995), Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave, «Harvard Business Review», 73, 1: 43-53

[2] Hindman, M. (2008), The Myth of Digital Democracy , Princeton University Press.

[3] Cf. on this point the recent book edited by Elster; J. &  Landemore, H. (2012) Collective Wisdom, Cambridge University Press.

[4] Cf. Mark Davis’ (Microsoft) presentation of the EC Onlife Manifesto Initiative, Brussels, February 8^th, 2013, accessible at: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/sites/digital-agenda/files/Onlife_Initiative.pdf

[5] Bohman, J. (2004) Expanding Dialogue. The Internet, The Public Sphere, and the Prospects for International Democracy, «The Sociological Review», 52: 131-155.

[6] Sustein, C. (2009), Republic.com 2.0, Princeton University Press.

[7] Cf. Habermas, J.  (1999) Der europäische nationalstaat unter dem Druck der Globalisierung (Lo Stato Nazione europeo sotto la pressione della mondializzazione) in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 4.

[8] Cf. data on Pew Internet & American Life Project at: http://www.pewinternet.org/Topics/Activities-and-Pursuits/Politics.aspx?typeFilter=5

[9] Cf. for example, Pettit, P.  (20) 4, Reliance, Trust and Internet, “Analyse & Kritik”, 26: 2004, 108-121. http://analyse-und-kritik.net/en/2004-1/AK_Pettit_2004.pdf ;  McGeer, V. (2004) Developing Trust on the Internet, “Analyse & Kritik”, 26: 2004,  91-107.

[10] On trust and democracy, cf. Warren, M. E. (1999) (ed.), Democracy and Trust, Cambridge University Press.

[11] Cf. on this point Dunn, J. (1988) Trust and political agency, in Diego Gambetta (ed.), Trust:

Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 

[12] I borrow the expression “from custom to code” to Rom Harré (1990) Trust and its surrogates: psychological foundations of political process in Warren (cit.), ch. 8.

[13] Cf. Warren (cit.) but also Hardin (ed.) (2004) Distrust, Russell Sage Foundation, NY.

[14] Cf. Dwyer, C., Hiltz, S. R., Passerini, K. (2007) Trust and Privacy Concerns within Social networking Sites. A comparison between Facebook and MySpace,” Proceedings of the Thirteen American Conference on Information Systems”, Keyston, Colorado 9-12 August.

[15] Citation in a blog: http://themaniblog.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/on-human-rights-on-the-internet/

[16] See on this point Chris Anderson’s article on the Death of the Web on Wired: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1

[17] Source: http://gking.harvard.edu/gking/files/censored.pdf

[18] Cf. Grigoriadis, V. (2009) Do you own Facebook or does Facebook own you? http://nymag.com/news/features/55878/index2.html

[19] Cf. Hardin, R. (1992) The Street Level Epistemology of Trust, “Analyse und Kritik”, 14, 154-174.

[20] Cf. Baier, A. (1986) Trust and Antitrust, “Ethics”, 96, 231-260; Jones, K. (2012) Trustworthiness, “Ethics”, 61-85.

[21] See Hardin 2004 (cit.).

[22] Cf. Hardin, R. (2004) Distrust. Manifestations and Management in Hardin, H. (ed.) Distrust, Russell Sage Foundation, NY, p. 4.

[23] McGeer (2004) cit, Pettit (2004) cit.

[24] Cf. Mindus, P., Greppi, A. Cuono, M. (2011) Legitimacy, 2.0, p. 70, http://uppsala.academia.edu/PatriciaMindus/Books/

[25] Cf. on this point, Origgi, G. (2002) Per una scienza cognitiva di Internet  « Sistemi Intelligenti », XIV, n.2, pp. 269-286; Origgi, G. (2003) Ricerche su Internet,  “La Rivista dei Libri”, dicembre.

[26] Cf. Kleinberg, J. (2000) The Structure of the Web, “Science”, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/294/5548/1849.summary

[27] Cf. Morris, M.R., Counts, S. et al. (2012) Tweeting is Believing? Understanding Microblog Credibility Perceptions, CSCW 2012, Washington, Seattle, 11-15 February.

[28] http://googleblog.blogspot.fr/2011/02/update-to-google-social-search.html

[29] Cf. Cardon, D. (2013) Du lien au like. Deux mésures de la reputation sur Internet, in Origgi; G. (ed.) La Réputation, COMMUNICATIONS, Seuil, Paris.

[30] For the notion of good informant see Craig, E. (1990) Knowledge and the State of Nature, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

[31] Cf. Origgi, G. (2008) A Stance of Trust, in Origgi, G. (2008) A Stance of Trust in María Luisa Mora Millán (ed.) “Estudios en homenaje a José Luis Guijarro Morales”, Universidad de Cadiz, ISBN 978-84-9828187-3, 187-200.

[32] Cf. Origgi, G. (2004) Is Trust an Epistemological Notion? Episteme, 1, 1; G. Origgi (2005) What Does it Mean to Trust in Epistemic Authority? http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:130569

[33] Cf. Williams, B. (2002) Truth and Truthfulness, Princeton UP.

[34] Cf. Craig cit.

[35] See. Boyd, R. and Richerson, P.J. (2002) Not by Genes Alone; Sperber, D. Origgi, G. et al. (2010) “Epistemic Vigilance”, Mind and Language, 25, 4, pp. 359-393.

[36] Cf. Morris, M.R. et al. (2012) (cit.).

[37] See Origgi, G. (2012) A Social Epistemology of Reputation, “Social Epistemology”, 26, 399-418.

[38] For an analysis of indicators see: Davis, K.E., Kingsbury, B. and Merry, S.E., (2012) Indicators as a Technology of Global Governance, “Law and Society Review”, 46, 1, pp. 71-104.

[39] See for example the Klout score: www.klout.com

[40] See Devin, S.M. (2008) Anti-Social Networking: Exploiting Trusting Environment of Web 2.0, “Network Security”, 11.

[41] Cf. Origgi, G. (2010) Epistemic Vigilance and Epistemic Responsibility in the Liquid World of Scientific Publications, “Social Epistemology”, 24, 3, 149-159; Origgi, G. (2012) Epistemic Injustice and Epistemic Trust, “Social Epistemology”, 26, 2, 221-23 .