“We solve questions of cognitive authority by employing our already formed stocks of beliefs and preferences. If we did not do so, we could never know what to think of anything said or read.”

Patrick Wilson, Second-Hand Knowledge

How do you know what strawberries taste like? How do you know how to get to work? How do you know what causes the moon’s phases? How do you know whether a vaccine is effective and safe? How do you know…?

We don’t often reflect on how we know what we know. Some things we know by firsthand experience, like the taste of strawberries, but most things in modern life are “second-hand knowledge,” for which we rely on others. In his 1983 book Second-Hand Knowledge: An Inquiry into Cognitive Authority, Patrick Wilson establishes this distinction and explores its consequences. In this post, I attempt to summarize the main points of his book.

Where does second-hand knowledge come from, and how do we know we can trust it? The people we get our second-hand knowledge from are called cognitive authorities. These are different than other kinds of authorities, because they cannot impose their authority on their own; rather, their authority has to be granted by others. The basis for cognitive authority may be partly in educational credentials and expertise, but these can lead us astray as often as not.

Our cognitive authorities participate in the knowledge industry—that which produces knowledge through research and other forms of inquiry. What knowledge is produced in this industry, and how, is largely a matter of taste and community norms. What ends up counting as knowledge is the set of questions that a group of researchers takes to be closed, if these people are seen as cognitive authorities. In this light, the main work of the knowledge industry is not to produce knowledge per se, but to produce cognitive authority within its membership.

Now, it is not just individual people who have cognitive authority, but also institutions. The foremost knowledge institution is science. But the knowledge industry also includes history, criticism, and technology. (Wilson classifies the social sciences as a kind of history “of the present,” as they are mostly about description and interpretation rather than prediction.) The extent to which any of these sectors create knowledge is the extent to which they are able to settle/close questions. It is not clear exactly how they are able to do so, but one thing that is clear is that it is not up to them alone to decide.

For each of us, deciding who we should take as a cognitive authority can be difficult. In simpler societies it may be straightforward; but the more complex society is, the more complex is the question of cognitive authority. We are born with certain cognitive authorities through the accident of birth; our first cognitive authorities are our parents, and soon later our peers, and then things may get more complex as we enter different realms of life. In everyday life, we tend not to be discerning about who we consult as cognitive authorities. In fact, our cognitive authorities may signal group membership as much as anything—in the end, our desires to be part of a particular group can actually change what we believe to be true.

The vast majority of people live information-poor lives in small worlds: a self-contained job, not participating in public life, focusing on home, family and entertainment. People like this will not have many questions about cognitive authority. They tend to rely on first-hand knowledge, and they tend to distrust experts on things that they are not familiar with from personal experience. We may lament that anyone is information-poor, but such people can live perfectly dignified and rewarding lives. Moreover, even professionals are not so different from this picture; yes, they may seem to inhabit a larger information world, but their focus is mostly on issues relevant to the profession.

There are people who inhabit very large information worlds, which Wilson calls the intellectuals. In endlessly engaging with second-hand knowledge, they attempt to create the largest view of the world they can. This may seem good, but the problem is they need to solve many questions of cognitive authority… and in the end, the way they ultimately do this is by judgments of intellectual taste, as they cannot be a specialist in everything. This can result in a defective picture of the world, if a large one. Bigger is not better!

Things get even stickier when we reflect on the reality that much of our second-hand knowledge is in textual form. That is, we grant cognitive authority to texts, as well as people and institutions. How might we judge the cognitive authority of a text? We could look at the cognitive authority of the author or the publishing house, or we could look at aspects of the text itself (e.g., its intrinsic plausibility), but there doesn’t seem to be a broadly reliable method.

This being the case, we might wonder what claim libraries and other information systems have to being truly information systems rather than misinformation systems. Living up to this claim would seem to require libraries to be able to adequately judge the information they hold. Yet they, like the intellectuals, are not specialists in everything, and nor are they fully “authorities on authorities.” There is simply too much to know.

So how should libraries be understood? In some contexts, libraries follow the didactic model, in which they take certain questions to be settled. For instance, a theological library may take questions of dogma to be closed ones. On the other hand, libraries may follow the liberal model, in which librarians seek to remain as nonpartisan as possible and present all known sides of a conversation in answer to patron’s questions. In the end, Wilson suggests that the best model of the librarian is that of the skeptic, who remains agnostic on whether true knowledge is possible but continues to inquire, never fully satisfied. (Note: Not the kind of skepticism that denies the possibility of knowledge outright.) Indeed in dealing with the knowledge industry at all, our best attitude toward knowledge is that of skepticism.