I started ScratchTap when my primary field was applied linguistics. This was my venue for exploring issues in writing systems, digital text, and so on. Over the years of my Ph.D., my interests shifted to things like document theory, information behavior and experience, and technology ethics. For the past few years here on ScratchTap (and in my writing elsewhere), those issues have been in the foreground of my writing.
I decided to formalize this shift by moving to a new writing platform, Substack. Follow me there at Ports!
“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.
It’s easy to feel hopeless given the state of the world. Not only are there tons of bad things happening out there, but we have to keep hearing about them. For those of us who want to make the world a better place, this is a tragic situation—what Luciano Floridi calls the Tragedy of the Good Will in his 2013 book The Ethics of Information.
The Tragedy of the Good Will arises from an imbalance between information (what we know) and power (what we can do about it). On one hand, our information technologies and global connections increase our possibilities for doing good in the world. For instance, today I can easily check out GiveWell and find that Malaria Consortium is among the world’s most effective charities and donate to their cause. I can look up information about which political candidates to support, how to improve my teaching, and on and on. But on the other hand, these same technologies also inform me of injustices and misfortunes so numerous that there’s no hope for me to do anything about most of them. Cruelly, just knowing about such problems seems to exert pressure on me to do something… but genocide? corruption? state-sponsored disinformation? rampant conspiracy theories? What can I do about any of these things?
Lately the tragedy seems to be worsening. If so, this could be because things are really getting worse. And when we think of the climate crisis, political polarization and similar issues, it can certainly seem that way. But scholars such as Steven Pinker argue that, broadly speaking, we have never been better off.
If that is the case, then an alternative explanation for our deepening tragedy is that our information–power ratio as getting less balanced. And this is not hard to fathom, given that our news cycle is approaching the attention span of a goldfish, and that we live amidst always-on internet with endless streams of social media content that are continually replenished.
How can we cope in the face of such tipping imbalance?
Less Information
One way, which seems to come naturally to us, is to get less information. We can call it the ostrich approach*: “If I don’t see it, it’s not happening.” Perhaps, sometimes, that’s all we can do. It was part of my own approach, admittedly, when I quit Facebook in mid-2020. But avoidance is hardly a long-term solution, and as Floridi points out, it only fuels the echo chamber/filter bubble phenomenon. We may not like to confront bad news, but on some level we ought to.
* But to be fair to the ostriches among us, evidently they don’t really bury their heads in the sand to avoid information.
Better Information
So if less information is not a good solution, then what about better information? This is what Rutger Bregman counsels in his book Humankind: “Steer clear of television news and push notifications and instead read a more nuanced Sunday paper and in-depth feature writing, whether online or off. Disengage from your screen and meet real people in the flesh. Think as carefully about what information you feed your mind as you do about the food you feed your body” (p. 392). This approach is resonant with the Slow Information movement, encapsulated for instance in the research paper “Information Balance” by Liz Poirier and Lyn Robinson (Journal of Documentation, 2014). The Slow principles (underlying Slow food, Slow travel, Slow art, etc.) entail finding joy in the activities themselves, making deliberate choices, and establishing mindful balance. When it comes to information, faster is not necessarily better, nor is free or short.
If we are suggesting that a weekly newspaper can provide better quality than a journalist’s Twitter feed, what exactly do we mean? In his discussion of information quality in connection with the Tragedy of the Good Will, Floridi names several things that high-quality information provides:
guidance, helping us see what actions are possible and how to do them
feedback, helping us understand how our actions are affecting the world
transparency, showing us what other people and organizations are up to as a constraint on their behavior
forecasting, possibly preventing the worst from occurring
engineering, helping us build our capabilities
Empowerment
Next, the information–power gap could also be closed by increasing our power—something that seems to me to be sitting between the lines of the “better information” solution. Indeed, consider again the Malaria Consortium example above. It is precisely the “better information” provided by GiveWell, which identifies the charities that save or improve the most lives per dollar, that allows me to use my charity dollars in a more powerful way than I could otherwise. This is an example from philanthropy, but what if similarly empowering organizations could sprout up across all domains of human interest?
We could also become empowered as a human race, not just as individuals. Floridi writes that humanity as a whole could be empowered by new information technologies so that we could do things together that we could never accomplish alone. Here Floridi has in mind sociotechnical institutions that function as “supra-individual, global, artificial agents that are hybrids of other artificial agents… and individual people.” Designing such solutions, while desirable, would entail solving a massive coordination problem. How to do so without massive coordination in the first place is troubling.
Design
And finally, writes Floridi, in response to the Tragedy of the Good Will, we must realize that we are not just “users” of the world, but also continual creators of it. When we act in the world, we are not moving about in a static space, but we are contributing to the future state of the world. We are designing the world as we go, however badly. This solution recognizes the possibility of not just rebalancing the information–power equation, but of changing the future states of the underlying world, which ultimately requires us to develop an ecological (or “e-cological,” as Floridi puts it, nodding to the centrality of information technology in the picture) ethics of design.