Le désintéressement. Review of Jon Elster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Gloria Origgi and Judith Simon


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

1: Introduction

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

2: Reputation as Evaluative Social Information

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

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

3: Rational Model for the Epistemic Use of Social Information

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

4: Reputational Tools on the Web

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

References

Alcoff, L. M. (2001). On Judging Epistemic Credibility: Is Social Identity Relevant? Engendering Rationalities. N. Tuana and S. Morgen. Albany, SUNY Press: 53-80.
Barsalou, L. (1995). Flexibility, structure and linguistic vagary in concepts. Theories of Memory. A. F. Collins, S. E. Gathercole, M. A. Conway and P. E. Morris, Psychology Press, Taylor and Francis.
Bowker, G. C. and S. L. Star (1999). Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MIT Press.
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice. Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Lehrer, K. (1990). Metamind. Oxford, Claredon Press.
Lehrer, K. and C. Wagner (1981). Rational Consensus in Science and Society. Dordrecht, Reidel.
Linestone, H. A. and M. Turoff (2002). The Delphi Method: Techniques and Applications, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
Merriam-Webster-Online-Dictionary (2009). Reputation. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.
Origgi, G. (2007). Wine epistemology: The role of reputational and rating systems in the world of wine. Questions of Taste. B. Smith. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 183-197.
Origgi, G. (2009). Designing wisdom through the web. The passion of ranking. Collective Wisdom. J. Elster and H. Landermore. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Scheman, N. (2001). Epistemology Resuscitated: Objectivity as Trustworthiness. Engendering Rationalities. N. Tuana and S. Morgen. Albany, SUNY Press: 23-52.
Simon, J. (2008). Knowledge and Trust in Epistemology and Social Software/ Knowledge Technologies. Culture and identity in knowledge organization: Proceedings of the Tenth International ISKO Conference. C. Arsenault and J. T. Tennis. Montréal, Canada, Würzburg: Ergon: 216-221.
Simon, J. (2009). MyChoice & Traffic Lights of Trustworthiness: Where Epistemology Meets Ethics in Developing Tools for Empowerment and Reflexivity. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics, Corfu, Nomiki Bibliothiki.

Robinson 2009 - Perché è davvero difficile scomparire

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


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

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

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

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

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

Tréma, dieresi.. .. .. ..

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

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

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

A short story of the tréma, for Raphaël

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


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

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


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

Raphaël

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

Obama's mama

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

Translated into English by Stash Luczkiw

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Ranking che passione

Copyright Micromega 2009. Do not quote or reproduce without permission.


Uno spettro si aggira per l’Europa: lo spettro delle misure oggettive di valutazione della ricerca. Liste, classifiche, agenzie di valutazione, sistemi bibliometrici prolificano, si incrociano, si accumulano in un mosaico complesso di indici, voti, tassonomie da far girare la testa al povero professor Vaccadamus che nient’altro aveva fatto finora che stare seduto dietro alla scrivania, munito di pantofole, sciarpa, carta e penna, a scrivere spensierato pagine su pagine per il solo bene della conoscenza o dei suoi affezionatissimi studenti. Finita la libertà, finita l’ingenuità dello studioso isolato dal mondo: la macchina razionale ha investito anche noi poveri accademici, la modernità non perdona, il processo di razionalizzazione delle pratiche umane, nel quale Max Weber vedeva l’essenza stessa della modernità, travolge al suo passaggio le vecchie abitudini, i rituali e le piccole usanze dei mondi antichi, in un cieco tendere verso un optimum universale, condivisibile e razionale.

E ben venga. Perché le vecchie abitudini, i rituali e le usanze del mondo antico accademico nascondono, e neanche tanto bene, il peggio dei pubblici vizi: nepotismo, assenza di selezione nel vagliare il corpo docenti, mancanza di incentivi alla produzione scientifica di qualità, relazioni baronali con gli studenti, meschinerie, mediocrità, pubblicazioni vanitose a zero valore scientifico distribuite da misteriose case editrici accademiche locali, le varie Copli, Clupi, Clop, Cbup, praticamente pubblicazioni in conto autore, libri che non circoleranno mai al di fuori dei commissari del concorso accademico destinato all’autore e dei familiari fieri del figlio eruditissimo che mostreranno il volume agli amici nella biblioteca del salotto. E poi l’impunità: non c’è errore, sgarro, mancanza che non possa essere perdonato dall’inerzia del sistema. Concorsi truccati senza conseguenze, plagio nelle pubblicazioni senza che questo scalfisca neanche di un graffio il pomposo e localissimo prestigio del plagiario: uno dei casi più spettacolari di quest’ultimo vizio tutto italico fu quello dello stimato professor Stefano Zamagni, professore ordinario di Economia all’università di Bologna, il quale, colto a copiare intere pagine del filosofo Robert Nozick - attività che dovrebbe comportare l’esclusione immediata e non ritrattabile dalla comunità accademica - non solo non subì alcuna sanzione da parte della comunità degli economisti italiani, ma anzi, fu difeso da vari colleghi che attaccarono il suo denunciatore, invocando il plagio come pratica normale di diffusione del pensiero, o sulla base di giustificazioni ancora più stravaganti, come quella data da una sua collega bolognese: “Almeno Zamagni copia da buoni autori!”. Caso analogo, più recente, quello del plagio di Umberto Galimberti, che, avendo copiato nel suo libro L’ospite inquietante (Feltrinelli, 2007) intere pagine dal libro di Giulia Sissa, Il piacere e il male. Sesso droga e filosofia, (sempre Feltrinelli 1999), fu difeso da professoroni e intelettuali italiani - tra i quali personaggi del calibro di Gianni Vattimo e Emanuele Severino - sulla base del semplice argomento secondo cui in fondo tutta la storia della filosofia è una storia di scoppiazzature, e dunque, che male c’è??

Bene, la festa è finita, l’Europa ci impone nuovi standard di qualità accademica - conseguenza della dichiarazione di Bologna del 1999 - in vista della costruzione di uno spazio europeo per l’istruzione universitaria con standard parificati: l’Agenzia europea per la garanzia della qualità dell’istruzione universitaria (ENQUA - www.enqua.eu ) associa fondazioni e associazioni nazionali in tutti gli stati europei che realizzano inchieste e valutazioni di qualità nelle università cercando di armonizzarle in uno standard generale. Tra i criteri di qualità più importanti, vi è quello del valore e dello statuto delle pubblicazioni di ricerca prodotte dalle università. Come decidere? Come valutare in un continente multilingue, multitradizione, ciò che è buono e ciò che non lo è? Quali criteri si applicano alla valutazione di un articolo accademico, il famoso paper che assilla la carriera dell’universitario? Il problema non è semplice, ed è ancora più spinoso nel caso delle cosiddette scienze umane. Perché, se per gli scienziati è ancora possibile appellarsi a criteri di qualità “oggettivi” e misurabili quantitativamente (robustezza degli esperimenti, replicabilità, numero di brevetti derivati da una scoperta, etc.) per tutti gli altri questa trasparenza è più difficile da stabilire. Nell’era moderna della produzione accademica anonima e a scala industriale, i linguaggi quantitativi della scienza hanno, al di là del loro valore metodologico oggi sempre più messo in discussione, un valore comunicativo: in un mondo in cui gli scienziati lavorano sugli stessi paradigmi agli antipodi geografici, il formato quantitativo in cui un risultato è espresso ne permette una lettura universale: chiunque padroneggi quel linguaggio tecnico è in grado di decodificare il contenuto delle stringate statistiche che riassumono un complesso esperimento, espresse a volte in non più di 800 parole, formato obbligatorio della rivista Nature, la più autorevole delle riviste scientifiche. Anche se è difficile parlare ingenuamente oggi di “verità” di un risultato scientifico, possiamo comunque dire che il formato quantitativo - la sua comunicabilità e replicabilità - permette di controllare la qualità di ciò che viene detto nella scienza in modo sufficientemente robusto da filtrare nelle riviste l’informa-zione più pertinente per l’avanzamento di un certo campo di conoscenze. Certo, tutto ciò è sottomesso alle irregolarità e tendenze del sistema “scienza”, che nessuno considera più come una torre d’avorio protetta dalle pressioni della società, ma che è soggetta alle influenze detereminate dagli interessi economici, dalle politiche ideologiche, insomma, da tutto l’insieme di forze sociali a cui qualsiasi sistema di produzione sottostà. Ci sono dunque cento pesi e cento misure per ogni disciplina, e i programmi di ricerca che hanno più finanziamenti e più pubblicazioni sono quelli che corrispondono al trend di interessi e di valori stabilito dai grandi organismi di finanziamento nazionali e sovranazionali, come in Europa i programmi quadro (Framework Programmes) della Commissione Europea, i programmi EUROCORES della European Science Foundation, o, negli Stati Uniti, la National Science Foundation (http://www.nsf.gov/). Le neuroscienze e le nanotecnologie per esempio hanno visto un successo senza precedenti nei finanziamenti degli ultimi 10 anni, il che spiega la loro onnipresenza anche mediatica, a scapito di altri programmi, come per esempio l’intelligenza artificiale, che hanno subito una drastica riduzione dei fondi.

Ciò detto, se per le scienze, soprattutto quelle formalizzate, c’è ancora un qualche barlume di senso oggettivo della qualità, la questione è molto più delicata nel mondo degli umanisti e dei cosidetti social scientists. Tutto l’apparato accademico di pubblicazioni, dal riconoscimento scientifico, al sistema di peer-review, è basato sul modello, peraltro molto antico, del paper delle scienze esatte. E come adattare questo modello nelle scienze umane non è evidente. In realtà, non c’è stato grande sforzo di adattamento, solo di trasferimento dei criteri di produzione scientifica da un ambito all’altro, e di formattazione del sapere nelle stesse griglie: un filosofo, uno storico o un esperto di Settecento letterario finlandese, dovranno confezionare articoli con un formato non dissimile a quello dei giornali di fisica - titolo, abstract, parole chiave, ringraziamenti agli organismi finanziatori del progetto, testo e bibliografia - spedire l’articolo al journal accademico, aspettare il giudizio di due colleghi a cui l’articolo viene inviato per referaggio dalla redazione del journal, integrare le eventuali modifiche se l’articolo è stato accettato e aspettare pazienti la pubblicazione. La pubblicazione, se la rivista è referenziata, metterà in circolo l’articolo nei vari sistemi di citazione internazionali, come il Citation Index, e l’articolo acquisirà pian piano una sua reputazione, un suo ranking basato su una semplicissima misura: l’impatto, ossia quante volte l’articolo è citato negli articoli degli altri. A parte quest’ultima fase di messa in circolo automatica grazie al Citation Index, su cui ritornerò presto, i meccanismi di produzione del paper accademico indicato sopra non sono molto diversi da quelli della prima pubblicazione accademica della storia, le Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, che cominciarono a uscire regolarmente nel 1665, circa vent’anni dopo che un gruppo di “filosofi naturali” particolarmente affascinati dalla nuova cultura sperimentale, cominciarono a incontrarsi regolarmente a Londra e a stabilire le nuove regole del gioco della scienza moderna, basate sulla sperimentazione, il disinteresse per il guadagno economico e l’importanza della diffusione dei risultati scientifici nel pubblico dominio. E’ proprio intorno alla Royal Society, con personaggi del calibro di Robert Boyle, John Walkins, Robert Hooke e, successivamente, Issac Newton, che prende corpo una certa concezione della proprietà intellettuale nella scienza, ancora oggi alla base dell’autorevolezza scientifica. In primo luogo, la comunità degli scienziati è una comunità di pari: ci si ritrova tra happy few tutti ben informati sulle discussioni scientifiche in corso, si discutono le nuove idee in circolazione, le quali diventeranno verità scientifiche solo dopo l’approvazione di un numero di colleghi. In secondo luogo, queste verità non possono essere oggetto di proprietà: nessuno scienziato degno di questo nome può acquisire diritti su ciò che scopre, perché si scoprono fatti che riguardano la natura, e la natura è di tutti. Lo scienziato potrà quindi acquisire solo benefici secondari dalla sua scoperta, ossia, il prestigio e il riconoscimento della comunità, e gli eventuali brevetti che possono derivare dalla sua scoperta e che possono dare benefici economici. La storia dell’autorità accademica nasce dunque separata dall’inizio da quella dell’autorità intellettuale: i diritti d’autore, le leggi sul copyright che cominciano a stabilirsi intorno alla prima metà del Settecento in Inghiterra e in Francia, non comprenderanno l’autore scientifico, ma solo l’invenzione, la creazione letteraria. Così, i brevetti proteggeranno l’invenzione tecnologica, ma mai la verità scientifica, che deve restare bene comune dell’umanità. Lo scienziato gentiluomo è dunque un essere disinteressato, che indaga la verità per il bene di tutti, e che mette i suoi risultati a disposizione grazie ai bollettini delle societés savantes, di cui la Royal Society è il primo esempio. Addirittura Robert Boyle incoraggiava la pratica della pubblicazione anonima, perché anche il riconoscimento personale gli sembrava legato al volgare mondo degli interessi contrapposto all’aulico mondo delle idee.

Sebbene il fair-play del filosofo naturale settecentesco si è decisamente perso nel gioco al massacro delle carriere scientifiche contemporanee, dove orde di giovani ambiziosissimi si riducono a lotte al coltello per decidere dell’ordine dei nomi degli autori di un articolo, alcune regole tutte sui generis di questo regime di produzione intellettuale resistono: un giornale accademico è tale solo se è una pubblicazione peer-review, ossia se il contenuto che pubblica è filtrato dalla comunità di pari di una certa disciplina scientifica. La ricerca deve essere giudicata originale dalla comunità di pari. Gli autori che pubblicano su questi giornali non sono pagati per la loro pubblicazione, perché si considera faccia parte del loro lavoro mettere a disposizione della comunità allargata i loro risultati su queste riviste e perché, come per i filosofi naturali, nessuno può avere diritti speciali su un fatto del mondo: i fatti sono di tutti. I benefici di una pubblicazione sono dunque tutti indiretti: impatto, riconoscimento, prestigio, che, se per i filosofi chic del Settecento potevano essere valori in sé, oggi hanno valore soprattutto se si traducono in avanzamento di carriera, migliori stipendi, migliore accesso ai fondi di ricerca.
L’applicazione di questo concetto di autorità scientifica nelle scienze umane e sociali fu un dato di fatto più che una scelta ideologica: l’evoluzione dell’accademia in un dispositivo di organizzazione del sapere in discipline a partire dall’inizio dell’Ottocento - grazie soprattutto al modello organizzativo delle università tedesche - creò pian piano la figura dell’accademico come “funzionario” del sapere, estendibile anche all’erudito oltre che allo scienziato. L’accademico assume così il ruolo di “vestale” di un corpus di conoscenze: deve mantenerlo, farlo evolvere, proteggerlo a volte dalle interferenze esterne, trasmetterlo alla prossima generazione...Così, a partire dall’Ottocento, le sociétés savantes cominciano a proliferare anche nelle discipline letterarie e storiche, con criteri simili a quelli delle società scientifiche; comunità di pari, dedizione alla verità, disinteresse e oggettività. Ma sappiamo bene che l’intellettuale, il letterato o lo studioso di scienza politica è sottoposto a ben altre pressioni oggi che a quelle di fare evolvere il corpus della sua disciplina. Se il modello dell’accademico nella torre d’avorio della sua disciplina si è effettivamente mantenuto soprattutto nelle università americane di oggi, costruite sul modello tedesco, l’intellettuale europeo, e forse anche quello indiano o sudamericano, è più “organico”: il suo riconoscimento passa dalla sua partecipazione alla scena pubblica intellettuale e civile, al suo scrivere sui giornali non accademici, pubblicare nelle case editrici prestigiose, vendere copie dei suoi libri, prendere posizioni politiche pubbliche, insomma, tutto un lavoro che conterà pochissimo per il suo impatto accademico “formale”, ma che sta alla base del suo vero riconoscimento in quanto intellettuale di impatto. E nella società del riconoscimento, delle economies de la grandeur, per usare la bella espressione di Luc Boltanski e Laurent Thévénot , rinunciare all’onore pubblico per il bene dei sistemi di citazione, soprattutto in paesi in cui la buona reputazione accademica non ha nessuna conseguenza sulla carriera, il guadagno e le migliori condizioni di lavoro, è davvero difficile. Eccomi qui, per esempio, a scrivere su una delle più prestigiose riviste culturali italiane, Micromega, la quale, non essendo un giornale peer-reviewed, non aumenterà il mio impatto accademico, benché aumenti molto di più di tante mie pubblicazioni in misteriosi journals, il mio “capitale simbolico” di intellettuale.

Ma davvero c’è una dicotomia tra sistemi razionali e oggettivi e capitale simbolico contingente e storicamente situato, come spesso viene rivendicato da coloro che non vogliono piegarsi alla logica dei sistemi scientometrici? In realtà la questione è più sottile, perché i sistemi cosiddetti “razionali” e oggettivi sono anch’essi dispositivi con una storia, una sociologia e un insieme di tendenze e di influenze che vanno ben al di là del puro calcolo razionale. Non c’è quindi contrapposizione tra oggettività e contesti locali storici: ogni dispositivo che crea un regime di conoscenza è il frutto in parte di una storia accidentale e ne porta le tracce. Per esempio, chi decide quali sono i journals che contano per la carriera accademica? Esistono più di ventimila riviste peer reviewed nel mondo e certo non tutte con lo stesso impatto. La differenza di impatto di un articolo su Nature e di uno sul Journal of Advances in Colloid and Interface Science, anche sullo stesso argomento, è incomparabile, tanto che la maggior parte degli scienziati “top” considera pubblicazioni scientifiche serie solo quelle che escono su Nature e Science, e relega il resto a una variante della vanity press. La maggior parte delle riviste scientifiche hanno pochissima rilevanza, la media dei lettori per articolo sui peer-reviewed journals è di 1,5, ossia un lettore e mezzo compreso l’autore che va a rimirarsi il suo capolavoro nel portale on line della rivista accademica. La storia dei sistemi scientometrici spiega da sola la formazione di un primo “ranking’ di journals, poi ripreso, modificato, razionalizzato negli ultimi vent’anni da comitati, fondazioni, istituzioni che vedevano nella classifica delle pubblicazioni l’unico strumento di categorizzazione del pasticciato universo accademico.

Il Science Citation Index fu inventato nei primi anni Sessanta dal signor Eugene Garfield e dal suo ISI - Institute for Scientific Information, frutto del sogno informatico dell’epoca di poter registrare qualsiasi informazione in potenti database. Fu la creazione, insomma, di un repertorio di riviste accademiche, senza nessun obiettivo di valutazione: le riviste che venivano repertoriate erano quelle che Garfield riusciva a scovare per ogni disciplina, che rispettassero i criteri, storici e intuitivi, del peer-review, della rilevanza per la comunità di pari, etc etc. Molte sfuggirono alla rete di Garfield per pura mancanza di visibilità, e oggi il Citation Index conta circa 5600 riviste repertoriate, ossia, molte meno delle ventimila riviste peer-reviewed. Presto Garfield si accorse che i criteri di accettazione di una rivista di “scienze dure” nel Citation Index non potevano essere completamente uguali a quelli delle riviste umanistiche o di scienze sociali, cosa che lo spinse a costituire un Social Science Citation Index e un Arts and Humanities Citation Index. Il servizio era venduto alle università come un modo alternativo e oggettivo di misurare l’impatto delle pubblicazioni dei propri ricercatori. Ovviamente il servizio era a pagamento, e lo è tutt’ora, ossia il signor Garfield ci teneva a guadagnare con tutto ciò e non semplicemente a dare voti dall’alto della sua saggezza alle pubblicazioni accademiche. Il sistema funziona, come ho detto, calcolando l’impatto: un articolo ha impatto a seconda di quante volte viene citato in altri articoli. Ma la scientometria evolveva, e a partire da questa scarna misura si potevano calcolare molte altre misure, ossia, attribuire un ranking più alto alle riviste che avevano più articoli con più impatto, facendo così risalire l’autore e la rivista in un circolo virtuoso di successo sempre crescente dove chi è famoso rende famoso tutto ciò che tocca: la rivista dove pubblica, i colleghi con cui pubblica, gli argomenti su cui pubblica. Effetto correlato, la rivista, una volta resa famosa dal magico circolo virtuoso, illumina tutti gli autori che vi pubblicano, tutti complicati effetti di sistema, alcuni prevedibili e giustificabili, altri francamente spiacevoli e ben poco razionali, come il famoso Mathiew effect studiato dal sociologo Robert Merton, secondo cui, come nel Vangelo di San Matteo, chi vince piglia tutto e chi ha più citazioni, ha più chances di essere citato nel futuro e di accumulare ancora più credito accademico. Ecco dunque gli effetti di sistema che si accumulavano su un corpus che di per sé non aveva nulla di normativo: addirittura i criteri di ammissione delle riviste accademiche negli Indexes erano spesso confusi e contraddittori, tanto da ritrovare, per esempio, la New York Review of Books tra le pubblicazioni dello Arts and Humanities Citation Index, quando tutti sanno che non è una rivista peer-reviewed, che si pubblica solo su invito del direttore Bob Silvers e che si viene profumatamente pagati (durante un’inchiesta alla IsI sul perché certe riviste non peer-reviewed erano state incluse, gli impiegati rispondevano: “Perché sono riviste che tutti sanno che hanno un grande impatto accademico” !)
Bene, questo gigante di citazioni creato dalla storia di un dispositivo che “gira” da più di quarant’anni, è stato ripreso negli ultimi dieci da varie istituzioni internazionali per creare le liste di riviste considerate “di prestigio” per ogni disciplina, e con questo costruire le griglie di valutazione delle istituzioni e dei ricercatori che tanto ci assillano oggi. Le prime liste europee sono state costituite dalla Commissione Europea e dalla European Science Foundation (www.esf.org). Quest’ultima ha creato una classifica a tre livelli, A, B, C, delle pubblicazioni che contano consultando comitati costituiti da 5 o 6 accademici per disciplina, che stabiliscono non solo la classifica, ma anche i criteri con i quali attribuire i voti. Il motivo per cui un accademico si trova in questi comitati resta opaco, così come le procedure di selezione che l’hanno portato là: faccio l’esempio della disciplina che conosco meglio, la filosofia, per la quale i cinque accademici selezionati dall’ESF provenivano tutti da una sola area della filosofia, la filosofia analitica, riuscendo così a imporre molte A ai giornali di quella branca della filosofia, a scapito di altri giornali. Un criterio enunciato esplicitamente dalla ESF per giustificare la classifica è il numero di lettori, che appare esplicitamente accanto al nome della rivista. Non si spiega però allora perché tra le poche riviste italiane che hanno ricevuto una valutazione A risulti anche l’Annuario della scuola archeologica italiana di Atene e delle missioni italiane in Oriente, che non escludo sia un’ottima pubblicazione, ma il cui valore non è certamente stato calcolato in termini di numero di lettori.

Ora, il problema non è così grave, perché nessun accademico serio è mai stato assunto solamente sulla base del suo ranking dentro a un Citation Index o del calcolo del suo “fattore H”, il fattore di impatto che ormai ci viene chiesto di calcolare, tramite programmi online, come Publish or Perish che estraggono tutta l’informazione esistente sul nostro lavoro e la trasformano in un numerino che ci dice qual è il nostro valore accademico. Le riflessioni sono molto più complesse e tengono conto di ben altri fattori che non possono essere calcolati meccanicamente. Ma il problema può diventare grave perché invece le nuove agenzie promosse a livello europeo per la valutazione della ricerca e dell’università, prendono queste classifiche come oro colato, come classifiche prodotte da una votazione imparziale, da un maestro saggio che sa dire chi è bravo e chi non lo è, e non dai mille accidenti di un dinosauro che accumula informazione da più di quarant’anni. In Francia, l’AERES, agenzia per la valutazione della ricerca e dell’insegnamento superiore, ha costruito le sue classifiche con nuovi, localissimi, comitati che avevano come compito quello di spulciare le classifiche già create dalla ESF e di “personalizzarle” un po’ al caso francese. Su quelle liste, i ricercatori francesi e i loro laboratori si giocano la carriera, come se le liste reificassero il valore di una classifica in realtà stabilita in gran parte dai capricci della storia.

Che fare? Sicuramente è nostra responsabilità epistemica almeno sapere come funzionano questi sistemi, quali sono i loro limiti, per farne buon uso. Inoltre, la cornucopia di misure e di valutazioni che il Web mette a disposizione fa sì che o queste classifiche saranno in grado di evolvere in fretta, o resteranno rigidi strumenti di valutazione da maestrini, superati da sistemi di ranking più efficienti, come per esempio quello gratuito e universale messo a disposizione da Google Scholar. Interessante peraltro notare che i famosi programmi di calcolo del fattore H, come il Publish or Perish, che istituzioni come l’AERES, o la Commissione Europea vi chiedono esplicitamente di usare per classificarvi, sono a loro volta basati sui rankings prodotti da Google Scholar, un bel gatto che si morde la coda, dato che il barocco incrocio di espertoni per compilare le liste di valore dovrebbe essere quello che ci salva dal cieco giudizio delle macchine à la Google.

Insomma, non ci sono né buoni, né cattivi: né vecchi metodi artigianali da difendere, né nuovi criteri perfettamente razionali. C’è solo da usare con la testa questi criteri, spendere qualche ora a capire come funzionano, padroneggiare i dispositivi grazie anche alla tecnologia di facile accesso di cui oggi disponiamo, invece di sentirsi schiacciati da essi. Io credo che in un modo di produzione scientifica più “aperto”, che il Web sta rendendo possibile, i criteri intuitivi e quelli oggettivi di valore piano piano torneranno a mescolarsi, e a rendere un’immagine più pacata e umana della nostra attività di ricerca. Che la ragione non ci faccia perdere di vista la ragionevolezza dei giudizi e delle classifiche, come un’appellazione D.O.C. non deve vincere sulla prova del palato di un vino. Le classifiche sono tante, i criteri molteplici e spesso contrapposti. Non priviamoci di nessuna risorsa per tenere quel che c’è di buono in questa rivoluzione e insieme mantenere vive le nostre sane intuizioni su ciò che vale e ciò che non vale.

La maman d'Obama

La version française de mon article sur Stanley Ann Dunham publié en italien par Micromega en décembre 2008 est parue dans la revue La vie des idées

GLORIA'S RANKING 2008

What's in a year? What makes it so special, so different from any other years? Scattered pictures of vacations with friends, dinner parties, children birthdays, ends of schools, Christmas days, give to each year an unforgettable touch, as in a vintage selection, that filters what we will keep in memory for the rest of our life. The value of these precious pictures, lost in some drawers that sometimes we open in the boring winter evenings, is that they produce a selection of instants worth remembering, a ranking of what must be kept in memory and what will be lost in the magmatic confusion of our unconscious past.
Here I'll provide another way of making an year unforgettable, just by giving grades, ranking the days and the experiences in a way that makes it distinguishable in my memory from any other year forever. Ranking is a form of visualization of reality, a way of illustrating a special configuration of the world worth remembering.

Best lunch: Restaurante Porto Santa Maria, on the beach of Cascais, Portugal, with Ariel in a sunny day of January. After a freezing bath in the Ocean, I was incredibly hungry and we ate a giant lobster.

Best dinner: At Gusto restaurant, Rome, piazza Augusto imperatore, end of November, with some friends and my elegant Italian publisher Andrea Gessner after the presentation of my book at the Libreria Fannucci. Lot of laughter about one of my best tirade on the functioning of horn-pipes.

Best friend of the year: Catherine Legallais, a discrete and auratic Paris-based poet and critic, with an outstanding capacity of listening and understanding. I think she's the only person who really understood my way of looking at my childhood in my Italian book, La Figlia della Gallina Nera.

Best philosopher: Akeel Bilgrami. His talks in Paris on liberalism and relativism and, especially, on Gandhi, in March, were a breath of fresh air in the stifling philosophical world.

Best philosophical paper: Akeel Bilgrami's on Gandhi's philosophy of nature.

Best academic talk: Steven Shapin on science as a vocation given at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris on June 2nd. Perfect voice, timing, rhetoric, facial mimicry, a piece of performance art, sadly neglected by a distracted audience.

Best philosophical conference: Third International Conference on Wine and Philosophy, organized by Nicola Perullo, myself and Barry Smith at the university of Pollenzo, in Southern Piedmont, Italy. Not really for the contents of the conference, but for a special childish atmosphere that reminded me my years in high school, like a delirious conversation about the name of a fellow philosopher while driving from a wine taste to another, almost drunk in a very crowded car.

Best place: St. Jacut de la Mer, in Bretagne, discovered by Dan and Bruno, a beautiful peninsula surrounded by marvelous and colored beaches. Leo, Matteo and myself had also the priviledge of a bath with a seal, a nice seal with big, dark, round eyes and long whiskers, a sort of epiphany from nowhere that gave all of us strange, magic dreams during the night.

Best blog: Ricardo Bloch's Amphibious Andromeda, at http://ricardobloch.com/docs/home.htm, an image and a sound per day. An essential, elegant, soft and deep zen exercise of precision.

Best website and webby idea: www.demotix.com a citizen journalism site run by the genius of geniuses Turi Munthe

Best day: November 4th, my son's 8th birthday and Obama's victory. Sleepless all night watching three computer screens with Dan, then the dinner party for Leo with Yotam and his family, lot of music, laughter, affection and a shy optimism in our gazes.

Best song: Alba Arikha Dans une impasse

Best movie: There will be blood, by Paul Thomas Anderson

Best documentary movie: Nurith Aviv D'une langue à l'autre

Best opera: Actually, the choice is very limited, given that I saw just two, a Wozzeck at La Scala in Milano where I slept almost all the time, and another one in Paris in November. This latter is one of the most beautiful mise-en-scènes I've ever seen in my life: Wagner's Tristan und Isolde illustrated by enourmous yet ephemeral Bill Viola's videos.

Best museum: Louisiane museum, just outside Copenhagen, where I saw the best Bill Viola's video of my life: a variation on the theme of Géricault's Le radeau de la Meduse (The raft).

Best exhibition: Richard Serra at the Grand Palais, June.

Best non-fiction book: Margareth Mead's autobiography, Blackberry winter.

Best fiction book: Well, I know I shouldn't, but, actually, it's true: it's mine: La figlia della gallina nera, 2008, Nottetempo.

Best discovered etymology: Thanks to Guglielmo Brayda, who found it somewhere in one of Pascal Quignard's books, I discovered the special etymology of "desire" which comes from desiderium in Latin, which, itself, is made by the prefix de and sidera, star. Desiderium is thus a deprivation of stars, a feeling of absence of light, a craving for aura.

Best culinary invention: My entrée of carpaccio of coquilles st. jacques slightly cooked in a fry pan just for 10 seconds with butter and lemon and served on a hot trevisana salad, cooked in a pan with oil, garlic, soja sauce, sugar and balsamic vinegar. I've added some sesame seeds on the coquilles in the end and decorated with a leaf of peppermint. Delicious. Served as entrée at a dinner in my place at the Passage on December 31st.

Best hotel: Hotel Locarno in Rome, via della Penna, an "as it should be" old, charming hotel in my favorite block in Rome, a few steps away from Elsa Morante's apartment in via dell'Oca. I've spent a febrile night reading Rilke, Canetti and Sebald and smoking cigarettes - because I had to present 5 books of my choice at the Italian radio the morning after - and feeling for the first time of my life of being a "real" intellectual!

The Age of Reputation

This is my 2009 answer to the annual EDGE question. This year's question was WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING? Easy, don't you think? Do not quote without permission.

THE AGE OF REPUTATION

When asked about what will change our future, the most straightforward reply that comes to mind is, of course, the Internet. But how the Internet will change things that it has not already changed, what is the next revolution ahead on the net, this is a harder matter. The Internet is a complex geography of information technology, networking, multimedia content and telecommunication. This powerful alliance of different technologies has provided not only a brand new way of producing, storing and retrieving information, but a giant network of ranking and rating systems in which information is valued as long as it has been already filtered by other people.

My prediction for the Big Change is that the Information Age is being replaced by a Reputation Age in which the reputation of an item — that is how others value and rate the item — will be the only way we have to extract information about it. This passion of ranking is a central feature of our contemporary practices of filtering information, in and out of the net (take as two different examples of it — one inside and the other outside the net - www.ebay.com and the recent financial crisis).

The next revolution will be a consequence of the impact of reputation on our practices of information gathering. Notice that this won’t mean a world of collective ignorance in which everyone has no other chances to know something than to rely on the judgment of someone else, in a sort of infinite chain of blind trust where nobody seems to know anything for sure anymore: The age of reputation will be a new age of knowledge gathering guided by new rules and principles. This is possible now thanks to the tremendous potential of the social web in aggregating individual preferences and choices to produce intelligent outcomes. Let me explain how more precisely.

One of the main revolution of Internet technologies has been the introduction by Google of the « PageRank » algorithm for retrieving information, that is, an algorithm that bases its search for relevant information on the structure of the links on the Web. Algorithms such as these extract the cultural information contained in each preference users express by putting a link from a page to another with a mathematical cocktail of formulas that gives a special weight to each of these connections. This determines which pages are going to be in the first positions of a search result.

Fears about these tools are obviously many, because our control on the design of the algorithms, on the way the weights are assigned to determine the rank is very poor, nearly inexistent. But let us imagine a new generation of search engines whose ranking procedures are simply generated by the aggregation of individual preferences expressed on these pages: no big calculations, no secret weights: the results of a query are organized just according to the « grades » each of these pages has received by the users that have crossed that page at least once and taken the time to rank it.

A social search engine based on the power of the « soft » social computing, will be able to take advantage of the reputation each site and page has cumulated simply by the votes users have expressed on it. The new algorithms for extracting information will exploit the power of the judgments of the many to produce their result. This softer Web, more controlled by human experiences than complex formulas, will change our interaction with the net, as well as our fears and hopes about it. The potential of social filtering of information is that of a new way of extracting information by relying on the previous judgments of others.

Hegel thought that universal history was made by universal judgments: our history will be written from now on in the language of « good » and « bad », that is, in terms of the judgments people express on things and events around them, that will become the more and more crucial for each of us to extract information about these events. According to Frederick Hayek, Civilization rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge we do not possess: that’s exactly the kind of civilized cyber-world that will be made possible by social tools of aggregating judgments on the Web.

Confiance, autorité et responsabilité épistémique. Pour une généalogie de la confiance raisonnée

Draft. Do not quote. To be published in the proceedings of the conference "Confiance et Gouvernance", Namur, Belgique.

Confiance, autorité et responsabilité épistémique : pour une généalogie de la confiance raisonnée

Gloria Origgi
CNRS
Institut Nicod – EHESS - ENS
origgi@ehess.fr

Abstract: Dans cet article, je reconstruis une « généalogie » des raisons de croire les autres. Mon hypothèse c’est que la quête des raisons pour croire - que des individus autonomes et responsables doivent être capables d’articuler comme justification de leur confiance épistémique - est ancrée dans des modèles de la confiance morale et politique qui sont à la base de la conception d’individu qu’on retrouve à l’origine de la pensée contractualiste moderne. Je discute ensuite un modèle discursif de la confiance épistémique auquel j’adhère, en essayant néanmoins de le différencier de son homologue moral et politique qu’on retrouve dans le débat contemporain sur la démocratie délibérative.

Mots clé: confiance, croyance, autorité, responsabilité

1. Croire les autres

J’arrive à la gare d’une ville étrangère, je descends du train et je demande à une inconnue de m’indiquer la direction de la cathédrale de la ville, que je veux visiter. Bien sûr, je n’ai pas posé la question à n’importe qui : un monitorage rapide de l’environnement social autour de moi m’a fait pencher pour une personne avec un air « local » - non pas une touriste comme moi - une femme, que je sais plus bavardes et gentilles que les hommes, et d’un âge adulte, ce qui me rassure sur son expérience de la ville et de ses meilleurs parcours. Mais ce monitorage n’a été que très superficiel, presque instantané et sans que j’en prenne vraiment conscience. C’est ma façon spontanée d’explorer le monde social et d’en extraire des indices de compétence et de bienveillance qui orientent ma confiance. La dame répond à ma question, je la remercie et lui fais confiance, en suivant ses indications. Est-ce que j’ai la moindre raison de me fier à ce qu’elle dit ?
Croire les autres pour acquérir de l’information est l’une des pratiques épistémiques les plus courantes dans notre vie cognitive. Sans cette immersion permanente dans la vie sociale, sans ce partage de travail cognitif avec nos semblables, notre vie mentale ne serait pas très différente que celle des animaux. Ce constat est pourtant lourd des conséquences sur la vision que la tradition philosophique nous transmet d’un sujet épistémique autonome, responsable et capable de baser ses croyances sur des raisons bien fondées. Très souvent les raisons que nous avons de croire les autres ne nous sont pas claires, les biais et le préjugés sont nombreux, les tendances à déférer aveuglement à l’autorité bien connues. Nos jugements rapides sur la fiabilité des autres nous font commettre des nombreuses injustices épistémiques, pour utiliser l’expression de la philosophe Miranda Fricker , en donnant trop de crédit à certains et en en privant d’autres. Bref, la vision du sujet épistémique est transformée par l’introduction de la confiance dans nos processus d’acquisition des connaissances : repenser les raisons que nous avons de croire devient une tâche fondamentale d’une épistémologie qui s’ouvre à la dimension sociale de la connaissance.
Dans une certaine tradition épistémologique, la connaissance par le biais d’autrui est considérée comme une forme dégradée d’accès à l’information, une ressource que nous sommes obligés à utiliser faute de mieux, les raisons que nous avons de croire étant toujours valables seulement si maîtrisées par le sujet individuel. Ici, je défends une approche plus optimiste de la dimension sociale de la connaissance : faire confiance aux autres est une source primaire d’acquisition de savoir, indispensable à notre développement cognitif et à la stabilisation des structures sociales de production et transmission du savoir. Dans des sociétés à forte densité informationnelle, la confiance est un ingrédient fondamental de la connaissance, non substituable par des procédures d’acquisition de savoir individuelles. On pourrait dire d’ailleurs, comme l’ont soutenu nombreux philosophes , que même dans des sociétés traditionnelles, la confiance est un pilier de l’acquisition et du partage d’information, ce qui permet l’accumulation d’un pool de croyances partagées sur le monde qui constitue les rudiments d’une culture spécifique, stable et transmissible. Cette vision optimiste de la confiance comme « outil épistémique » d’acquisition des connaissances demande donc de repenser les critères d’autonomie et de responsabilité qu’un groupe social adopte pour que ce partage de savoir soit possible et fiable. Et pose aussi d’autres interrogations, notamment sur les rapports entre la confiance dans nos relations interpersonnelles, sociales et politiques et cette forme de confiance particulière qui est en jeu lors que nous croyons les autres pour acquérir de l’information sur le monde. Confiance morale et affective et confiance épistémique sont-elles liées et comment ? Est-il possible de reconstruire une généalogie différente de ces deux formes de confiance ? Est-ce que les critères de responsabilité individuelle que nous devons adopter lors que nous nous fions au discours des autres ont la même justification que ceux qui régissent nos relations de confiance dans la vie sociale ?
Il existe des nombreux travaux qui s’interrogent sur ces critères. Le travail magistral de l’historien Steven Shapin sur l’Histoire sociale de la vérité , explore la relation entre la constitution d’un modèle de « civilité » dans la modernité et l’établissement des nouveaux critères de vérité et crédibilité de la science expérimentale moderne. Il considère que la confiance dans la science expérimentale s’est établie au XVIIe siècle, en Angleterre, autour de la figure du scientifique gentilhomme désintéressé, cultivant ses recherches pour le pur plaisir de la connaissance et sans poursuivre d’ambition personnelle. La Royal Society of London naît comme une société de gentilshommes se reconnaissant mutuellement comme membres de la même caste. La crédibilité du gentilhomme est donc fondée sur sa réputation, son caractère moral et ses fréquentations. Shapin conclut donc qu’on ne peut pas séparer la construction d’une confiance épistémique de la construction d’un modèle de vie sociale, d’une vision partagée de « civilité » qui détermine les standards de vérité et de crédibilité. L’argument de Shapin soulève une question centrale à la compréhension du rôle de la confiance dans notre vie épistémique. Il insiste d’abord sur l’inséparabilité d’un modèle social de la confiance et des formes de crédibilité que ce modèle social promeut et renforce. Il présente ensuite un cas particulier d’un biais dans l’attribution de crédibilité qui se développe aux origines de la conception moderne de la science : la gentelmanry comme modèle de supériorité morale ancrée sur le désintérêt.

Dans cet article, je vais avancer les hypothèses suivantes : tout d’abord, comme le fait Shapin, je voudrais explorer davantage la relation entre différents modèles de la relation sociale et politique de confiance qui sont à l’origine de la notion de sujet responsable et l’essor d’une certaine conception de la confiance comme relation épistémique fondamentale qui nous tient liés les uns aux autres grâce à la reconnaissance d’un engagement réciproque à dire le vrai. Je proposerai donc une brève généalogie des trois modèles de la confiance morale et politique et essayerai d’expliquer comment ces modèles sont reliés à une notion de responsabilité individuelle qui trouve son origine dans la conception du sujet individuel qui est à la base de la conception moderne de la société comme contrat entre pairs. Mon hypothèse c’est qu’on ne peut pas comprendre la nécessité de donner des raisons de la confiance qu’on fait aux autres sans comprendre le rôle que la notion du sujet autonome et d’individu responsable joue dans l’histoire du concept moderne de société - de communauté choisie par les individus et réglée par un contrat. Faire confiance aux autres, croire leur parole, est une attitude qui appelle à la responsabilité individuelle de celui qui sait que sa confiance peut ne pas être réciproquée.
Dans la deuxième partie de l’article j’essayerai d’esquisser un modèle de confiance épistémique qui relève d’une conception « discoursive » de la responsabilité typique des démocraties délibératives. Ce modèle « communicationnel » de la responsabilité épistémique implique que c’est dans le discours que nous prenons nos engagements de vérité. Je vais insister néanmoins sur le fait que les pratiques et les contextes de communication font varier ces engagements d’une façon plus souple et variée que l’on reconnaît lors qu’on considère le discours comme source de normes dans un espace des raisons partagé.

1.1. Trois modèles de la confiance : confiance inconditionnée, confiance contractuelle et confiance dans l’autorité

Confiance inconditionnée et saut dans l’inconnu

Dans une conception paternaliste, pré-moderne, des relations de pouvoir, la confiance est fondamentalement un acte de soumission inconditionnée. Le seul sens moral de l’acte de confiance réside précisément dans son absence de motivation, dans son aveuglement vis-à-vis de toute raison. Dans cette tradition, la confiance coïncide avec la foi. Pour Kierkegaard, la confiance aveugle d’Abraham, qui se soumet au vouloir de Dieu en acceptant de sacrifier son fils Isaac, est la preuve d’une moralité qui va au-delà de l’éthique. Dans son livre Crainte et Tremblement, il décrit cet acte de foi d’Abraham, qui fait confiance à Dieu au-delà de tout espoir, comme une suspension des règles éthiques courantes, suspension qui crée une dimension de valeur différente, ancrée dans le geste d’être disposé à tout perdre, à tout sacrifier. Cette confiance aveugle, ce saut dans l’inconnu, est le paradigme de l’acte irrationnel qui doit être justifié par un engagement d’ordre supérieur à un autre niveau de responsabilité, de morale : la capitulation de la raison individuelle devant l’autorité absolue. Justifier un tel acte de confiance requiert un apparat moral et politique fondé sur des relations d’obéissance et de servitude vis-à-vis du pouvoir. Croire et obéir sans se demander pourquoi.
Or une donnée centrale de la pensée moderne est le questionnement de ce rapport traditionnel à l’autorité politico-religieuse : la confiance aveugle n’est pas acceptable à l’intérieur d’une morale de la modernité, qui voit dans la responsabilité la source de sa légitimation. Si nous souhaitons être responsables de nos choix et de nos décisions, suspendre volontairement son autonomie pour se remettre entre les mains d’autrui est un acte de servitude inacceptable. Il renvoie à la fidélité aux maîtres, aux relations à des autorités paternalistes, ce que la pensée politique moderne juge inadmissible : la confiance que Locke voit comme base des relations sociales et une confiance conditionnée, entre agents égaux, l’opposé d’une obéissance inconditionnée à des agents d’« ordre » supérieur. Se pose alors la question morale suivante : une confiance non calculée est-elle compatible avec une conception morale fondée sur la responsabilité ? Kierkegaard explique la moralité du saut dans l’absolu comme un acte de volonté qui contribue à fonder un ordre moral supérieur. Notre « faire confiance sans raison » crée une nouvelle dimension morale, transcendante par rapport à la morale courante. Certes, si on s’interroge sur la moralité intrinsèque d’un acte de confiance, au-delà des raisons, il est difficile d’éviter de retomber dans ce paradigme « irrationaliste » : si une confiance absolue, non calculée, peut être considérée comme intrinsèquement morale, c’est à la volonté qui est la sienne de créer un nouvel ordre moral qu’elle doit sa moralité ; l’acte même de confiance aveugle a le pouvoir - auto-réalisant - d’instaurer une nouvelle dimension de confiance. La confiance accordée par Abraham à Dieu n’est pas que celui-ci ne lui enlèvera pas ce qu’il a de plus cher au monde, son fils Isaac. Sa confiance est plus profonde : il accepte de vouloir tout ce qui, de bien ou de mal, lui vient de Dieu. De la même façon, Isaac suit son père sur la montagne parce qu’il a confiance en sa bienveillance mais, s’il ne se rebelle pas au moment d’être sacrifié, c’est parce que sa confiance en son père est indépendante du bien ou du mal qui peut découler de l’acte de celui-ci. Le philosophe de la religion Richard Swinburne soutient qu’on fait confiance à Dieu pour qu’il nous donne ce qu’on souhaite et que c’est donc aux choses voulues qu’on fait confiance. Dans cette acception religieuse, la confiance est plus qu’un simple optimisme, elle est un acte de volonté, qui crée un nouvel ordre moral et nous permet d’exaucer nos désirs autrement que par la rationalité pratique : en faisant confiance à ce que je veux, je donne à ce vouloir un sens nouveau que je peux réaliser dans une attitude nouvelle, tandis que si je ne fais pas confiance à mon objectif, je ne le réaliserai pas. Pour Herbert G. Wells, faire de la bicyclette, c’est comme s’engager dans une relation amoureuse : une question de foi. Tu y crois et ça marche, tu n’y crois plus et ça ne marche plus . Un acte de confiance inconditionnée créé un ordre éthique différent, qui n’est pas basé sur la raison, ou, au moins, sur des raisons partagées avec les autres : cet acte apparemment absurde de foi peut être jugé en termes d’une morale de la responsabilité seulement s’il se revèle producteur de nouvelles valeurs. Si cet acte de foi comporte un aspect moral dans l’assomption de responsabilité individuelle – Abraham, choisissant de croire, assume la responsabilité de fonder ce nouvel ordre moral – il ne pose pas la question de la responsabilité collective : c’est soi et son rapport à un pouvoir inconditionné qu’engage un acte de foi, tandis qu’un acte de confiance engage les autres. On pourrait dire cependant que ce pouvoir auto-réalisant de l’acte de confiance peut parfois engager aussi les autres dans un partage des valeurs communs qu’on ne savait pas de posséder avant qu’elles soient révélées par l’acte de confiance même : c’est le pouvoir « subversif » de l’acte de confiance lors qu’il arrive à engager les autres dans un partage de valeurs qu’ils ne soupçonnaient pas en eux-mêmes. Dans un film récent de Martin Scorsese, entièrement consacré aux différents types de relations de confiance (Les infiltrés, 2006 ; titre original : The Departed) , un des protagonistes, Billy Costigan, désormais pourchassé et par la police et par les malfaiteurs, fait confiance à la femme de son pire ennemi pour lui confier la preuve de la culpabilité de celui-ci. Ce geste - apparemment désespéré - est sa façon de révéler à lui-même et à elle qu’ils partagent des valeurs, dans ce cas d’honnêteté et de sincérité, qu’ils ne savaient pas d’avoir : l’acte même de confiance, la demande tacite qu’on fait à l’autre d’adhérer à nos valeurs, a le pouvoir subversif et performatif, au-delà des intérêts, des rôles partagés, de la réputation connue et des motivations, de révéler un monde de valeurs partagées, un monde souhaité dans lequel quelqu’un d’autre nous demande d’être à la hauteur de ces qualités, de ces vertus auxquelles nous voudrions être à la hauteur depuis toujours.

Le contrat de confiance de Locke

La confiance comme saut dans l’inconnu reste cependant un modèle de la confiance « exceptionnelle » sur lequel une société ne peut pas se baser. C’est une ressource individuelle, existentielle on pourrait dire, de « révolte » contre un ordre de valeur établi, ce qui rend ce concept peu viable pour fonder une société basée sur des contrats de confiance clairs et durables, ce qui est le leitmotiv de la littérature philosophique moderne sur le contrat social.
Le penseur qui a plus mis en valeur le rôle de la confiance dans la formation de liens sociaux durables entre individus responsables est sans doute John Locke.
La politique idéale, pour Locke, comporte la construction d’une entité collective coopérative, d’un accord rationnel liant une multiplicité d’agents libres, qui, sans savoir avec certitude ce que seront les actions d’autrui, peuvent cependant, dans une certaine mesure, se fier les uns aux autres. La légitimité d’un gouvernement a donc, pour Locke, des effets sur la confiance que ressentent les citoyens : un pouvoir légitime, qui fonde son autorité sur le consentement, est la condition préalable à l’essor d’une société civile dans laquelle existe une bonne dose de confiance personnelle entre ses membres. La confiance est pour Locke « le lien de la société » . Un lien fondé sur un mélange d’ingrédients : une disposition pré-sociale à la fides, nécessaire à la définition même d’individu, de sujet responsable, qui permet de prendre des risques en ayant confiance dans le fait que les autres tiendront leur parole ; un pacte social, qui permet un transfert des pouvoirs aux gouvernants grâce à un accord rationnel entre des sujets aux attentes responsables vis-à-vis de la fiabilité des institutions, auxquelles ils peuvent retirer leur confiance, tout en étant prêts à accepter la vulnérabilité que suppose la soumission à une organisation étatique dont le fonctionnement est complexe et sur lequel ils ont très peu de contrôle direct. La confiance n’est pas pour Locke une relation psychique entre le souverain et ses sujets, mais une prise de conscience responsable de la part de ceux-ci de l’irréversibilité d’une « division du travail » politique et de la responsabilité qui est celle du sujet politique dans le choix d’une distribution adéquate des droits et des devoirs.
On peut certes juger très optimiste cette vision lockienne de la politique idéale, un contrat entre pairs dans lequel différentes formes de confiance se renforcent mutuellement : confiance raisonnée les uns dans les autres, dans les gouvernants et dans les contraintes institutionnelles qu’on impose à leurs actions au travers des limitations constitutionnelles.
Pour que ce contrat de confiance se réalise Locke a pourtant besoin d’une disposition naturelle chez les êtres humains qui précède le contrat même : dans les Deux Traités sur le gouvernement, Locke précise que la fides réciproque, le devoir d’observer les engagements les uns envers les autres, est une composante de la nature humaine qui précède tout contrat et existe aussi dans l’Etat de Nature : « Car la vérité et le respect de la parole donnée appartiennent aux hommes en tant qu’hommes et non comme membres de la société » . Locke ancre ainsi sa vision de la confiance nécessaire à la construction d’une société de contrat à une certaine conception de la nature humaine, selon laquelle les individus assument la responsabilité de leur parole. C’est grâce à la reconnaissance de ce trait fondamental de la nature humaine – le respect de la parole donnée – que nous avons des raisons de nous fier aux autres. Dans une société européenne en forte transformation au XVIIème siècle, où aux liens de famille et de proximité se substituent en partie des liens commerciaux avec des partenaires distants, qui ne partagent pas forcement la même culture et les mêmes valeurs, le besoin de reconnaître dans les autres des semblables grâce à des propriétés et des vertus morales que l’on partage en tant qu’individus devient le refrain d’un époque d’ouverture au risque social et en même temps de constitutions des fondements modernes des institutions politiques.
Nous retrouvons la même insistance sur la gravité des mensonges chez Montaigne :

« C’est un vilain vice que du mentir […] Notre intelligence se conduisant par la seule voie de la parole, celui qui la fausse, trahit la société publique. C'est le seul outil, par le moyen duquel se communiquent nos volontés et nos pensées : c'est le truchement de notre âme : s'il nous faut, nous ne nous tenons plus, nous ne nous entrecognoissons plus. S'il nous trompe, il rompt tout notre commerce, et dissout toutes les liaisons de notre police » .
La responsabilité individuelle de tenir sa parole crée donc un lien profond entre les personnes : celui qui nous trompe sort d’un contrat moral de confiance implicite qui règle notre vie sociale.
La même interdiction morale à mentir nous la retrouvons chez Kant, qui soutient que le mensonge ne peut jamais être justifié dans n’importe quelle circonstance :
« Je m'aperçois bientôt ainsi que si je peux bien vouloir le mensonge, je ne peux en aucune manière vouloir une loi universelle qui commanderait de mentir; en effet, selon une telle loi, il n'y aurait plus à proprement parler de promesse, car il serait vain de déclarer ma volonté concernant mes actions futures à d'autres hommes qui ne croiraient point à cette déclaration ou qui, s'ils y ajoutaient foi étourdiment, me payeraient exactement de la même monnaie : de telle sorte que ma maxime, du moment qu'elle serait érigée en loi universelle, se détruirait elle-même nécessairement ».

Dans son échange célèbre avec Benjamin Constant, qui lui soumettait un exemple d’exception possible à la loi universelle de tenir sa parole, Kant réaffirme l’impossibilité d’une norme qui admettrait le mensonge en quelques circonstances, peine le désordre social et l’incommunicabilité. Si jamais il nous arrive de mentir pour nos fins, même nos fins les plus nobles, comme celui de sauver la vie à un innocent, ceci doit être vu comme une exception contingente à une loi universelle qui maintient l’interdiction de mentir et non pas comme une possible modification de la norme universelle :

La véracité dans les déclarations que l’on ne peut éviter est le devoir formel de l’homme envers chacun quelque grave inconvénient qu’il en puisse résulter pour lui ou pour un autre ; et quoique, en y en altérant la vérité, je ne commette pas d’injustice envers celui qui me force injustement à le faire, j’en commets cependant une en général dans la plus importante partie du devoir par une semblable altération, et dès lors celle-ci mérite bien le nom de mensonge .




Pour Kant aussi, cette exigence profonde de tenir sa parole est ancrée dans la confiance dont nous avons besoin afin de pouvoir interagir les uns avec les autres et faire des prédictions sur les actions futures des autres. Si ce qu’ils nous disent n’est plus contraint par leur responsabilité à agir en conséquent, alors les normes de l’agir social sont perdues et la coordination et coopération collective impossibles.
L’intuition lockéenne d’une nature humaine responsable de sa parole s’ancre donc dans une tradition forte de conceptualisation de l’individu comme d’un agent responsable et autonome. La confiance sociale, base de toute construction de la société publique requiert donc une certaine conception de l’autre en tant qu’agent fiable au moins dans son engagement à respecter sa parole. Il est intéressant de remarquer que la naissance du concept moderne de société va de pair avec la naissance d’un concept d’individu comme agent autonome et responsable. Bref, pas de société sans individus responsables, car si on ne peut pas se fier aux autres le contrat social ne peut même pas commencer. C’est ce paradoxe qu’Hobbes aborde lorsque il se demande comment les êtres humains sortent d’un état de nature dans lequel ils sont défiants l’un de l’autre. Si on ne présuppose pas tant de vertus chez les hommes et les femmes dans l’état de nature, qui fait le premier pas pour en sortir ?


1.1.1.1 Défiance et confiance dans l’autorité.

Cet idéal politique vu par Locke, dans lequel autorité, légitimité et confiance vont de pair, est bien différent des propositions d’autres penseurs contractualistes, tel Thomas Hobbes par exemple, selon lequel il n’y a pas de disposition naturelle à tenir sa parole. Pour Hobbes, le contrat social est fondé sur la défiance entre les individus : l’état de nature hobbesien conduit à une impasse, qu’on pourrait représenter par le dilemme du prisonnier : les hommes étant tous nés égaux en raison de leur force, leurs ambitions de réalisation de leurs objectifs sont les mêmes et ils se mettent à désirer la même chose, qu’un seul d’entre eux cependant peut obtenir. À partir de là se développent entre eux la haine et une défiance à entreprendre quelque activité que les autres, dans la poursuite de leurs intérêts personnels, pourraient détruire. La défiance crée ainsi une impasse généralisée dans l’état de nature, comme dans le dilemme du prisonnier, où on se contente d’un résultat moins satisfaisant parce que les risques qu’il y aurait à s’engager dans la stratégie conduisant au meilleur résultat sont trop grands, vu le degré élevé d’incertitude où on se trouve sur ce que peut être l’action de l’autre joueur. Les hommes décident donc de transférer leurs droits naturels par contrat à un souverain afin qu’il assure leur survie. Mais un tel contrat, passé entre des personnes n’ayant aucune confiance mutuelle, est un contrat vide . Pour qu’il ne le soit pas, il faudrait qu’existe une autorité commune qui ait le pouvoir de contraindre leurs actions intéressées et mutuellement destructrices. Un contrat est alors établi qui assure la confiance entre le peuple et le souverain, non entre les individus. La légitimité du souverain se base donc sur des rapports de défiance entre individus. Tandis qu’elles convergent chez Locke, confiance politique et confiance sociale divergent chez Hobbes.
Dès lors, c’est de façon très différente que s’articulent chez l’un et l’autre auteurs la question, centrale dans la naissance de la pensée politique contractualiste, des rapports entre confiance et légitimité : pour Locke, la légitimité du souverain est ancrée dans une société de confiance mutuelle ; pour Hobbes, dans le choix que font les sujets, par peur les uns des autres, de transférer leur pouvoir au souverain. Le Léviathan personnifie et incarne tous les membres de la société dans une unité qui, seule, a le pouvoir de décision. Une fois que le contrat social a créé cette unité supérieure, la possibilité de désaccord n’existe plus, les sujets devant considérer le jugement du souverain comme s’il s’agissait du leur. La relation de confiance est donc, chez Hobbes, une relation asymétrique, qui introduit un déséquilibre du pouvoir afin de sortir de la méfiance généralisée qui est celle de l’état de nature. Tandis que, chez Locke, ayant d’abord été établie entre les individus grâce à l’engagement par chacun de tenir sa parole, la relation de confiance est une relation d’équilibre entre pouvoir politique et société civile. On pourrait résumer ce qui précède en disant que, pour Locke, le contrat social est ancré dans la confiance alors que, pour Hobbes, c’est la confiance (dans le souverain) qui est ancrée dans le contrat.
Il est important de souligner l’originalité de la conception lockéenne de la confiance par rapport à l’idée, répandue au XVIIe siècle chez les théoriciens du droit naturel, d’un rôle de la promesse comme acte de langage fondamental à la base de la possibilité même de coopérer. Même s’il souscrit à ce point de vue, Locke considère que la confiance ne peut dépendre uniquement de nos actes de paroles : toute confiance est basée sur des attentes à propos des actions des autres, et ces attentes peuvent être déçues. La confiance implique donc la possibilité de sa trahison : la rationalité d’un acte de confiance comporte la capacité de prendre en compte qu’une faillite de la coopération est possible. En ce sens, comme le dit bien John Dunn, la confiance est « un dispositif pour faire face à la liberté des autres ». C’est cet élément d’incertitude, de confiance conditionnée aux « bonnes » actions de l’autre, qui fonde le lien entre confiance et légitimité du gouvernement. Locke l’exprime clairement dans Deux traités sur le gouvernement, un des textes fondateurs du libéralisme moderne, qui représente une mise en question radicale de tout pouvoir inconditionnel (du père sur ses enfants, de l’homme sur sa femme, du souverain sur ses sujets). Selon lui, en l’absence d’autorité naturelle ou de descendance divine, la légitimité de quelque autorité politique que ce soit dépend de la confiance que les sujets font à leur souverain, une confiance entendue comme un ensemble d’attentes raisonnables de leur part vis-à-vis de l’action du gouvernement. Locke distingue les sociétés civiles - celles dans lesquelles le pouvoir de coercition du souverain découle du consentement des citoyens – d’autres types de sociétés, dans lesquelles la coercition est la même mais où l’autorité pour l’exercer ne découle pas de ce consentement. Une société civile n’est donc pas sans coercition, mais celle-ci est exercée par une autorité qui a reçu la confiance des citoyens. Un gouvernement dépourvu de cette confiance n’a aucune légitimité et, vice-versa, une autorité illégitime ne reçoit pas la confiance de ses sujets - même si les souverains illégitimes affirment très souvent le contraire. Faire confiance aux autorités gouvernementales signifie donc leur donner la liberté d’agir en notre nom, sûrs que nous sommes qu’elles prendront en compte nos droits et nos intérêts.

1.2. Généalogie de la confiance raisonnée

Ce long tour de force aux origines de la pensée politique moderne est une amorce de généalogie d’une notion de confiance basée sur des responsabilités et des raisons autonomes. L’origine de la confiance raisonnée, celle qui est justifiée par nos raisons et engagements, est à reconstruire dans la conception des individus qui émerge avec la vision contractualiste de la société dans la philosophie politique moderne. Des individus égaux se fient les uns les autres car ils sont justifiés à s’attribuer des vertus typiquement humaines, comme celle de tenir sa parole. On se reconnaît en tant que personnes car on tient sa parole, ce qui nous rend des individus responsables de nos actions, et donc membres fiables d’une société de contrat. On pourrait définir la confiance comme la relation symétrique de la promesse : je te donne ma parole, tu me donnes ta confiance. Promettre c’est demander à l’autre sa confiance, ainsi que faire confiance c’est créer sur l’autre une pression normative à tenir sa promesse. Ces engagements normatifs indispensables pour créer des liens sociaux sont assurés par des individus conçu comme agents autonomes et responsables.
Nous retrouvons cette conception de la confiance raisonnée dans les conceptions contemporaines de la confiance épistémique. Croire les autres pour acquérir de l’information c’est un choix rationnel et autonome qui repose sur une prise en compte de la compétence et de la bienveillance de nos informateurs. C’est ainsi que l’épistémologue John Hardwig soutient que parmi les raisons d’une justification rationnelle d’une connaissance peut se trouver la confiance. Bien qu’un individu peut ne pas avoir les raisons ni les preuves dont dispose son informateur pour affirmer le fait que p, il peut néanmoins savoir que p par le biais d’un autre parce qu’il peut estimer rationnellement que la connaissance que son informateur a de p est d’une qualité épistémique supérieure à celle qu’il pourrait acquérir tout seul. Une des raisons de faire confiance aux nouvelles que je lis dans le journal à propos d’un nouveau virus de grippe très dangereux en provenance de Chine c’est que je suis capable de juger que les moyens dont je dispose pour m’informer moi-même de cet événement me fourniront une connaissance plus pauvre et biaisée que celle que je peux lire sur le journal. Les justifications rationnelles de ce type ont toujours un caractère normatif : c’est les bonnes raisons de croire qui nous intéressent, c'est-à-dire les raisons pour lesquelles il existe une norme d’acceptabilité. Or, dans le cas de la confiance, ces raisons peuvent se baser sur deux types de normes : des normes épistémiques, qui prennent en compte la compétence des informateurs, et des normes morales, qui assurent la bienveillance et le respect d’un code partagé dans le passage d’information. La confiance épistémique est donc rationnelle si elle se base sur des normes de conduite que l’on peut attribuer aux autres, au moins à l’intérieur d’une communauté qui partage des valeurs communes. Sans une conception de l’autre comme d’un être responsable, qui agit sur la base d’une rationalité et d’une moralité partagées, la confiance ne serait pas une stratégie épistémique rationnelle.
Une alternative au modèle normatif des raisons basées sur les valeurs, c’est le modèle des raisons basées sur les intérêts, qui reprend la conception hobbesienne de la confiance. Si on ne peut faire confiance à la sincérité ou à la bienveillance des autres, on peut néanmoins calculer les intérêts que les autres ont à ne pas nous tromper : si on travaille dans la même institution scientifique, un partage honnête de l’information peut intéresser les deux parties, car le prix de l’exclusion de la communauté pour avoir passé une information fausse est trop élevé, ou car on peut calculer qu’on aura besoin dans le futur de la même bienveillance de la part des collègues pour poursuivre la recherche…Ici aussi on se retrouve devant un modèle d’individu rationnel – dans ce cas dans la maximisation de ses intérêts – qui sert de base à un modèle de la confiance épistémique.
En conclusion, la confiance épistémique raisonnée repose sur des modèles de l’interaction rationnelle entre individus qui fondent notre concept moderne de sujet rationnel. Voyons comment une conception discursive de l’individu peut fournir une intuition différente sur la confiance raisonnée.

1.3. Confiance raisonnée et discours : une approche pragmatique de la confiance.

Les approches de la confiance que je viens d’analyser partagent le même présupposé, c'est-à-dire que les raisons de faire confiance sont fondées sur une conception de l’agent rationnel qui nous permet d’attribuer a priori aux autres certaines qualités, comme si la confiance que nous leur accordons dépendait de quelque chose que nous savons d’eux ou que nous pouvons découvrir sur eux. Or, les contextes dans lesquels les liens de confiance épistémique se forment sont normalement des contextes de discours où l’échange de parole participe à la construction de la confiance réciproque. Nous croyons la parole des autres non pas seulement car nous avons certaines garanties sur leur fiabilité morale ou épistémique, mais parce que l’acte même de parole crée des attentes réciproques d’ordre normatif sur la conduite des nos interlocuteurs. Nous nous attendons à qu’un acte de parole soit motivé par une intention de nous informer sur quelque chose de pertinent pour nous, même si cette intention n’est pas motivée par de la bienveillance à notre égard. Dans les contextes de communication, nous adoptons une posture de confiance qui nous dispose à croire ce que les autres nous disent sans pourtant devenir crédules : c’est la posture qu’il nous faut partager pour que le discours devienne un espace des raisons partagées et donc un espace générateur des valeurs. La spécificité de l’acte discursif tient à la responsabilité mutuelle des interlocuteurs vis-à-vis de leurs paroles respectives, de leur engagement délibéré à assumer la responsabilité de leurs pensées. La confiance engendrée dans les contextes discursifs est donc une confiance basée sur l’engagement réciproque et délibéré.
Cette perspective discursive sur la confiance épistémique rejoint elle aussi un modèle de société fondée sur un partage des raisons dans le discours publique, notamment le modèle de démocratie délibérative, qu’on pourrait voir comme une version contemporaine du contractualisme, visant à comprendre la construction effective d’une confiance partagée dans l’espace publique. Jürgen Habermas est l’un des penseurs qui a mieux articulé cette position. Selon lui, la légitimité d’une décision ou d’une action politique dépend de son acceptabilité à l’intérieur d’un discours partagé entre citoyens et institutions qui respecte des normes d’intelligibilité et de rationalité. Les normes pragmatiques du discours rejoignent donc ses normes morales et politiques et également les normes épistémiques de sincérité et compétence.
Mais ce que je voudrais essayer de suggérer en conclusion c’est qu’une application trop rigide des modèles provenant de la pensée politique et sociale à la confiance épistémique risque de ne rendre pas compte de la spécificité de la relation proprement épistémique de confiance. Prenons l’exemple du modèle délibératif de la confiance épistémique - dont je partage l’intuition de fond sur l’importance des engagements de responsabilité sur ce qui est dit . Ce modèle implique un partage des raisons qui devrait être suffisant à engendrer des standards de vérité toujours pareils. Or, les contextes de communication sont très différents, et les normes épistémiques qui règlent la communication dans ces contextes très variables. Une conversation à un dîner mondain sur la présence d’un programme nucléaire en Iran engage le locuteur à des standards épistémiques beaucoup plus souples que les mêmes déclarations faites par un ministre des Affaires Etrangères. Les normes épistémiques ne sont pas donc données simplement par la prise en compte d’un espace des raisons partagées, mais aussi par la prise en compte des contextes et des enjeux du discours, bref, elles sont en partie construites et acceptées dans la dynamique de la communication. C’est la responsabilité cette fois-ci du plus vulnérable, de celle ou celui qui reçoit une information sur laquelle il n’a pas d’autre sources de vérification que la parole de son interlocuteur, de « doser » les normes épistémiques d’une façon telle à rendre la communication possible et en même temps à se protéger de la variabilité des contextes. La confiance épistémique requiert donc une responsabilité partagée, et pas toujours négociée, entre locuteurs et auditeurs.

REFERENCES

ADLER, J., 2003, Belief’s own ethics, Mit Press.
CLEMENT, F.; KOENIG, M.; HARRIS, P., 2004, “The Ontogenesis of Trust”, Mind & Language, 19, pp. 360-379.
COADY, A., 1992, Testimony, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
DUNN, J., 1990, Interpreting Political Responsibility, Polity Press, New York.
FOLEY, R., 2001, Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others, Cambridge University Press.
FRICKER, E., 2006, “Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy” in J. Lackey and E. Sosa (eds.) The Epistemology of Testimony, Oxford University Press.
FRICKER, M., 2007, Epistemic Injustice, Oxford University Press.
HOLTON, R., 1994 “Deciding to Trust, Coming to Believe”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 72, pp. 63-76.
MORAN, R., 2005, “Getting Told and Being Believed”, in Philosophers’ Imprints, vol. 5, n. 5, pp. 1-29.
ORIGGI, G., 2004, “Is Trust an Epistemological Notion?” Episteme, 1, 1, pp. 61-72.
ORIGGI, G., 2005, “What Does it Mean to Trust in Epistemic Authority?” in P. PASQUINO (éd.) Concept of Authority, Edizioni Fondazione Olivetti, Rome.
ORIGGI, G., 2007, “Le sens des autres. L’ontogenèse de la confiance épistémique », in A. Bouvier, B. Conein (eds.) L’épistémologie sociale, EHESS Editions, Paris
ORIGGI, G., 2008, Qu’est-ce que la confiance?, Paris, VRIN.
ORIGGI, G. 2008, « Trust, Authority and Epistemic Responsibility », in J.
PETTIT, P., SMITH, M. (1996) “Freedom in Belief and Desire”, The Journal of Philosophy, XCIII, 9, pp. 429-449.
SHAPIN, S., 2004, The Social History of Truth, Harvard University Press.
SPERBER, D., WILSON, D. (1986/1995) Relevance. Communication and Cognition, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
WILLIAMS, B. 2006, Vérité et véracité, Gallimard, Paris.
WILSON, D. , SPERBER, D. (2002) “Truthfulness and Relevance”, Mind, 111(443):583-632.

Du vin et du web

Soirée Science 2.0
Originally uploaded by Enro

Entretien avec Marc Foglia publié dans rue89

Interview avec Gloria Origgi, chercheuse au CNRS, s’intéresse au phénomène de la croyance, à la construction des valeurs, et plus spécifiquement à la manière dont le web modifie et accélère la construction de la connaissance collective.

Je voudrais revenir sur le bel article [1] que vous avez publié dans La Vie des Idées, sur « la passion d’évaluer ». Avant de travailler sur le fonctionnement de la réputation sur Internet et ses effets, vous aviez étudié la réputation dans le monde du vin?

Lorsqu’on entre en contact avec un domaine de connaissance nouveau, ce sont les opinions des autres, leurs valeurs et préférences qui déterminent notre accès aux faits.

Le vin était donc pour moi un prétexte intéressant pour développer mes travaux en épistémologie. J’ai observé des novices adultes entrer en contact avec un corpus culturel nouveau, auquel ils doivent apprendre à donner de la valeur.

Quand ils souhaitent acheter une bouteille, les gens doivent d’abord s’orienter, se créer un paysage dans lequel ils pourront se retrouver. Les systèmes de classification du vin changent, évoluent -surtout sur les marchés nouveaux- mais il ne s’agit pas d’une simplification.

Il s’agit plutôt d’une différenciation de plus en plus fine, qui permet de stocker sur une étiquette une grande quantité d’indices réputationnels sur la qualité du vin.

Dans notre société à forte densité informationnelle, que ce soit sur Internet, ou dans un hypermarché avec des centaines de bouteilles de vin sur les rayons, le filtrage de l’information et les échelles de valeur prennent une importance essentielle. Comment s’acquiert cette information sur l’information? L’opinion des autres opère un filtrage.

Dans votre article, vous décrivez un nouvel âge de l’Internet : l’âge du filtrage de l’information aurait succédé à l’âge du stockage. Comment peut-on décrire la courte vie de l’Internet, quelles étapes se dégagent aujourd’hui? Comment caractérisez-vous l’âge actuel, est-ce l’âge de la maîtrise, après celui de l’enthousiasme?

Je suis convaincue que nous nous trouvons face à un changement de paradigme fondamental dans notre rapport à la connaissance: de l’âge de l’information, nous sommes en train de passer à l’âge de la réputation, dans laquelle l’information n’aura de la valeur que si déjà filtrée, évaluée et notée par les autres.

Il s’agit d’une transformation radicale, due en partie aux nouveaux moyens techniques de diffusion de l’information, et surtout à l’usage social de ces moyens.

Depuis la création du PageRank, en 1998, il n’y a pas eu d’innovation technique décisive dans l’Internet. Les innovations sont venues plutôt du versant des applications sociales sur le web.

Je vois un contraste énorme entre la créativité d’avant 2000, et la normalisation après l’éclatement de la bulle et le changement de gouvernement aux Etats-Unis.

L’administration Clinton (en particulier Al Gore) a intensément soutenu le développement de l’Internet: à la fin des années 90, les Etats-Unis disposaient d’un potentiel unique au monde, et dont ils entendent bien faire profiter le monde entier. Après, avec l’administration Bush, l’âge de glace commence.

Dans les années 90, ce sont des politiques institutionnelles qui ont rendu possible la créativité sur l’Internet: ainsi, la norme « end-to-end », selon laquelle l’intelligence est concentrée aux extrémités du réseau, dans les différentes applications créées par différents opérateurs (modems, programmes « client » comme Eudora, Skype, etc.) fait que personne n’a le droit de s’approprier le réseau.

En France, on avait le Minitel, mais sa situation propriétaire et monopolistique a énormément limité son potentiel d’innovation. Les débuts d’Internet ont été marqués à l’inverse par des idéaux libertaires : il s’agissait de créer un bien commun, de faire en sorte que tous puissent en profiter.

A des idéaux libertaires ou anarchistes, on a ajouté un zeste de collectivisme. L’information sur Internet est un bien qui ne s’épuise pas dans son usage collectif: cela contredit l’idée des économies de marché selon laquelle seule la propriété privée garantirait un usage des ressources raisonnable.

L’essor de l’idéologie libertaire explique en partie pourquoi il est si difficile, encore maintenant, de trouver un modèle économique pour l’Internet.

Il y a trois niveaux de douane susceptibles de rémunérer des investissements: le droit d’accès au contenu, le droit d’accès au code, et le droit d’accès au câble. L’innovation apportée par certaines inventions du web 2.0, comme les blogs, a été de supprimer les deux premières barrières.

Depuis 2001, ce n’est plus la question technologique qui domine, c’est la question de la participation, qui est une question sociale et politique.

Le filtrage des informations serait d’autant plus justifié que l’on se trouve en contexte d’incertitude. Quel est le rôle du jugement, de la responsabilité individuelle? Est-ce que l’on peut parler de sagesse collective sur Internet?

Internet d’aujourd’hui est devenu principalement un outil social de traitement automatisé d’une énorme quantité d’informations. Le web 2.0, ou web social, tient compte des préférences individuelles en les agrégeant: lorsqu’un internaute crée un lien, il met à disposition des autres une préférence individuelle.

Le web est d’un coté la réalisation d’un rêve de collecte d’information issu du libéralisme. Pourquoi le marché est-il si important selon Friedrich Hayek [figure de proue de la pensée économique libérale, ndlr])? Parce que le marché fixe un prix, et que le prix est l’indicateur d’informations éparpillées dans la société.

Aujourd’hui, le prix est un indicateur dépassé. On ne sait pas grand-chose d’un individu si l’on sait qu’il achète une bouteille à 3 euros, 5 euros ou 8 euros. L’agrégation d’informations utiles ne passe plus par le prix, mais par des systèmes de filtrage collaboratif des informations beaucoup plus sophistiqués. C’est d’ailleurs la transformation la plus intéressante du web depuis une dizaine d’années.

Il faut néanmoins être conscient de ce que les processus de formation de la sagesse collective varient énormément d’un système à l’autre. Prenez Google, prenez Wikipedia, c’est très différent: l’individu n’a qu’une influence très indirecte sur le PageRank en créant des liens, dont le poids est ensuite manipulé par des algorithmes qu’il ne contrôle point, alors qu’il peut intervenir directement sur un article de Wikipedia.

Lorsque Google a commencé, les internautes n’étaient pas conscients que le référencement pouvait être payant. C’est une intervention institutionnelle, une loi, aux Etats-Unis, qui a obligé les moteurs de recherche à séparer visuellement ce qui fait l’objet d’une promotion commerciale. Ces biais des systèmes sont mal connus, et je trouve que leur maîtrise devrait faire partie d’une éducation à leur usage.

Traditionnellement, la sociologie avait un rôle à jouer dans l’étude des comportements sociaux, et la philosophie s’impliquait dans l’étude du sens… Comment concevez-vous votre travail sur l’objet Internet?

Mon travail se situe dans la ligne directe de mes autres travaux d’épistémologue. Comment la connaissance est-elle produite, diffusée, stockée?

Il était pour moi impossible de rester indifférente à Internet. L’objet Internet n’a toutefois rien d’une reconversion: c’est ma façon d’étudier le design de la connaissance, qui est l’objet même de l’épistémologie.

Il reste difficile de faire passer Internet dans la culture académique, comme vous en avez également fait l’expérience, même si tous les universitaires utilisent les e-mails, Wikipedia, Facebook, Google, etc. Ces activités ne font pas partie de l’activité officielle d’un chercheur, alors que cela représente sans doute 80% de son activité réelle…

Dans le cadre d’un projet européen auquel je participe comme épistémologue, LiquidPublications [2], nous sommes en train de concevoir une nouvelle façon de produire la science, de valoriser toute l’activité d’un chercheur, en prenant en compte les outils sociaux du web 2.0.

La question, aujourd’hui, c’est que la plus grande partie de l’activité d’un chercheur n’est pas prise en compte dans l’évaluation de sa carrière scientifique.

C’est l’un des messages que j’essaye de faire passer au niveau européen, auprès de l’European Research Council, et même en France, où je collabore avec les projets du CNRS qui essayent de remettre en question les pratiques de diffusion de la recherche (comme le projet TGE Adonis [3].

Je pense qu’il faut passer d’une conception statique de la connaissance, incarnée aujourd’hui par l’article de recherche, à une conception dynamique, nécessairement plus collective.
URL source: http://www.rue89.com/innovation/2008/11/02/du-vin-au-web-20-comment-la-sagesse-collective-se-forme

Liens:
[1] http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Sagesse-en-reseaux-la-passion-d.html
[2] http://liquidpub.org/
[3] http://www.tge-adonis.fr

La mamma di Obama

Do not quote without permission. Copyright MicroMega 2008


E’ una donna che ha vinto le elezioni americane: è Stanley Ann Dunham, nata nel 1942 e morta di cancro nel 1995 ad appena 53 anni senza così vedere il suo sogno visionario realizzato, l’elezione di suo figlio Barack Hussein Obama a quarantaquattresimo presidente degli Stati Uniti. Il nome maschile le fu imposto dal padre, Stanley Dunham, che avrebbe preferito avere un figlio maschio. Unica figlia di Stanley e di sua moglie, Madelyn Payne, Stanley Ann fu una ragazza anticonformista e una madre solitaria, convinta di poter educare i suoi figli per prepararli a un mondo nuovo, globale e multiculturale, un mondo che non era certo presente nel suo quotidiano di bambina middle class di un’anonima cittadina del Kansas. Barack - Barry – come lo chiamava lei, è una sua creatura, il frutto di una paziente, attenta ed amorosa educazione che fu l’impegno della sua vita, tanto vedeva nei suoi due figli misti lo specchio di un futuro prossimo migliore, che pacifica nel caldo mélange del sangue le false opposizioni, gli odiosi sensi di appartenenza, le unreal loyalties, come le chiamava Virginia Woolf, che tanto ci rassicurano nel disperato bisogno di identità sociale di cui la nostra specie è vittima.

Al tempo della sua nascita, il 4 agosto 1961, suo figlio Barack era considerato ancora in metà degli stati americani il prodotto criminale di una miscegenazione, incrocio di razze, obrobrioso ibrido biologico la cui possibilità di esistenza non era semplicemente contemplata e i suoi autori puniti con la prigione. Parola impronunciabile oggi, termine coniato negli Stati Uniti nel 1863, con falsa etimologia latina, da miscere più genus, ad indicare la supposta differenza genetica tra bianchi e neri, la questione della miscegenazione diventa cruciale proprio durante gli anni della guerra civile americana e della conseguente abolizione della schiavitù, perché va bene dare diritti civili ai non bianchi, ma permettere relazioni intime tra bianchi e neri è un’altra storia. Il termine si trova per la prima volta nel titolo di un pamphlet pubblicato a New York, Miscegenation: The Theory of Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, in cui l’anonimo autore rivelava che il progetto del partito repubblicano, che aveva sostenuto l’abolizione della schiavitù, era quello di incoraggiare al massimo il mélange di bianchi e neri affinché le differenze razziali si attenuassero sempre di più fino a scomparire. Si scoprì presto che si trattava di un falso, confezionato dai democratici per far inorridire i cittadini americani davanti all’intollerabile progetto repubblicano di un auspicabile métissage. Il delitto di miscegenazione fu definitivamente abolito nel 1967, quando la Corte Suprema degli Stati Uniti sentenziò che le leggi anti-miscegenazione erano anticostituzionali, in risposta al famoso caso giudiziario Loving vs. Virginia in cui una coppia mista sposata fu condannata a un anno di prigione e a lasciare lo stato della Virginia per il solo fatto di essere stata trovata a letto sotto lo stesso tetto: il certificato di matrimonio appeso sopra il letto nuziale non fu considerato valido dai poliziotti che avevano scassinato la porta di ingresso e, armati di fucili, avevano pestato e umiliato i giovani sposi, perché era stato rilasciato in un altro stato che non condannava la miscegenazione. I fatti avvennero nel 1959 e la coppia dovette aspettare 8 anni per vedere infine riconosciuta la propria innocenza e l’indecenza morale di ciò che avevano subito.

Bisogna provare a immaginarsi quell’America per capire il coraggio di Stanley Ann, che si sposò incinta di quattro mesi a diciotto anni con il giovane e brillante studente kenyota Barack Obama senior., il primo africano ad essere accettato all’università delle Hawaii. Lui aveva 25 anni. Era arrivato alle Hawaii nel 1959 grazie a una borsa di studio del governo kenyota sponsorizzata anche dagli Stati Uniti per aiutare gli studenti africani più dotati a formarsi nelle università americane, per poi rientrare in patria e costruire nuove élites competenti e moderne. Cresciuto ai bordi del lago Vittoria, in una famiglia della tribù Luo, Barack senior aveva passato l’infanzia ad occuparsi del bestiame di suo padre, uno dei capi della tribù, e a frequentare la scuola del villaggio. Una prima borsa di studio gli aveva permesso l’accesso a un liceo di Nairobi. Alle Hawaii era arrivato per studiare economia, e si laureò in tre anni con i migliori voti della sua classe. Incontrò Stanley Ann a un corso di russo, che lei seguiva probabilmente attirata da quel paese così diverso dagli Stati Uniti, che le faceva sognare nelle lontane Hawaii la realizzazione dei suoi sogni di giovane atea marxista.
Stanley Ann era una ragazza timida, studiosa e sognatrice. Era nata a Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, dove il padre faceva il servizio militare. I suoi genitori, entrambi del Kansas, si erano conosciuti a Wichita, la più grande città del Kansas, nel 1940. La madre veniva da una famiglia rispettabile, gente che non aveva mai perso il lavoro nemmeno durante la grande depressione, e che viveva decentemente grazie a una concessione a una compagnia petrolifera sulle loro terre. Il padre veniva da una famiglia più difficile e modesta economicamente: cresciuto dai nonni, era diventato da adolescente particolarmente ribelle e scontroso, a causa anche del suicidio di sua madre. Il carattere duro gli rimase sempre: sarcastico e severo con Stanley Ann, sua figlia cominciò presto a distaccarsene e a manifestare una vera e propria insofferenza nei confronti delle sue maniere forti e troppo rozze, della sua eccessiva semplicità intellettuale, dello stile ottuso e maschile con cui conduceva i suoi rapporti familiari.

L’infanzia di Stanley Ann fu ricca di spostamenti: dal Kansas infatti i genitori andarono in California, poi di nuovo in Kansas, poi in varie città del Texas, a Seattle durante l’adolescenza della figlia, e infine a Honolulu, dove decisero di restare. Il padre aveva intrapreso affari di vario tipo, con un’alternanza di sucessi e insuccessi, per poi mettersi a commerciare mobili alle Hawaii. La madre lavorò sempre in banca, e a Honolulu divenne direttrice di un’agenzia bancaria. La coppia non aveva grandi interessi nella religione, anche se il padre cercò di convincere sua moglie Madeleine, detta Toot, a convertirsi alla congregazione Unitaria Universalista, un gruppo religioso che mescolava le scritture di cinque religioni diverse, con un argomento economico: “E’ come avere cinque religioni al prezzo di una!”. Ma infine fu dissuaso da sua moglie, la quale protestò che la religione non era come un supermercato. I numerosi spostamenti avevano fatto dei genitori di Stanley Ann una tipica coppia americana di ordinary outsiders, gente ordinaria, che si sposta per ragioni di soldi, che si sente profondamente americana nei valori, ma non sente radici particolari in nessun posto. Era una coppia comunque tollerante, il padre si considerava un bohème perché ascoltava jazz, scriveva poesie la domenica e non aveva paura di enumerare qualche ebreo tra i suoi più cari amici. La questione razziale non si era mai posta nella loro vita. La vita dei neri e dei bianchi nelle città che toccarono nel loro peregrinare era talmente segregata che per la maggior parte degli americani di quella generazione era un problema inesistente.

Stanley Ann cresceva solitaria, passava interi pomeriggi a leggere libri presi in prestito nella biblioteca del quartiere. Amava le lingue straniere, i romanzi europei e il Manifesto di Carlo Marx. A dodici anni, il primo trauma di intolleranza sociale. Arrivati in una cittadina del Texas, Stanley Ann diventa amica di una ragazza nera, figlia di vicini. I genitori non hanno nulla da obiettare, ma i compagni di scuola cominciano a prenderla in giro. Lo scherno diventa sempre più pesante, fino a diventare una vera e propria emarginazione. Toot, nonna di Obama, si ricorda della volta in cui trovò le due ragazze sdraiate in giardino, a guardare il cielo silenzione, mentre dalla cancellata che circondava il piccolo pezzo di terra i compagni di scuola e i ragazzi del quartiere urlavano ingiurie e insulti: “Nigger lover” strillavano a Stanley Ann, ad insinuare che la loro amicizia avesse connotazioni sessuali, unica ragione di attrazione per il diverso, come se il contatto con il nero non potesse che rappresentare un fantasma sessuale, un’alterità selvaggia e un desiderio rimosso nel puritanesimo wasp dell’America Anni Cinquanta.
Il Texas violento, intollerante e conformista non piace neanche ai genitori, che decidono di trasferirsi a Seattle, nuova frontiera economica dell’estremo Ovest degli Stati Uniti. La città è più aperta e accogliente, Stanley Ann fece a Seattle tutta la scuola superiore. Marine Box, la sua migliore amica all’epoca la ricorda come la più brillante delle studentesse, non tanto per i risultati scolastici, ma per la sua capacità di pensare da sola, di non piegarsi ai cliché e ai conformismi culturali del suo paese. Si professava atea per esempio, scandalizzando così i compagni di classe.

Quando i genitori si trasferiscono alle Hawaii, Stanley Ann si iscrive all’università di Honolulu. Nonostante le durezze del padre, il suo incontro con Barack Obama senior non è ostacolato dai genitori: lo invitano subito a cena, pensando che quel ragazzo si senta solo, così lontano da casa. Ovviamente le gaffes sono tante, data la poca dimestichezza con la gente di colore: il padre gli chiede subito se sa cantare e ballare, e la madre gli dice che assomiglia così tanto a Harry Belafonte. Ma Barack sr. non si lascia intimidire, anzi, una sera a una festa canta davanti a tutti, senza perarltro avere una gran voce, ma la sua sicurezza e il suo carisma sono percepiti da tutti. E’ un uomo fiero delle sue origini africane, figlio di un capo, che non ha mai subito le umiliazioni dei neri americani e non sente il peso del colore della sua pelle in quell’America violenta, segregata, ma ancora ingenua sulle questioni razziali, che non si è ancora confrontata con le Black Panthers, con i movimenti di rivolta e di costruzione dell’identità afro-americana.

Appena dopo la nascita di Obama Hussein, il padre è selezionato dalle migliori università americane e decide di proseguire i suoi studi a Harvard. Stanley Ann non ha voglia di seguirlo nel Massachussets: è felice del suo bébé, pienamente soddisfatta, ma non si vede in una vita di moglie di un politico kenyota. Sa che il destino di suo marito è segnato, che dovrà rientrare in Kenya, perché il suo successo negli Stati Uniti è un esempio per tutta una nazione, perché è per questo che è stato mandato a studiare in America. Decidono di separarsi in amicizia, Barack sr. viene da una cultura poligama, e quindi sa bene che la sua vita di marito e padre non finisce lì. Stanley Ann è sufficientemente sicura di sé e felice di quel figlio meticcio da tornare a Honolulu senza complessi, e riprendere i suoi studi. Riesce a ottenere una laurea in matematica e un master in antropologia nel 1967. Nello stesso anno, incontra un altro studente straniero, Lolo Soetoro, un ragazzo indonesiano piccolo, bruno e gentile, che comincia a frequentare casa Dunham. Toot, la madre di Stanley Ann, gioca a scacchi con lui ogni sera, e lo prende in giro perché “Lolo” in hawaiano significa “pazzo”. Ma di pazzo questo ragazzo non ha nulla; è estremamente cortese, affettuoso con il piccolo Barry e decisamente innamorato di quella giovane donna stravagante e avventurosa. Le propone di sposarlo, e di trasferirsi con lui a Jakarta. Stanley Ann accetta e parte con suo figlio per l’Indonesia alla fine del 1967, negli anni dell’irresistibile ascesa di Suharto al potere, delle purghe anti-comuniste e del declino del vecchio presidente, fondatore dello stato, Sukarno. Stanley Ann trova lavoro all’ambasciata americana, dove spesso porta con sé il suo bambino, che passa le giornate nella biblioteca dell’ambasciata a leggere la rivista Life. Gli parla di politica, di geografia, di relazioni internazionali. Lolo racconta a Barry i miti indonesiani, il grande Hanuman, dio scimmia e guerriero invincibile contro i demoni. L’ateismo comunista del governo Sukarno viene ben presto sostituito con una nuova ondata religiosa sotto Suharto. A scuola si studia la religione musulmana: l’Indonesia è il più grande paese convertito all’Islam. Barry è esposto a tutte queste influenze, tutte queste culture. Non ha problemi di appartenenza razziale: lui una razza non ce l’ha, è un cittadino del mondo, è curioso come sua madre, interessato alla differenza, sicuro di sé e completamente a suo agio nella normalità quotidiana che è il clan multietnico della sua famiglia ricomposta. Nel 1970 nasce sua sorella, Maya Kassandra Soetoro. Barry va a scuola, ma la sveglia per lui è alle tre della mattina, quando sua madre entra in camera sua sulle note di Mahalia Jackson, gli legge la biografia di Malcolm X, gli fa ascoltare i discorsi del reverendo Martin Luther King, insomma, gli inculca di forza un senso di appartenenza alla cultura afro-americana, che sta prendendo piede negli Stati Uniti, sta trovando una forma politica, un’identità comunitaria e un linguaggio.

Barry deve saper essere tutto: americano, nero, bianco, cosmopolita, perché questo è il suo futuro, questo è il sogno azzardato e visionario di sua madre. Quando il matrimonio con Lolo inizia a vacillare, Barry viene rimandato un anno dai nonni alle Hawaii. E’ lei che lascia Lolo, perché lui desidera avere altri figli. Presto anche Stanley Ann e Maya rientrano a Honolulu, e il clan si ricompone questa volta senza mariti, ma con i due figli e i nonni Dunham. I genitori di Stanley Ann si dedicano con amore al piccolo Barry, ma, a differenza di quello che si è letto sui giornali, non sono loro ad educarlo: è la madre che veglia sulla sua educazione, lei che, una volta rientrata alle Hawaii, ha ripreso gli studi per riuscire finalmente ad ottenere un dottorato in antropologia a cinquant’anni, nel 1992. Sceglie come terreno di ricerca la società rurale indonesiana, che le dà occasione di ritornare spesso in Indonesia, affinché sua figlia Maya possa vedere suo padre, con il quale ha mantenuto buoni rapporti di amicizia. Nel 1977 decide di fare un soggiorno più lungo, sempre per la sua ricerca. Andrà sola con Maya, perché Barry preferisce terminare la scuola negli Stati Uniti.

La carriera di Stanley Ann intanto si sviluppa in una nuova direzione: si occupa di sviluppo rurale, di progetti di microcredito per le donne indonesiane per varie agenzie e banche internazionali. La sua vita, la sua esperienza di donna e di madre di due figli multietnici è diventata il terreno della sua crescita intellettuale, le ha fatto capire cose che altrimenti non avrebbe visto sulle differenze sociali e culturali, sulla condizione delle donne, sulla condizione delle minoranze etniche. La sua autobiografia è il suo campo di sperimentazione, è insieme osservatrice e protagonista del mondo che si trasforma e si globalizza. Ma il suo entusiasmo e la sua carriera vengono stroncati di lì a poco da un cancro alle ovaie, che la uccide a cinquantatré anni, nel 1995.

C’è da chiedersi quanto ci sia di questa donna indipendente, autorevole e coraggiosa nell’obamania che ha preso il mondo intero durante le elezioni americane. Il nuovo che Obama rappresenta non è forse solo la sua pelle scura, ma anche quella sua profonda capacità di comprendere e di conciliare gli opposti che solo un uomo che ha accettato l’esempio e l’autorità di una donna può avere. Obama è di una generazione nuova perché è figlio di una donna autorevole intellettualmente, perché può avere una madre come esempio invece di un padre, perché è intriso di valori femminili di tolleranza e comunione. Obama è il prodotto di questa donna, ed è il suo più gran successo. Certo, durante la campagna elettorale era meglio tenere il ricordo di Stanley Ann lontano dalle luci della ribalta, e raccontare la storia del bambino nero allevato dai nonni del Kansas. Ma ora che Obama è presidente, ci sarà occasione finalmente di rendere onore a chi questo figlio perfetto se l’è inventato, curato ed allevato per farne l’icona del mondo che verrà e che lei non vedrà.

Les invasions barbares - The Barbarian Invasions - Le invasioni barbariche

Watch Gloria in tv at Le Invasioni Barbariche


On Friday night, November 7th, I was at the Italian tv to present my first "literary" book, La figlia della gallina nera a sort of memoir of my childhood through the words of my family in Milano, Italy.

The discussion was quite tough, at least from my side. I was facing a very well known in Italy and totally unknown abroad Italian psychoanalyst. Well, my roughness was due to inexperience! Once you have dedicated half of your life defending yourself from the linguistic attacks of the most brainy and almost totally male community in the Academy - analytical philosophers - an Italian psychoanalyst is a light "aperitivo" easy to swallow in less than 10 seconds.

My perfect day

Barak Obama has won the elections on November 4th, my son's 8th birthday. This morning the world seems a better place to be.

Mourir de philosophie

Le dernier ouvrage de Marie-Claude Lorne


Marie-Claude Lorne est morte. Elle s’est jetée dans la Seine il y a un peu près deux semaines. La police a retrouvé le corps vendredi. Elle a choisi le pont Simone de Beauvoir, à coté de la nouvelle Bibliothèque Nationale, pour prendre son envol. Je la connaissais depuis plus de dix ans : on s’était rencontrées à Paris, dans le laboratoire d’épistémologie où on étudiait toutes les deux. Les mêmes sujets : les approches biologiques du langage, le sens des mots dans l’évolution de l’espèce humaine, des thèmes fascinants qui n’intéressent personne.

Toutes les deux fascinées par une philosophe, femme elle aussi, très peu connue en France et en Italie, d’où je viens. Ruth Millikan à l’époque nous avait fait rêver. Peut-être parce qu’il y avait si peu de femmes philosophes dont s’inspirer, des femmes qui pouvaient fasciner par leur pensée et non pas par le fait d’être des femmes. Mais aussi parce qu’ elle proposait une vision radicalement différente du langage, une vision biologique d’une langue nécessaire, générée par les interactions de tous les jours de tous temps, stabilisée par le besoin de se coordonner comme des abeilles pour vivre ensemble. Je pense que ça nous fascinait car c’était une vision plus chaude, plus incarnée du langage comme d’une fonction organique, plus proche du battement du cœur que des caprices de la raison. Le langage non plus comme objet cartésien, forme publique de la pensée, mais comme objet biologique, vivant, pulsant, forme publique et privée en même temps de la vie. Au fond, à y repenser maintenant, c’était une vision tout simplement plus féminine.

Marie-Claude avait fait des études difficiles, une carrière difficile, en poursuivant parfois une excellence dont les standards sont établis ailleurs et négligés, ou parfois méprisés, en France. Trop française pour le jeu de massacre des carrières philosophiques internationales, trop intelligente pour se contenter de la scène intellectuelle provinciale et auto-référentielle de son pays. Comme beaucoup parmi nous, à jouer ce jeu, on devient étrangers, marginaux partout.

Marie-Claude s’est jetée du pont Simone de Beauvoir seule, désespérée après la nouvelle que la titularisation à son poste de maître de conférences lui avait été déniée. Elle était déprimée, bien sûr, comme souvent le sont les gens qui font ce type de métier, car peut être c’est une vocation des esprits souffrants, ou parce qu’on devient facilement déprimés lorsqu’on est intelligents et méprisés. Et Marie-Claude était une femme intelligente et passionnée par les idées.

Une femme seule, à l’âge où on commence à faire des bilans, à s’interroger sur le sens qu’on peut donner à sa vie. J’aurais voulu être à coté d’elle ce soir là, pour lui dire que le sens n’existe pas, qu’il n’y a pas des tribunaux qui peuvent juger une vie réussie ou une vie ratée, qu’un moment de satisfaction intellectuelle, comme un instant d’amour ou de plaisir suffisent à donner le seul sens des nos vies, leur sens biologique. Mais je n’étais pas là. Au revoir Marie-Claude, je ne t’oublierai pas.

Sagesse en réseaux. Designing wisdom

An article on Collective Wisdom on the web published in English and French by the French magazine
La vie des idées.

You find the online text here

La fine del convegno

Assorta nei miei pensieri durante un’interminabile sessione pomeridiana di un recente convegno, rifletto sulla saga di Star Wars, il mio film preferito. Ecco la chiave filosofica di quella mia passione cinematografica : siamo uomini del pleistocene, con istituzioni medievali e tecnologie futuriste ! Mi guardo attorno : gli astanti fanno fatica a tenere gli occhi aperti, vittime della stanchezza animale della digestione del pranzo consumato a mezzogiorno. Il rito delle presentazioni Power Point va avanti spietato : i conferenzieri si alternano sulla scena, davanti agli occhi vacui e a mezz’asta del pubblico. L’atmosfera è pesante, manca l’aria, la noia insopportabile. Ad un tratto, un sussulto : il pubblico si accende davanti allo scorrere di un video. Ma la scossa è breve e il sonno ripiomba rapidamente sulla platea. Alla pausa caffé i partecipanti si rianimano, si inseguono l’un l’altro, si scambiano biglietti da visita. Le conversazioni sono concitate, non bisogna perdere nemmeno un istante perché dopo saremo riassorbiti dal rito medievale della pubblica declamazione e non potremmo più scambiare nemmeno un sorriso.

Rientro in sala affranta all’idea di altre due ore di oratoria. Accendo il computer per restare sveglia, ed ecco che si apre una breccia di speranza: la connessione WiFi funziona! Comincio freneticamente a potenziare il mio ascolto: cerco on line informazioni su quello che l'oratore americano racconta, apro i siti che sta mostrando, insomma, sono viva di nuovo, e partecipo attivamente alla creazione di un sapere realmente condiviso. E, dato che immagino che il professore in questione una connessione ce l’abbia anche nel suo ufficio, mi chiedo: perché abbiamo fatto complessivamente più di seimila kilometri ad altissimo costo per trasmetterci informazioni che avremmo potuto scambiarci istantaneamente e a costo zero seduti nelle comode poltrone dei nostri uffici? Di colpo una certezza mi assale, il disincanto epistemologico è inevitabile: il convegno accademico non ha più alcun senso. E’ il sopravvivere di un antico rituale a mezzi tecnologici che ne hanno spazzato via ogni funzione, o quasi.

Ogni innovazione tecnologica mette in questione legittimazioni istituzionali esistenti. L’invenzione della stampa, e la conseguente diffusione della Bibbia stampata nel XV secolo, misero in questione il monopolio della Chiesa sulle sacre scritture, partecipando così all’avvento della Riforma. Un cambiamento di formato nella produzione e nella diffusione del sapere può rendere evidente l’obsolescenza di un’istituzione la cui funzione era stata proprio fino a quel momento di produrre e diffondere quel sapere. Così è successo per i convegni nell’era di Internet. Più del 60% del budget della Commissione Europea per la ricerca in scienze umane è consumato per viaggi e rimborsi di hotel : una mostruosa agenzia di viaggi che assorbe come un buco nero i fondi destinati alla ricerca. Il tempo allocato ad ogni intervento è comunque troppo poco, la comunicazione spesso difettosa, la sottodeterminazione tra la succinta presentazione e l’effettivo contenuto della ricerca immensa. La sessione di domande è quasi sempre mal gestita : la timida studentessa esita ad alzare la mano davanti al vecchio collega dell’oratore che si concede il solito show polemico. Le domande vengono fraintese, le risposte frammentate, il moderatore interrompe quasi sempre la discussione prima che si sia arrivati al punto con una frase di circostanza : « Forse è meglio continuare questo dibattito durante la pausa caffé ». Ma alla pausa caffé si farà tutt’altro, anzi, si farà finalmente quello che i convegni oggi hanno l’unica funzione di fare : networking.

Ma allora perché questo spreco di risorse, i pasti indigesti, le teste che si piegano sul mento, quando oggi, a basso costo, potremmo condividere risorse, discuterle, commentarle, valutarle insieme, fare tutto il lavoro che rende i convegni pesanti, noiosi e costosi per poi invece ritrovarsi leggeri e gravidi di idee per un evento sociale di vera conversazione e condivisione ? Un qualunque blog su WordPress permette di discutere articoli on line, mostrare video, chattare e commentare il lavoro scientifico degli altri. Il filtraggio collaborativo di siti come CiteULike permette di condividere risorse bibliografiche, sapere istantaneamente chi legge gli stessi articoli che stiamo leggendo e costruire comunità di conoscenza nuove, più appropriate e veramente corrispondenti ai nostri interessi. La rivoluzione di Internet è spesso vista come un rischio per la comunicazione scientifica « seria », un’introduzione di troppe voci nel vecchio rituale del consesso degli esperti. Ma se riuscissimo a utilizzare queste risorse per rendere efficiente il sapere, per condividerlo anche nella stretta comunità degli accademici, facendone un uso intelligente, forse questo contribuirebbe anche a cambiare l’immagine di un’accademia vecchia e legata a rituali obsoleti e fare evolvere dolcemente, senza rivoluzioni, le istituzioni ormai esangui del sapere.

La figlia della gallina nera

My new book, an autobiographical lexicon on the history of my Milanese childhood, is now out in Italy. Here's a review appeared in Il Corriere della Sera two days ago.

Elzeviro Un «lessico famigliare» milanese

VEDI ALLE VOCI BRU BRU E COCORITE

«Echi sono io? La figlia della gallina nera?» è un modo di dire che i lettori di certo conoscono: sottolinea un sopruso o una negligenza che in qualche modo ci riguarda. È il titolo del libro curioso e avvincente di Gloria Origgi, filosofa italiana che vive a Parigi (appunto La figlia della gallina nera, edizioni Nottetempo, pagine 125, 12,50). È una nuova specie di lessico famigliare che da privato fa presto a diventare pubblico, un' opera oltremodo femminile, come sottolinea anche la dedica «Alla memoria di mia madre. Per la memoria di mio figlio». «Le parole si portano dietro non soltanto la nostra storia, ma la storia di un' epoca, di un ambiente sociale, di una cultura», avverte l' autrice; «ho cominciato a scriverle e, pian piano, sono riemerse le persone, le atmosfere, i dolori della mia infanzia milanese». L' infanzia - e quindi la città - è quella degli anni Settanta, come si evince da una delle rare date (manca anche quella anagrafica dell' autrice) presente nella voce «Pigotta», la bambola di pezza confezionata dalla nonna per il Natale 1974: «... Non credevamo a Babbo Natale. Ma il laicismo non toglieva nessun incanto a quei natali all' alba, con mia madre addormentata in vestaglia e io e mia sorella stordite dall' ebrezza di scartare decine di pacchetti che ricoprivano il salotto di via Montenapoleone». Era, la sua, una Milano ricca, borghese. E anche «Comunista»: «Mio padre era iscritto al Pci dal 1948. Ascoltava jazz, frequentava le cineteche, leggeva Vittorini Durante una manifestazione operaia fu preso a manganellate in via Manzoni e salvato dal padrone del Don Lisander, il suo ristorante preferito. Lasciatelo stare, è il dottor Origgi!, e questo "dottor" l' aveva fatto identificare per un semplice esponente della borghesia rossa milanese». E così tra «Bru bru», «Cocorite», «Cose turche», «Esproprio proletario», «Mammalucco», «Signorina tu mi stufi», «Cosa mi guardi con quella faccia da sperduto di Allah?», «Refugium peccatorum» si arriva alla voce «Sotto quella dura scorza batte un cuore di pietra». Era il motto prediletto della madre, che rovesciava la tendenza del libro «Cuore», «allora dominante nella morale italiana della mia infanzia, per cui anche nel profondo dell' anima di un nazista a guardar bene batte un cuore d' oro». Lei sosteneva invece che perfino «la Milano-dal-cuore-in-mano decantata dai vecchi milanesi era più che altro un mito consolatorio per gli abitanti di una città spietata». E aggiungeva che la sua descrizione più appropriata si trova forse nel libro del grossetano e anarchico Bianciardi La vita agra. E noi la ringraziamo per averci ricordato un libro che oggi, dopo quarantasei anni, è ancora di scottante attualità, e uno scrittore che «pagò con la vita quella mancanza di cuore tutta lombarda».

Giulia Borgese

Pagina 43
(16 settembre 2008) - Corriere della Sera

A softer science. Reply to Chris Anderson's Wired article on The End of Theory

Draft. Do not quote. Published in the EDGE Summer Colloquium on Chris Anderson's Wired piece on The End of Theory

I agree with Daniel Hillis that Chris Anderson's point, although provocative and timely, is not exactly breakthrough news. Science has always taken advantage of correlations in order to gain predictive power. Social science more than other sciences: we have few robust causal mechanisms that explain why people behave in such or such a way, or why wars break out, but a lot of robust correlations - for which we lack a rationale - that it is better to take into account if we want to gain insight on a phenomenon. If the increase of child mortality rates happened to be correlated with the fall of the Soviet Empire (as it has been shown) this is indeed relevant information, even if we lack a causal explanation for it. Then, we look for a possible causal mechanism that sustains this correlation. Good social science finds causal mechanisms that are not completely ad hoc and sustain generalizations in other cases. Bad social science sticks to interpretations that often just confirm the ideological biases of the scientist.

Science depicts, predicts and explains the world: correlations may help prediction, they may also depict the world in a new way, as an entangled array of petabytes, but they do not explain anything if they aren't sustained by a causal mechanism. The explanatory function of science, that is, answering the "Why" questions, may be just a small ingredient of the whole enterprise: and indeed, I totally agree with Anderson that the techniques and methods of data gathering may be completely transformed by the density of information available and the existence of statistical algorithms that filter this information with a tremendous computing capacity. So, no nostalgia for the good old methods if the new techniques of data gathering are more efficient to predict events. And no nostalgia for the "bad" models if the new techniques are good enough to give us insight (take AI vs. search engines, for example). So, let's think about the Petabyte era as an era in which the "context of discovery", to use the old refrain of philosophy of science, is hugely mechanized by the algorithmic treatment of enormous amounts of data, whereas the "context of justification" still pertains to the human ambition of making sense of
the world around us. This leaves room for the "Why"-questions, that is, why are some of the statistical correlations extracted by the algorithms so damn good? We know that they are good because we have the intuition that they work, they give us the correct answer, but this "reflective equilibrium" between Google ranked answers to ourqueries and our intuition that the ranking is satisfying is still in need of explanation. In the case of PageRank, it seems to me that the algorithm incorporates a model of the Web as a structured social network in which each link from a node to another one is interpreted as a "vote" from that node to the other. This sounds to me as "theory", as a method of extraction of information that, even if it is realized by machines, is realized on the basis of a conceptualization of reality that aims at getting it right.

A new science may emerge in the Petabyte era, that is, a science that tries to answer the question of how the processes of collective intelligence made possible by the new, enormous amount of data that can be easily combined by powerful algorithms are sound. It may be a totally new, “softer” science, uninhibited at last by the burden of the rigor of "quantitative methods", that make scientific papers so boring to read, that leaves to algorithms this burden and lets the minds free to movearound the data in the most creative way. Science may become a cheaper game from the point of view of the investment for discovering new facts: but, as a philosopher, I do not think that cheap intellectual games are less challenging or less worth playing.

Take the Talking Cure

Article published in the New Statesman, June 19th 2008.

Gloria Origgi on why a second language is the best antidote to intolerance

By rejecting the Lisbon Treaty, Ireland's voters may have thrown the European Union into cri sis, but in a more profound way I am optim istic about Europe. A while ago, I took the train from Paris to Brussels for a meeting at the headquarters of the European Commission. The train was full of people my age - the late thirties - going to Brussels to participate in various EU projects.

I started chatting with my neighbours. Most of the people I spoke with came from more than one cultural background, with two or more nationalities in the family. All of us were at least bilingual, many trilingual or more. My neighbours epitomised the deep cultural change now taking place in Europe. A new generation has grown up, of people born more than a quarter of a century after the end of the Second World War and now moving around Europe to study and work - meeting, dating, marrying and having children with people from other European countries and doing so as a matter of course.

More and more European children are growing up multilingual. They are unlike immigrants born in one culture and having to grow up in another. They are unlike children growing up in a monolingual, monocultural family that happens to be located in a wider multicultural en vironment. For these children, cultural and linguistic diversity is not just a part of the society at large, it is a part of themselves, a novel kind of identity. Multilingualism is becoming an existential condition in Europe, good news for a continent in which national identities have been so powerful and have caused so much tragedy and pain in the past.

This condition also affects our cognitive life. Recent research in developmental psychology shows that bilingual children are quicker to develop an ability to understand the mental states of others. A likely interpretation of these findings is that bilingual children have a more fine-grained ability to understand their social environment and, in particular, a greater awareness that different people may represent reality in different ways. My bilingual six-year-old son makes mistakes in French and Italian but never confuses contexts in which it is more appropriate to use one language than the other.

I believe that European multilingualism will help produce a new generation of children whose tolerance of diverse cultures will be built from within, not learned as a social norm.

All this may be wishful thinking, projecting my own personal trajectory on the future of Europe. But I can't help thinking that being multilingual is the best and cheapest antidote to cultural intolerance, as well as a way of going beyond the empty label of multiculturalism by experiencing a plural culture from within. And, of course, this is not just a European issue.

Gloria Origgi is an Italian philosopher based in Paris. Taken from "What Are You Optimistic About?" (edited by John Brockman, Pocket Books)

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What's in my Common Sense?

Draft. Do not quote. A version of this paper will appear in the October 2008 issue of the review The Philosophical Forum.

“I believe that I have forbears, and that every human being has them. I believe that there are various cities, and, quite generally, in the main facts of geography and history. I believe that the earth is a body on whose surface we move and that it no more suddenly disappears or the like than any other solid body: this table, this house, this tree, etc.” [Wittgenstein, On certainty, §234)

“We are all, I think, in this strange position that we do know many things, with regard to which we know further that we must have evidence for them, and yet we do not know how we know them” [Moore, 1959]

In his famous paper In defence of commonsense (1959) G.E. Moore starts with a long list of what he calls commonsensical propositions that he holds true :

1. There exists at present a living human body, which is my body.
2. This body was born at a certain time in the past
3. Ever since it was born, it has been either in contact with or not far from the surface of the earth
4. There have existed some other things of this kind with which it was in contact
5. Among the things which have, in this sense, formed part of its environment there have, at every moment since its birth, been large numbers of other living human bodies
6. But the earth had existed also for many years before my body was born; and for many of these years, also, large numbers of human bodies had, at every moment, been alive upon it; and many of these bodies had died and ceased to exist before it was born.
7. I am a human being, and I have, at different times since my body was born, had many different experiences, of each of many different kinds.
8. I have often perceived both my own body and other things which formed part of its environment, including other human bodies
9. I have not only perceived things of this kind, but have also observed facts about them, such as, for instance, the fact which I am now observing, that that mantelpiece is at present nearer to my body than that bookcase
10. I have been aware of other facts, which I was not at the time observing, such as that my body existed yesterday
11. I have had expectations with regard to the future, and many beliefs of other kinds, both true and false
12. I have thought of imaginary things and persons and incidents, in the reality of which I did not believe
13. I have had dreams and I have had feelings of many different kinds.

These are propositions that according to Moore are commonsensical, that is, are believed and held true by every “regular” or, one could say, “commonsensical” human being. There are subtle debates among philosophers about the epistemological status of these kinds of propositions, whether we know them (as Moore claims) or just believe them to be true while knowing that they are partly false; how do we know them etc., whether they have a special status, an ear-mark, as Thomas Reid thought, that distinguish them from other kinds of beliefs or propositions…

But what strikes most at a first glance in Moore’s list is the heterogeneity of the propositions he accepts in his commonsense:

Some of them, like 1 and 7 are expressed in the form of first-person thoughts (I imagine that Moore would have consented to rephrase 1 as: “I am alive”) the evidence of which is based on one’s present self-awareness. Others, like 8, 12 and 13, are again first-person thoughts, but this time believed on the basis of memory, whereas 3, 9 and 10 are factual statements whose evidence is based on something I may discover by observing myself instead of a direct self-awareness. I find 2 and 6 even more surprising to cast in the “commonsensical” category: the fact that one is born sometime is something one is told about. Many people don’t even know exactly when they were born: before the mass diffusion of hospital births, in which the exact time is recorded in the official acts of birth, birth of children was vaguely reported days or months after by the parents. Memories of the event are usually very, very costly to recollect: maybe after an entire life of psychoanalytic training one is able to go back to that. And I can imagine a commonsensical belief in another culture that people are not born but brought to Earth from another planet (actually, to conceive such a belief, I do not need to think of a very exotic culture: when I was 8 years old, I found the personal diary of my 10 years old sister in which she was writing every night about how kind we all were with her even if she was not the daughter of my parents, but an extraterrestrial creature coming from a planet called Happiness). Proposition 6 strikes as even more controversial. This seems a genuine piece of testimonial knowledge, or, more exactly, historical knowledge, that I’ve acquired through some instructor at a certain point in my childhood, usually around the age of five or six, when some folk-historical concepts start to develop in children that are reinforced by school-learning. But, surely, I believe it for reasons that are quite different from the other propositions in Moore’s list. Certainly, no direct experience is involved in 6.

This apparently idle analysis of Moore’s commonsensical shows that even in the conception of one of the most enthusiastic philosophers about commonsense, this notion seems to point to a very weird philosophical kind. Pieces of self-awareness, of experiential knowledge, memories, testimonial beliefs and “common-knowledge” beliefs that are cheaply acquired in each culture seem to float freely together without any clear conceptual tie to connect one to the other. The general glue that makes these things stick together seems to be the idea that “Anyone who has a drop of commonsense would obviously believe them”. Commonsense in philosophy thus seems to be a rather “commonsensical” notion that doesn’t capture any real psychological kind.

In the history of philosophy, the expression has been used in a quite ambiguous way:

Common sense, from the Greek words, κοινή (common) αισϑήσις (sensation) was used in two very different ways, sometimes by the same philosopher, who left open - unintentionally or intentionally - a double reading: it may refer to a sort of sixth sense which gathers the various impressions received from the five senses into a common apperception (Aristotle, John Locke, Thomas Reid, Robert Burton)

“Inner Senses are three in number, so called, because they be within the brain-pan, as Common Sense, Phantasie, Memory [...] This Common sense is the Judge or Moderator of the rest, by whom we discern all differences of objects. Ibid. III. xiii, The external senses and the common sense considered together are like a circle with five lines drawn from the circumference to the centre.”

Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621 I. i. II. vii.

For Locke, each of the senses gives an input that has to be integrated in a single impression. Commonsense is the result of this integration, the sense of things in common between disparate impressions.

And, at the same time, commonsense refers historically to an average experiential/practical knowledge dependant on a universal human κοινή. Κοινή in Greek was in fact used to refer to the average language spoken by Greeks, a mixture of dialects that established the Attic variant of Greek as the common one. Commonsense is then what everyone commonly believes in a community, the wisdom of ordinary language.

And indeed the same ambiguity is found in modern and contemporary philosophical literature on commonsense. Take the anti-skeptical arguments in which commonsense is invoked. In modern and contemporary philosophy, the notion of commonsense was at the centre of various arguments against scepticism, like in Scottish commonsense philosophy. The overall structure of these arguments may be summed up in this way: Look, there are some obvious truths - the realist says - that nobody would deny and that lie at the foundation of philosophical inquiry. But when relativists object to realists that the appeal to a universal κοινή is misplaced, because every culture has its own system of commonsensical beliefs, commonsense philosophers usually reply by appealing to the other meaning of commonsense, that is, commonsense as more than common knowledge, as a special sixth sense that guides us in practical reasoning.

Another ambiguity is the one between two other possible meanings, that is commonsense as good and sane comprehension as opposed to the distorted visions of the mad. A further one is between commonsense as the view of the world of the layman as opposed to the scientist’s image of things.

All these ambiguities are present in Thomas Reid, “earmarks” of commonsense beliefs:

(1) Universally held by mankind

(2) Whose acceptance is reflected in the common structure of all languages

(3) Whose contradictory is not merely false but absurd, and

(4) That is irresistible, so that even those who question them are compelled to believe them when engaging in the practical affairs of life

Note that for Reid these are not epistemological criteria that we need to identify before commonsense beliefs are evident to us. They are automatically self-evident, and the criteria are just a way a posteriori of “marking” commonsense beliefs.

To sum up this excursus, it seems that commonsense beliefs are and have been for long time identified with those beliefs which it is commonsensical to hold. This of course introduces a problem of circularity in the definition (actually, there are few “explicit” definitions of commonsense: philosophers prefer the vagueness of the term so that it can be adapted to very different uses in different contexts).

But today I do not want to address the questions of the epistemological status of commonsense beliefs - questions such as: “do we really know commonsensical propositions and how do we know them?” - rather, I would like to share with you some intuitions about what we accept as “commonsensical” among our beliefs, how we pry apart commonsensical and non-commonsensical propositions, how we “construct” that very special system of irresistible beliefs that constitutes our folk epistemology[1]. As Clifford Geertz says, “There are really no acknowledged specialists in common sense”, neither philosophers, nor psychologists or other scientists. Maybe the layman is the expert in commonsense, but usually the commonsensical layman doesn’t have a cue as to how and why he accepts a stock of beliefs as commonsensical. So, I’ll turn to self-insight and autobiographical report in order to provide a concrete illustration of what’s in my commonsense and try to find out how and why some of my beliefs are for me commonsensical beliefs.

I hope that this will allow me to illustrate some general points:

• Our folk-epistemology contains very heterogeneous beliefs such as: pieces of learned expertise, vulgar knowledge, proverbs, intuitions, cultural beliefs, perceptual beliefs (the ones we can verify with our eyes and ears), norms of practical reasoning that help us to use these beliefs judiciously and reflectively, hence:
• Commonsense beliefs can’t be used to separate the Manifest Image from the Scientific Image of the world. There are some pieces of commonsense that are not manifest, as well as others that are scientific.
• Commonsense beliefs can’t be used either to distinguish between what we know through our eyes and ears and what we know through culture. Both kinds of beliefs can be commonsensical.
• They are no more unreflective and logically untied than other categories of beliefs (i.e. scientific beliefs or religious beliefs which we accept under authority are highly unreflective and logically untied as well)
• Still, not any cultural belief can become a part of our folk-epistemology. Cultural as well as cognitive constraints intervene in making a special set of beliefs particularly irresistible.
• It is not just pervasive cultural influence that is the evidence of validity of a commonsense belief, because we still want to distinguish between religious superstitions and ethnic canards of stereotypes from the belief that if you go out when it’s raining without an umbrella you can catch a cold.
• What makes us accept some propositions as commonsense beliefs is a complex system of trust in the reputational cues about their source, cognitive constraints on their intuitiveness, and socio-cultural or, as I will claim, conversational constraints on their acceptability in a certain community.

I will use my own personal example as a test for these claims.

What’s in my commonsense?

1. If I go out in the cold without warm clothing I catch a cold
2. Olive oil is better for health than butter
3. A fresh squeezed lemon juice each morning before breakfast prevents you from catching a cold or a flu
4. Fasting is good for health
5. Laughing is a cheap and efficacious anti-depressant
6. I have dreams and these dreams mean something that I can interpret
7. I have memories and sometimes I repress them
8. I have a bad character and people around me have characters
9. I am a woman and this influences my feelings and reactions
10. There are no intellectual differences between men and women
11. All that glitters is not gold
12. Nothing on Earth travels faster than light
13. Things do not fall just because they are heavy, but because of gravity
14. I have a heart and a kidney

As you may see, my list is as heterogeneous as Moore’s list, although I won’t exchange mine with his. Actually, I would not include some of the propositions in his list in mine: I think I never thought of other people as other bodies around me - more as other minds, and intentional agents – and I don’t find commonsensical at all to reflect upon the fact that my body was in contact with the surface of the Earth or not far from it since I was born (especially after a week in which I’ve spent more than 20 hours at a distance of about 30 000 feet from Earth!)

My folk-epistemology includes pieces of knowledge that come from very different corpuses and that are tied together by a certain intuitiveness they have, by a certain privileged relation with my sense of certainty or, as I will argue, by the place they have in my everyday conversational practices. It is not their value in practical reasoning, as many have argued, or their capacities of “making a difference to judgement and action” (Shapin 735), that makes them belong to my common sense. Rather, it’s their place in conversation, the default certainty-value they have in our conversational practices, their pragmatic self-evidence that we expect would be evident for our interlocutors too that give them such a special status.

Let’s see in more detail what is the nature of my commonsensical beliefs: (1) is based on my experience as well as on the authority of grand-mothers. (2) is more of a cultural-biased belief that I’ve learned in my Italian education and was subverted when I moved to France: I remember myself staring at my son’s French paediatrician when he told me to add some butter in the soup instead of olive oil because it was “healthier” for the baby… (3) is a very idiosyncratic dietary rule that I inflict to myself on the basis of a number of intuitions about what my body needs in order to be in a good shape and on the personal experience that happens to work very well. (4) and (5) are less idiosyncratic and more diffused pieces of common knowledge, even if (4) seems to be scientifically untenable - whereas I’m not aware of any result that systematically falsifies (5). (6) and (7) are deferential to psychoanalysis - here also as a result of a mixture of acceptance of a certain corpus as admissible in conversation and of personal experience with its techniques. (8) and (9) are based or my folk-theories of personality and gender. Even if any serious psychologist or social scientist would deny (8) and claim that people’s moral behaviour is more a matter of the situation and its opportunities than a matter of character (the recent brilliant book by John Dorris Lack of character is exactly a plea for this idea, or the splendid definition that Scott Fitzgerald gives in The Great Gatsby of personality as “un unbroken series of successful gestures”), I still include an irresistible folk-theory of personality in my everyday way of making sense of the social world around me. The same goes for (9): it packs my folk-theory of gender, even if I believe in (10), that is, that there are no intellectual differences between men and women. (10) of course is a matter of experience, of deference to scientific knowledge and also of a valuable ideology that has a role in defining my identity. (11) belongs to my “proverbial economy”, to use the words of Steven Shapin: “A network of speech, judgement and action in which proverbial utterances are considered legitimate and valuable, in which judgement is shaped and action prompted by proverbs competently uttered in pertinent ways and settings, that is to say a cultural system in which proverbial speech has the capacity of making difference to judgement and action” (Shapin, 2001: 735) So I’m a competent user of (11). (12) and (13) belong to the commonsensical propositions I trust because I trust in modern science, even if they do not have any practical consequence in my everyday reasoning. The last one is even more puzzling: nobody would deny that this is a commonsensical belief, yet my knowledge of it is as indirect as the ones about light and weight. Of course I can take my pulse and interpret its beats, but how I connect it to the presence of an organ called “heart” is a matter of having learned some piece of sophisticated science and not of taking the world as its authority.

In the essay already mentioned at various points today, Clifford Geertz challenges the idea that commonsense beliefs bear a privileged relationship with the immediacies of experience and defines it as a cultural system, an interpretive system that, as art, myths, religion is historically and socially constructed. An indeed the pieces of my commonsense I have shown you belong to my culture: they say a lot about my cultural identity and how I define myself with respect to it. Still, their systematicity is questionable: as I’ve tried to show, intuitive knowledge and learned expertise are clearly mixed up, and the way they relate to the world’s direct authority is not just by taking the reality at its face value. If it were so, then, bodies would fall because they’re heavy and light simply doesn’t travel at all. So the demarcation between the manifest image and the scientific one doesn’t hold to define what is commonsensical. Nor the relative “naturalness” as opposed to the “culturalness” of my beliefs. Cultural beliefs such as the one on the benefits of olive oil can be as commonsensical as more experiential beliefs, such as if I get out in the cold I can catch a cold.

But what Geertz doesn’t say is why these propositions form a cultural system, an interpretive schema of “relatively organized considered thoughts” (p. 75): how do I accept them as commonsensical, or how do they become commonsensical ? Is there a criterion that allows me to filter what enters my folk epistemology?

This is of course a very complicated question that I don’t have the ambition to resolve here. Still, I would like to advance some suggestions about a possible criterion: for a belief to be acceptable in my commonsense it has to be acceptable in those conversational practices which I repute valuable and want to take part in. The boy who responds to his mother who tells him “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” by saying:

“Mother, three NIH studies have shown that on a sample of 458 Americans of all ages there was no statistically significant decrease in the number of house calls by family doctors; no I won’t eat this apple” (Latour, Science in Action: 208) is just refusing a conversation with its rules and epistemic standards, not really challenging his mother’s folk epistemology.

The most authoritative conversation in which all of us are involved from the onset is that with our parents and teachers during our childhood. I have a precise memory of the bookshelves in my father’s library, what was in and what would had never slipped through his severe judgement. The complete works of Freud were there. Words such as repression, super-ego, and unconscious circulated often in conversations. But I never heard a word of astrology or homeopathy in my parents’ house: neither their friends or, later, mine, would have accepted them as themes of conversation. So, I still would have problems in accepting this corpus in a conversation.

Of course our epistemic authorities change as our will to be involved in new conversations evolves, and our epistemic standards are constantly updated. What settles in my commonsense is what is cognitively constrained by my folk theories about the world (such as psychoanalysis, which, as it has been nicely argued by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in a paper entitled “Freud’s permanent revolution” owes its success to its capacity to be an extension of our everyday folk psychology). But at the same time, they are constrained by the reputational value we attribute to some conversational circles we want to be part of, our family, our teachers, and the social milieu which shapes our intellectual and cultural identities. But what we feel as acceptable, as believable, as an irresistible part of our sense of ourselves, is shaped in many ways by what we want to be able to talk about with the people we repute authoritative for us. So, in conclusion, what ties together the weird thoughts that I accept as commonsensical is their contribution to my autobiography, to that unique mixture of feelings, ideas and practices that renders me a unique human being.

Clifford Geerts says that commonsense is “the world in its authority”. I would reformulate its motto in conclusion by saying that it is rather “the word in its authority”.

---

[1] There are many senses in which expressions such as “commonsense” and “folk- epistemology” may be used, and I do not want to present here a new definition. In this presentation I will use them as synonymous, and will refer to “folk-epistemology” as the system of commonsense beliefs we commonly accept in our everyday understanding of the world.

Wine Talk: Cosmopolitanism with a Human Face

Draft. Do not quote. Presented at the Third International Conference on Philosophy and Wine. Pollenzo, Italy 30-31 May 2008.

As a Milanese living abroad since 1992, I have always been sensitive to the different weights different cultures give to various topics in conversation: when I moved to Paris for example, I was a little shocked at the beginning by the predominance of talk about food and wine at dinners, a kind of conversation that was proscribed at the almost “protestant” tables of the Milanese bourgeoisie. I was even more shocked in discovering that food was becoming a topic of conversation among academic friends and colleagues in countries such as England, United States and Australia. Some academic workshops started to change “style” by the late Nineties: while travelling around I had the impression that in many occasions local organizers were slowly replacing Spartan meals at the university refectories and cafeterias by more interesting dinners in local restaurants, thus transforming the severity of the intellectual trip in a richer human and cultural experience of discovery of new tastes. Food and wine were becoming an international topic of intellectual conversation, as music and art were since longtime: they were dramatically changing their position and legitimacy in the hierarchy of discourse in a way that other intimate and everyday life topics were not (talking about children and styles of hairdressing for example – were, and are, still in the realm of private life). Food and wine have joined the realm of “high-culture”: culinary traditions have been recognised by the UNESCO as part of the cultural “immaterial patrimony of the humanity”[1], quite an odd recognition for the most animal, natural and material among human behaviours. A conference such as the one we are attending these days here in the temple of the Slow Food cultural movement, is an example of this positional change.

Of course, this is just anecdotical, and my proposal here is not to provide a serious sociological explanation of what made the transition of food talk from the slums of private pleasures and urges to the glories of the academic high-tables possible. Rather, I will try to argue that the new role of food talk, and, in particular, of wine talk, in our contemporary culture is due to a special relation that the new wine industry was able to entertain with a certain image of cosmopolitanism that has entered our global culture and with what is acknowledged as “civilized conversation” in this culture. As if the wine world was able to suggest a landscape of reconciliation between the inevitable globalization of the means of production and markets and an intimate need for anchoring our identity in local traditions and legacies.

In the last two decades, globalization has taken place. On the one hand, it has realized an ancient Marxist nightmare, that is, that the imperatives of capitalist production inevitably would have led the bourgeoisie to “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, and establish connections everywhere.”[2] On the other hand, it has simultaneously realized a Marxist dream, that is, that the instruments of “capitalist exploitation” - new technologies that increased possibilities for human interaction across borders - would have provided in the end the necessary infrastructure for a cosmopolitan future civilization. Globalization thus concentrates all our deep and contradictory fears and hopes. Global, deterritorialized, liberal trading imposes acceleration on the standardization and rationalization of forms of production and exchange. For an item (and I am referring here to all sort of items or goods, a medication, a cultural product like a book, a scientific result, etc.) to go “global” it has to undertake a series of transformations that make it suitable for entering a reliable and efficient chain of production and transmission that sustains its diffusion around the world. This seems to lead to an inevitable uniformity of goods and to a growing dominance of common rational standards of production to the detriment of variety and cultural diversity. The frightening face of the global world thus presents itself as a desert landscape, a flatland of conformism in which all interesting differences will rapidly vanish away. But, as I said, this goes together with positive hopes, such as that the interconnectedness of the global world is creating new forms of conversations and trustful interactions among different people sharing common concerns and values while keeping different standpoints and perspectives.

The two faces of globalization solicit two very different forms of trust (or, sometimes, distrust): the first one is a trust in the reliability of the techno-scientific mode of production and transmission that makes globalization possible: it is a form of trust that is based on the technical expertise of producers and in the rational design of the means of distribution as well as the respect of the standards. It is a trust that comes out of a loss of control: we cannot control anymore all the steps that go from the production of an item to its delivery to us. So we need some reasons to be confident in the reliability of the process that selects and filters what we come up to buy, to eat or to even to know. It’s an impersonal trust more on the credibility of the reliable and rational design of social institutions and processes that on people. The second is a form of trust that comes out of the interconnectedness of the world that makes new encounters and conversations possible: it is a trust based on our relations with others and on an optimistic stance towards the opportunity we have today to share common values and conversations even with people whom we do not clearly share norms and customs.

The food and wine industry are especially concerned with this tension. Eating and drinking make us part of a food chain that starts somewhere under the land and terminates into our stomachs. This makes us dramatically vulnerable to other people’s decisions and choices. As Michael Pollan rightly points out in his last book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma[3], one of the most natural human activity, that of preparing and consuming meals every day, doesn’t rely anymore on our spontaneous capacities of choosing what to eat, but on a complex system of trust relationships that involve experts, marketing strategies, dietary advisors and policy makers. Food industry has obscured the natural connection we have with our bodies and our territory. But, on the other hand, the possibility today of sharing at a global level our eating and drinking experiences, as well as our fears about the risks of the spreading of a technocratic alimentary industry, has given to many of us the access to a new form of sharing our tastes at a new level, and – I argue - to get rid of some of our “unreal loyalties” to our cultural niches and folklore and take part into a broader conversation which nonetheless is deeply entrenched in local identities and cultural temperaments. Global networks such as for example Terra Madre, a Slow-Food initiative whose aim is to preserve, encourage, and support sustainable food production methods by allowing small local producers all around the world to gather and share their savoir-faire, are an example of these new conversations that require an effort of adaptation to a new sense of community for those who participate. It is a community that shares values about food production methods, which should be based on attention to territory and those distinctive qualities that have permitted the land to retain its fertility over centuries of use. This vision is in direct opposition to pursuing a globalized marketplace, with the systematic goal of increasing profit and productivity. Yet, it is thanks to global network that this initiative can thrive and to the capacity of its members to adapt to the conversational standards of this network. On a more modest note, even a very personal example, such as the blog that Noga Arikha and I write at www.tuttipiatti.blogspot.com is an instance of the articulation of very personal experience and sense of what a good meal is within a global network, the blogs, that allows us to share our local dinners in Paris and New York between us and with people around the world.

Food and wine have thus exacerbated this contrast between forms of trust. The hypothesis that I would like to advance in a very informal way, more as an attempt to find a cultural interpretation of a phenomenon than to provide an explanation for it, is that the rise of food and wine talk in our worldly conversations lies in the particular way that at least a fraction of this production has succeeded in articulating our trust in reliable, new ways of production and circulation of goods and our will to take part into cosmopolitan conversations, where no one is expected to converge on a single mode of life, but only to share some common tastes and manners without abjuring to local allegiances and perspectives.

But let’s try to argue for this in a more concrete manner through a brief excursus on the globalization of wine markets since 1990. Globalization of wine markets means many different things. On the one hand, the mastery of new agricultural techniques by many producers and the rapid diffusion of innovations such as drip irrigation, new trellis systems and techniques, grape chilling etc, started to modify the way of production of many European producers, thus enhancing the quality of their products and the possibility of market expansion. The decade 1990-2000 was a prosperous era for European winemakers. On the other hand, during the same decade, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States started to impose themselves as real competitors to the European monopoly of wine production, export and consumption. If we take the export, between 1988 and 1999, this New World group’s combined share of global wine exports grew from 3 to 16 per cent in value terms. When intra-European Union (EU) trade is excluded, Europe’s decline in dominance is even more dramatic: from 91 per cent to 66 per cent, while the New World’s share grows from 8 to 31 per cent. And of the world’s top ten wine exporters, which account for 90 per cent of the value of international wine trade, half are in Western Europe and the other half are New World suppliers. Rates of consumption modified also radically within the same period. Just as an example, while France and Italy were facing a decrease of consumption of – 16% and – 8% respectively, due to a change in preventive health policies in both countries, Australia, United States and China saw a growth of consumption respectively of + 32%, + 43% and + 115 %.[4] New producers were relying often on much bigger vineyards, thus allowing more important economies of scale and a better ability to negotiate with mass market retailers.

Globalization of wine was perceived by European producers as a shock and, by most of them as a “bad thing”. An industry that had for centuries relied on local savoir-faire and national regulations and norms that institutionalised and reinforced the status-quo (appellation system, etc) was facing a competition with “strangers” who did not necessarily share the same conception of control on wine. Indeed, if some general rules and principles are shared by almost all producers, like the definition of wine or the control over the use of chemical products, others are ignored (like the use of transgenic rootstocks (porte-greffe) or the control on irrigation). More generally, world-wine was perceived as a standardized product, a challenge to the colourful personalities and local and temporal (year by year) varieties of wine typical of the traditional production. For example, it has been claimed at lenght that red world-wine has standardized its taste in order to comply with the following international “taste-profile”:

• Wine should have a very dark color-the darker, the better;
• It should have very ripe, fruity flavors;
• It should have a minimum of 14° alcohol; even more alcohol is okay;
• The wine's tannins should be very soft;
• The wine's acidity level should be low;
• The wine should be voluptuous, or velvety, on the palate;
• Most of the wine's flavor should be on the front of the palate[5].

But from the perspective of the emergent markets, wine globalization was perceived on a more positive note as a form of democratization of taste. Robert Parker, the internationally acclaimed “taste-pundit” in the world of wine, whose 100 points-based system of wine rating has revolutionized the wine market, presents himself as the advocate of a new class of wine consumers liberated from the inferiority complex towards the Old World. And indeed, the fact that so many people joined the pleasures of wine taste around the world made the market of wine less elitist. Also, if we take countries such as South Africa or Argentina and Chile, their presence on the international scene of wine world and the new image that these countries associated with their production was really connected to the process of democratization that these countries had undertaken and the willingness to give an image of themselves as “civilized” interlocutors on the international scene.

Still, it is true that wine taste today is partly due to the separation, so common in all food industry today, between the “taste-design” process, that is conceived and designed by experts (like the famous or infamous Austrialian flying winemakers that zip around the world, jumping from one season to the next, and taking advantage of the rotation of the globe to spread their expertise and grow the same wine everywhere) and the local characteristics of different soils and plants’ varieties. As the international taste was an abstraction, the outcome of a “cold” process of refining a flavour to please an abstract entity, the “ideal” palate of a generic consumer that could be located anywhere in the globe.

To put it roughly, the tension between the Old World and the New World of wine can be framed as a tension on two opposite interpretations of the role that two key concepts, democratization and civilization were playing in the globalization of wine market. While the Old World was perceiving the democratization of wine taste as an inevitable loss in “civilization”, the price to pay to give access to the many to the civilised pleasures, the New World was perceiving the same phenomenon as a step towards a new global civilization, which challenged an imperial view of civilisation of wine taste imposed by Europe.

The two attitudes were both plausible: civilization is an intrinsically normative concept: it refers to a human cultural patrimony that is potentially valuable for all humankind. But this patrimony is culturally situated: it stems from a particular nation, with its territories and cities. According to Norbert Elias[6] the concept of civilization (civilisation in French) refers ambiguously in the European Renaissance to the cultural, political, scientific accomplishments of a society and the behaviours and attitudes of its members (the good manners, the taste preferences of the “civilized” man). Even if the German term kultur refers to a more limited portion of the civilising process, that is, its intellectual, artistic and religious accomplishments, the term “cultivated” (kultiviert in German) refers also to the civilized manners: being cultivated refers to a form of people’s conduct or behaviour. As Elias says “it describes a social quality of people, their housing, their manners, their speech, their clothing”[7] Global civilization, if distinguished from imperialism and colonialism (that is, the imposing rules, manners and norms of life that stem from a centre of power) thus sounds as an oxymoron: either you are well mannered and national, or you are global, may be more democratic, but uncivilised.

Even the idea of a cosmopolitan citizenship, that has been so fashionable these years in order to try to find a way out to these contradictions[8], has raised some doubts, as it evokes an “unpleasant posture of superiority toward the putative provincial. You imagine a Comme des Garçons-clad sophisticate with platinum frequent-flyer card regarding, with kindly condescension, a ruddy-faced farmer in workman’s overalls”[9]

Yet, what I want to argue as a conclusion, is that the rise of world-wine contributed and contributes to a more suitable conception of cosmopolitanism “with a human face” that is necessary to build a new global culture without erasing the local standpoints. The globalized taste of the wines from the emergent market had a huge impact on the taste of wine even in the Old World, and it is hard to argue that this was just to the detriment of local traditions. Local traditions, if they do not want to become pure folklore, have to evolve even if sometimes this means to pay a price to its own identity and accepting that others, “the strangers” or the “uncivilized” may teach something new to you. Standardized worldwine tastes have something to teach to local traditions, at least by making them aware of an update of how the manners and needs of people around the world are evolving.

And as the rise of world-wine grows, its discrimination becomes more fine-grained: styles of worldwine start to develop, insisting on the notion of terroir and matching grapes and winemaking styles to particular locations. Californian producers, which started with a very simplified system of wine denomination, that included on the label just the name of the producer and the variant of grape, have started since already 10 years to put on their labels the name of local renowned vineyards now associated to a grape variety, such as Zinfandel in Dry-Creek Valley and Pinot Noir in Carneros. Differentiation of areas and vineyards is still ongoing, rankings and evaluations are multiplying. Instead of the desert landscape of an uniform wine, the globalized wine is becoming part of a global “civilizing” process in which conversations multiply and help to make explicit some common concerns for quality and respect of the difference. Wine has entered its cosmopolitan face, as many other products have, but this doesn’t coincide with a loss of identity and quality. There is no room anymore for a local standpoint of view, because the simple contact with global phenomena has irreducibly changed our way of perceiving our own identity and locality. Wine-talk is part of an attempt to construct a valuable shared culture (or civilisation) of taste, a cosmopolitanism with a human face that reinforces both kinds of trust: trust in the respect of the processes and trust in people who attach to these processes the richness and value of their local perspective. What kind of talk wine talk is that makes it so suitable for cosmopolitan conversations? It is mainly a sharing of different rankings, a meta-normative talk about what is good and bad. Exchanging rankings, that is, evaluated information, is one of the central ingredient of a new, emergent global culture. One could see the whole networked culture made possible by the Web as a giant network of ranking and rating systems in which information is valued as long as it has been already filtered by other people. In an informationally-dense but normatively uncertain environment as the global society, exchanging rankings becomes a crucial step towards the construction of a common culture. That is how culture grows, how traditions are created. A cultural tradition is, to begin with, a labelling system of insiders and outsiders, of who stays on and who is lost in the magma of the past. Wine talk is a talk that helps to establish new, exchangeable ranking of taste, thus providing a common ground to negotiate a new, shared cultural identity.

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[1] Cf. http://portal.unesco.org/culture

[2] K. Marx (1848) Manifesto

[3] Cf. M. Pollan (2006) The Omnivore’s Dilemma, A Natural History of Four Meals, Pengouin.

[4] Cf. Report of European Commission 2006 : Vin. Economie du secteur, Direction générale de l’Agriculture, February 2006.

[5] Ed McCarthy, “The Case Against Globalization of Wine”, Wine Review Online.com

[6] N. Elias (1994) The Civilizing Process : Sociogenetics and Psychogenetics, Blackwell, Oxford.

[7] Cf. ibidem. p. 6.

[8] See for example A. Appiah (2006) Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, W. W. Norton, New York, who contrasts the notion of “cosmopolitanism” to that of “globalization” and “multiculturalism”.

[9] Cf. Appiah, cit., p. xiii.

Designing Wisdom Through the Web: The Passion of Ranking

Draft. Do not Quote. Presented at the workshop on Collective Wisdom, Collège de France, Paris 22-23 May 2008.

Let me start with a rather trivial remark: Design matters. This triviality is rich of consequences for collective wisdom. This is the central claim I would like to defend through this paper. No matter how many people are involved in the production of a collective outcome – a decision, an action, a cognitive achievement etc. – the way in which their interactions are designed, what they may know and not know of each other, how they access the collective procedure, what path their actions follows and how it merges with the actions of others, affects the content of the outcome. Of course this is well known by policy makers, constitution writers and all those who participate into the institutional design of a democratic system, or any other system of rules that has to take into account the point of view of the many. But the claim may appear less evident – or at least in need of a more articulate justification - when it deals with the design of knowledge and the epistemic practices on the Web. That is because the Web has been mainly seen as a disruptive technology whose immediate effect was to blow up all the existing legitimate procedures of knowledge access, thus “empowering” its users with a new intellectual freedom, the liberty to produce, access and distribute content in a totally unregulated way. Still, methods of tapping into the wisdom of the crowds on the Web are many and much more clearly differentiated that it is usually acknowledged. In his book on the Wisdom of Crowds – probably the only shared piece of collective wisdom that we are able to attribute to each other as a background reading in this very interdisciplinary conference – James Surowiecki writes about the different designs for capturing collective wisdom: “in the end there is nothing about a futures market that makes it inherently smarter than, say, Google. These are all attempts to tap into the wisdom of the crowd, and that’s the reason they work”. Yet, sometimes the devil is in the details and the way in which the wisdom of crowds is captured makes a huge difference on its outcome and its impact on our cognitive life. The design question that is thus central when dealing with these systems is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers?

In this paper I will try to go through the details of some of the collective wisdom systems that are nowadays used on the Web. I will provide a brief “technical” description of the design that underlies each of them. Then, I will argue that these systems work because of their very special way of articulating (1) individual choices and collectively-filtered preferences on one hand and (2) human actions and computer processes on the other. I will then conclude by some epistemological remarks about the role of ranking in our epistemic practices, arguing that the success of the Web as an epistemic practice is due to its capacity to provide not so much a potentially infinite system of information storage, but a giant network of ranking and rating systems in which information is valued as long as it has been already filtered by other people. My modest epistemological prediction is that the Information Age is being replaced by a Reputation Age in which the reputation of an item – that is how others value and rate the item - is the only way we have to extract information about it. I see this passion of ranking in collective wisdom as such a central feature that I’m tempted to add it as a condition in the very illuminating list of conditions that James Surowiecki imposes on the characterisation of a wise crowd, that is:

1. diversity of opinion (each person should have some private information)
2. independence (people’s opinions are not determined by others)
3. decentralization (people are able to draw on local knowledge)
4. aggregation (presence of mechanisms that turn individual judgements in collective decisions)

5. presence of a rating device (each person should be able to produce a rating hierarchy, rely on past ranking systems and make – at least in some circumstances – his or her rating available to other persons)

I think that this last condition is particularly useful to understand the processes of collective intelligence that the Internet has made possible, although it is not limited to the Internet phenomenon. Of course, this opens the epistemological 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. After all, rankings introduce a bias in judgement and the epistemic superiority of a biased judgement is in need of justification. Moreover, these rankings are the result of collective human registered activities with artificial devices. The control of the heuristics and techniques that underlie this dynamics of information may be out of sight or incomprehensible for the users who find themselves in the very vulnerable position of relying on external sources of information through a dynamic, machine-based channel of communication whose heuristics and biases are not under their control. For example, that companies used to pay to be included in search engines or gain a “preferred placement” was unknown to 60% of users[1] until the American Federal Trade Corporation wrote in 2002 a public recommendation asking to search engines companies to disclose paid link policies and clearly mark advertisements to avoid users’ confusion.

The epistemic status of these collectively produced rankings thus opens a series of epistemological questions:

1. Why do people trust these rankings and should they?

2. Why should we assume that the collective filtering of preferences produces wiser results on the Web?

3. What are the heuristics and biases of the aggregating systems on the Web that people should be aware of?

These questions include a descriptive as well as a normative perspective on the social epistemology of collective wisdom systems. A socio-epistemological approach to these questions - as the one I endorse - should try to elucidate both perspectives. Although this paper will explore more the descriptive side of the question, by showing the design of collective wisdom systems with their respective biases, let me introduce these examples by some general epistemological reflections that suggest also a possible line of answer to the normative issues. In my view, in an information-dense environment, where sources are in constant competition to get attention and the option of the direct verification of the information is 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. And my modest epistemological prediction is that the higher is the uncertainty on the content of information, the stronger is the weight of the opinions of others in order to establish the quality of this content. This doesn’t make us more gullible. Our epistemic responsibility in dealing with these reputational devices is to be aware of the biases that the design of each of these devices incorporates, either for technical reasons or for sociological or institutional reasons. A detailed presentation of what sort of aggregation of individual choices the Internet makes available should be thus accompanied by an analysis of the possible biases that each of these systems carries in its design.

1. Collective intelligence out of individual choices

People - and other intelligent agents - often think better in groups and sometimes think in ways which would be simply impossible for isolated individuals. The Internet is surely an example of this. That is why the rise of the Internet created from the onset huge expectations about a possible “overcoming” of thought processes at the individual level, towards an emergence of a new – more powerful – form of technologically-mediated intelligence. A plethora of images and metaphors of the Internet as a super-intelligent agent thus invaded the literature on media studies – such as the Internet as an extended mind, a distributed digital consciousness, a higher-order intelligent being, etc…

Yet, the collective processes that make Internet such a powerful cognitive media are precisely an example of “collective intelligence” in the intended meaning of this workshop, that is, a mean of aggregation of individual choices and preferences. What Internet made possible though – and this was indeed spectacular - was a brand new form of aggregation that simply didn’t exist before its invention and diffusion around the world. In this sense, it provided a new tool for aggregating individual behaviours that may serve as a basis for rethinking other forms of institutions whose survival depends on combining in the appropriate way the views of the many.

1.1. The Internet and the Web

As I said in the introduction, the salient aspect of this new form of aggregation is a special way of articulating individual choices and collectively-filtered preferences through the technology of the Internet and, especially, of the World Wide Web. In this sense, it is useful to distinguish from the onset between the Internet as a networking phenomenon and the Web as a specific technology made possible by the existence of this new network. The Internet is a network whose beginnings go back to the Sixties, when American scientists at AT&T, Rand and MIT and the Defense Communication Agency started to think of an alternative model of transmitting information through a network. In the classical telephone system, when you call New York from your apartment in Paris, a circuit is open between you and the New York destination – roughly a copper line which physically connects the two destinations. The idea was thus to develop an alternative – “packet-switching” technology, by digitalizing conversations – that is – translating waves into bits, then chopping the result into packets which could flow independently through a network while giving the impression of a real-time connection on the other end. In the early Seventies the first decentralised network, Arpanet, was put in use that was able to transfer a message by spreading its chunks through the network and then reconstructing it at the end. By the mid Seventies, the first important application on the network, the mail, was created. What made this net such a powerful tool was its decentralised way of growing: Internet is a network of networks, which uses pre-existing wires (like telephone networks) to make computers communicate through a number of protocols (things like: IP/TCP) that are not proprietary: each new user can connect to the network by using these protocols. Each invention of an application, a mail system, a system of transfer of video, a digital phone system, can use the same protocols. Internet protocols are “commons”[2], and that was a boost to the growth of the network and the creativity of the applications using it. This is a crucial for the wisdom of the net. Without the political choice to keep these protocols free, the net would not have grown in a decentralised manner and the collaborative knowledge practices that it has realized would not have been possible. The World Wide Web, which is a much more recent invention, maintained the same philosophy of open protocols compatible with the Internet (like HTTP –hypertext transfer protocol or HTML- hypertext markup language). The Web is a service which operates through the Internet, a set of protocols and conventions that allows “pages” (i.e. a particular format of information that makes easy to write and read content) to be easily linked to each other, by the technique of hyperlink. It’s a visualization protocol that makes the display of information very simple. The growth of the Web is not the same thing as the growth of Internet. What made the Web grow so fast is that the creating a hyperlink doesn’t require any technical competence. The Web is an illustration of how an Internet application may flourish thanks to the openness of the protocols. And it is true that impact of IT on collective intelligence are due mostly to the Web.

1.2. The Web, collective memory and meta-memory

What makes the aggregation of individual preferences so special through the Web? For the history of culture, the Web is a major revolution on the storage, dissemination and retrieving of information. The major cultural revolutions in the history of culture have had an impact on the distribution of memory. The Web is one such revolution. Let’s see in what sense. The Web has often been compared to the invention of writing or printing. Both comparisons are valid. Writing, introduced at the end of the 4th millennium BCE in Mesopotamia, is an external memory device that makes possible the reorganization of intellectual life and the structuring of thoughts, neither of which are possible in oral cultures. With the introduction of writing, one part of our cognition “leaves” the brain to be distributed among external supports. The visual representation of a society’s knowledge makes it possible to both reorganize the knowledge in a more useful, more ‘logical’, way by using, for example, lists, tables, or genealogical trees, and to solidify it from one generation to the next. What’s more, the birth of “managerial” casts who oversee cultural memory, such as scribes, astrologists, and librarians, makes possible the organization of meta-memory, that is, the set of processes for accessing and recovering cultural memory.

Printing, introduced to our culture at the end of the 15th century, redistributes cultural memory, changing the configuration of the “informational pyramid” in the diffusion of knowledge. In what sense is the Web revolution comparable to the invention of writing and printing? In line with these two earlier revolutions, the Web increases the efficiency of recording, recovering, reproducing and distributing cultural memory. Like writing, the Web is an external memory device, although different in that it’s “active” in contrast to the passive nature of writing. Like printing, the Web is a device for redistributing the cultural memory in a population, although importantly different since it crucially modifies the costs and time of distribution. But unlike writing and printing, the Web presents a radical change in the conditions for accessing and recovering cultural memory with the introduction of new devices for managing meta-memory, i.e., the processes for accessing and recovering memory. Culture, to a large extent, consists in the conception, organization and institutionalization of an efficient meta-memory, i.e. a system of rules, practices and representations that allow us to usefully orient ourselves in the collective memory. A good part of our scholastic education consists in internalizing systems of meta-memory, classifications of style, rankings, etc.. chosen by our particular culture. For example, it’s important to know the basics of rhetoric in order to rapidly “classify” a line of verse as belonging to a certain style, and hence to a certain period, so as to be able to thus efficiently locate it from within the corpus of Italian literature. Meta-memory thus doesn’t serve only a cognitive function – to retrieve information from a corpus – but a social and epistemic function to provide an organization for this information in terms of various systems of classifications that embody the value of the “cultural lore” of that corpus. The way we retrieve information is an epistemic activity which allows us to access through the retrieving filters, how the culture autorities on a piece of information have classified and ranked it within that corpus. With the advent of technologies that automate the functions of accessing and recovering memory, such as search engines and knowledge management systems, meta-memory also becomes part of external memory: a cognitive function, central to the cultural organization of human societies, has become automated—another “piece” of cognition thus leaves our brain in order to be materialized through external supports. Returning to the example above, if I have in mind a line of poetic verse, say “Guido, i’vorrei...” 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 highly improbable combination of words in a line of verse makes possible a sufficiently relevant selection of information that yields among the first results the poem from which the line is taken (my search for this line using Google yielded 654 responses, the first ten of which contained the complete text from the poem in Dante’s Rime).

How is this meta-memory designed through the Web technology? What is unique on the Web is that the actions of the users leave a track on the system that is immediately reusable by it, like the trails that snails leave on the ground, which reveal to other snails the path they are following. The combination of the tracks of the different patterns of use may be easily displayed in a rank that informs and influence future preferences and actions of the users. The corpus of knowledge available on the Web – built and maintained by the individual behaviours of the users – is automatically filtered by systems that aggregate these behaviours in a ranking and make it available as filtered information to new, individual users. I will analyse different classes of meta-memory devices. These systems, although they both provide a selection of information that informs and influences users’ behaviour, are designed in a different way, a difference is worth taking notice of.

2. Collaborative filtering: wisdom out of algorithms

2.1. Knowledge Management Systems

Collaborative filtering is a way of making predictions about the preferences of a users based on the pattern of behaviour of many other users. It is mainly used for commercial purposes in web applications for e-business, although it has been extended to other domains. A well-known example of a system of collaborative filtering which I assume we are all familiar with, is Amazon.com : Amazon.com is a Web application, a knowledge management system which keeps track of users’ interactions with the systems and is designed to display correlations between patterns of activities in a way that informs users about other users’ preferences. The best known feature of this system is the one which associates different items to buy: “Customers who buy X buy also Y”. The originality of these systems is that the matching between X and Y is in a sense bottom-up (although the design of the appropriate thresholds of activities above which this correlation emerges are fixed by the information architecture of the system). The association between James Surowiecki’s book and Ian Ayer’s book Super Crunchers that you can find on the Amazon’s page for The Wisdom of Crowds has been produced automatically by an algorithm that aggregates the preferences of the users and makes the correlation emerge. This is a unique feature of these interactive systems, in which new categories are created by automatically transforming human actions into visible rankings. The collective wisdom of the system is due to a division of cognitive labour between the algorithms which compose and visualize the information, and the users who interact with the system. The classifications and rankings that are thus created aren’t based on previous cultural knowledge of habits and customs of users, but on the emergence of significant patterns of aggregated preferences through the individual interactions with the system. Of course, biases are possible within the system: the weights associated to each item to make it emerge are fixed in such a way that some items have more chances to be recommended that others. But given that the system is alimented by the repeated actions of the users, a too biased recommendation that couples items that users won’t buy together will not be replicated enough times to stabilize within the system.

2.2. PageRank

Another class of systems that realize meta-memory functions through artificial devices are search engines. As we all know by experience, search engines have been a major transformation of our epistemic practices and a profound cognitive revolution. The most remarkable innovation of these tools is due to the discovery of the structure of the Web at the beginning of this century[3]. The structure of the Web is that of a social network, and contains a lot of information about its users’ preferences and habits. The search engines of second generation, like Google, are able to exploit this structure in order to gain information about how knowledge is distributed throughout the world. Basically, the PageRank algorithm interprets a link from a page A to page B as a vote that page A expresses towards page B. But we’re not in democracy on the Web and votes do not have all the same weight. Votes that come from certain sites – called “hubs”- have much more weight than others, and reflect in a sense hierarchies of reputation that exist outside the Web. Roughly, a link from my homepage to Professor Elster’s page, weighs much less than a link to my page from that of Professor Elster. The Web is an “aristocratic” network – an expression that is used by the social network theorists – that is, a network in which “rich get richer” and the more links you receive the higher is the probability that you will receive even more. This disparity of weights creates a “reputational landscape” that informs the result of a query. The PageRank algorithm is nourished by the local knowledge and preferences of each individual user and it influences them by displaying a ranking of results that are interpreted as a hierarchy of relevance. Note that this system is NOT a knowledge management system: the PageRank algorithm doesn’t know anything about the particular pattern of activities of each individual: it doesn’t know how many times you and I go to the JSTOR website and doesn’t combine our navigation paths together. A “click” from a page to another is an opaque information for PageRank, whereas a link between two pages contains a lot of information about users’ knowledge that the system is able to extract. Still, the two systems are comparable from the point of view of the design of collective intelligence: neither requires any cooperation between agents in order to create a shared system of ranking. The “collaborative” aspect of the collective filtering is more in the hands of machines than of human agents[4]. The system exploits the information that human agents either unintentionally leave on the website by interacting with it (KM systems) or actively produce by putting a link from one page to another (search-engines): the result is collective, but the motivation is individual.

Biases of search engines have been a major subject of discussions, controversy and collective fears these years. As I’ve mentioned above, the refinement of the second-generation search engines such as Google has allowed at least to explicitly mark paid inclusions and preferred placements, but this needed a political intervention. Also, the “Mathiew effect” of aristocratic networks is notorious, and the risk of these tools is to give prominence to already powerful sites at the expense of others. The awareness of these biases should imply a refinement on the search practices also: for example, the more improbable is the string of keywords, the more relevant is the filtered result. Novices and learners should be instructed with even simple principles that make them less vulnerable to these biases.

3. Reputation systems: wisdom out of status anxiety

The collaborative filtering of information may require sometimes a more active participation to a community than what is needed in the examples above. In his work on Information Politics on the Web the sociologist Richard Rogers classifies web dynamics as “voluntaristic” or “non-voluntaristic” according to the respective role of human and machines in providing information feed-back for the users. Reputation systems are an example of a more “voluntaristic” web application than the ones seen above. A reputation system is a special kind of collaborative filtering algorithm that determines ratings for a collection of agents based on the opinions that these agents hold about each other. A reputation system collects, distributes, and aggregates feedback about participants’ past behaviour.

The best known and probably simplest reputation system of large impact on the Web is the system of auction sales at www.eBay.com . eBay allows commercial interactions among more than 125 millions of people around the world. People are buyers and sellers. Buyers place a bid on an item. If their bid is successful, they make the commercial transaction, then both (buyers and sellers) leave a feedback about the quality of that transaction. The different feedbacks are then aggregated by the system in a very simple feedback profile, where positive feedbacks and negative feedbacks plus some comments are displayed to the users. The reputation of the agent is thus a useful information in order to decide to pursue the transaction. Reputation has in this case a real, measurable, commercial value: in a market with a fragmented offer and very low information available on each offer, reputation becomes a crucial information in order to trust the seller. Sellers on eBay know very well the value of their good reputation in such a special business environment (no physical encounters, no chance to see and touch the item, vagueness about the normative framework of the transaction – if for example it is realized through two different countries, etc.), so there is a number of transactions at a very low cost whose objective is just to gain one more positive evaluation. The system creates a collective result forcing cooperation, that is, asking users to leave an evaluation at the end of the transaction and sanctioning them if they don’t comply. Without this active participation of the users, the system will be useless. Still, it is a special form of collaborative behaviour that doesn’t require any commitment to cooperation as a value. Non-cooperative users are sanctioned to different degrees: they can be negatively evaluated not only if the transaction isn’t good, but also if they do not participate into the evaluation process. Breaking the rules of e-bay may lead to the exclusion from the community. The design of wisdom thus comprises an active participation from the users for fear to be ostracized by the community (which would be seen as a loss of business opportunities). Biases are clearly possible here also. People invest in cheap transactions whose only aim is to gain reputational points. This is a bias one should be aware of and easily check: if a seller offers too many cheap items, he too concerned with his public image to be considered reliable.

Some reputational features are used also by non-commercial systems such as www.flickr.com. Flickr is a collaborative platform to share photos. For each picture, you can visualise how many users have added it among their favourite pictures and who they are.

Reputation systems differ from other systems of measurement of reputation that use citation analysis, like for example the Science Citation Index. These systems are in a sense reputation-based, given that they use scientometric techniques to measure the impact of a publication in terms of the number of citations in other publications. But they don’t require any active participation of the agents in order to obtain the measure of reputation.

4. Collaborative, open systems: wisdom out of cooperation

The collaborative filtering on the Web may be even more voluntaristic and human-based than the previous examples, while still necessitating a Web support to realize an intelligent outcome. Two are the most discussed cases of collaborative systems that owe their success to active human cooperation in filtering and revising the information made available: the Open Source communities of software development, like Linux, and the collective open content projects such as Wikipedia. In both cases, the filtering process is completely human-made: code or content is made available to a community which can filter it by correcting, editing of erasing it according to personal or shared standards of quality. I would say that these are communities of amateurs instead of experts, that is, people who love what they do and decide to share their knowledge for the sake of the community. Collective wisdom is thus created by individual human efforts that are aggregated in a common enterprise in which some norms of cooperation are shared.

I won’t discuss biases on Wikipedia: it is such a large topic that it could be the subject of another paper. Let me just mention that Larry Sanger, one of its founders, is promoting an alternative project, www.citizendum.org which endorses a policy of accreditation of its authors. Self-promotion, ideology, targeted attacks on reputation may of course act as biases in the selection of entries. But the fear of Wikipedia as a dangerous place of tendentious information has been disconfirmed by facts: thanks to its large size, Wikipedia is hugely differentiated in its topics and views, and it has been shown that its reliability is no less than that of the Encyclopedia Britannica[5].

Recommender systems: wisdom out of connoisseurship

Another class of systems is based on recommendations of connoisseurs in a particular domain. One of my favourite examples of wisdom created out of recommendations is the Music Genoma Project at www.pandora.com a sort of Web-based radio that works by aggregating thousands of descriptions and classifications of pieces of music produced by connoisseurs and matches these descriptions with the “tastes” of listeners (as they describe them). Then it broadcasts a selection of music pieces that correspond to what the listeners like to hear. And it works! Imagine how good would be to have a similar system that selects papers for you on the basis of recommendations of experts that match your tastes! Some recommender systems collect information from users by actively asking them to rate a number of items, or to express a preference between two items, or to create a list of items that they like. The system then compares the data to similar data collected from other users and displays the recommendation. It is basically a collaborative filtering technique with a more active component: people are asked to express their preferences, instead of just inferring their preferences from their behaviour, which makes a huge difference: it is well known in psychology that we are not so good in introspection and sometimes we consciously express preferences that are incoherent with our behaviour: If asked, I may express a preference for classical music, while if I keep a record of how many times I do listen to classical music compared other genres of music in a week, I realize that my preferences are quite different).

Conclusions

This long list of examples of Web tools for producing collective wisdom illustrates how fine-grained can be the choice of the design for aggregating individual choices and preferences. The differences in design that I have underlined end up in deep differences in the kind of collective communities that are generated by the IT. Sometimes the community is absent, as in the case of the Google users, who cannot be defined as a “community” in any interesting normative sense, sometimes the community is normatively demanding, as in the case of eBay, in which participation in the filtering process is needed for the survival of the community. If the new collective production of knowledge that the Web – and in particular the Web 2.0 – makes possible should serve as a laboratory for designing “better” collective procedures for the production of knowledge or of wise decisions, these differences should be taken into account.

But let me come back in the end with a more epistemological claim about what kind of knowledge is produced by these new tools. As I said at the beginning, these tools work insofar as they provide access to rankings of information, labelling procedures and evaluations. Even Wikipedia, which doesn’t display any explicit rating device, works on the following principle: if an entry has survived on the site – that is, it has not been erased by other wikipedians – it is worth reading it. This can be a too weak evaluative tool, and, as I said, discussion goes on these days on the opportunity to introduce more structured filtering devices on Wikipedia[6], but it is my opinion that the survival or even egalitarian projects like Wikipedia depends on their capacity to incorporate a ranking: the label Wikipedia in itself works already as a reputational cue that orients the choices of the users. Without the reputation of the label, the success of the project would be much more limited.

As I said at the beginning, the Web is not only a powerful reservoir of all sort of labelled and unlabelled information, but it is also a powerful reputational tool that introduces ranks, rating systems, weights and biases in the landscape of knowledge. Even in this information-dense world, knowledge without evaluation would be a sad desert landscape in which people would be stunned in front of an enormous and mute mass of information, as Bouvard et Pécuchet, the two heroes of Flaubert's famous novel, who decided to retire and to go through every known discipline without, in the end, being able to learn anything. An efficient knowledge system will inevitably grow by generating a variety of evaluative tools: that is how culture grows, how traditions are created. A cultural tradition is to begin with a labelling system of insiders and outsiders, of who stays on and who is lost in the magma of the past. The good news is that in the Web era this inevitable evaluation is made through new, collective tools that challenge the received views and develop and improve an innovative and democratic way of selection of knowledge. But there's no escape from the creation of a "canonical"—even if tentative and rapidly evolving—corpus of knowledge.

References

A. Clark (2003) Natural Born Cyborgs, Oxford University Press.

L. Lessig (2001) The Future of Ideas, Vintage, New York

G. Origgi (2007) “Wine epistemology: The role of reputation and rating systems in the world of wine”, in B. Smith (ed.) Questions of Taste, Oxford University Press.

G. Origgi (2007) « Un certain regard. Pour une épistémologie de la réputation », presented at the workshop La réputation, Fondazione Olivetti, Rome, April 2007.

G. Origgi (2008) Qu’est-ce que la confiance, VRIN, Paris.

R. Rogers (2004) Information Politics of the Web, MIT Press

L. Sanger (2007) “Who says we know: On the new Politics of knowledge” at www.edge.org

Taraborelli, D. (2008) “How the Web is changing the way we trust”, in: K. Waelbers, A. Briggle, P. Brey (Eds.), Current Issues in Computing and Philosophy, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2008.

P. Thagard (2001). Internet epistemology: Contributions of new information technologies to scientific research. In K. Crowley, C. D. Schunn, and T. Okada, (Eds.) Designing for science: Implications from professional, instructional, and everyday science.Mawah, NJ: Erlbaum, 465-485.

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[1] Princeton Survey Research Associates, “A Matter of Trust: What Users Want from Websites”, Princeton, January 2002, at: http://www.consumerWebwatch.com/news/report1.pdf . The case is reported in R. Rogers (2004) Information Politics on the Web, MIT Press.

[2] Cf. on this point, L. Lessig (2001) The Fututre of Ideas, Vintage, New York.

[3] Kleinberg, J. (2001) “The Structure of the Web”, Science.

[4] Knowledge management systems like Amazon.com have some collaborative filtering features that need cooperation, like writing a review of a book or ranking a book with the five stars ranking system, but these aren’t essential to the functioning of the collaborative filtering process.

[5] Cf. “Internet Encyclopedias go head to head” Nature, 438, 15 December 2005.

[6] See. L. Sanger «”Who says we know. On the new politics of knowledge” on line at www.edge.org and my reply to him, G. Origgi “Why reputation matters”

LiquidPublication call for job

'LiquidPublication' Post-doctoral researcher
Innovating the Scientific Knowledge Object Lifecycle
Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS, EHSS, ENS), Paris
-under the responsibility of Gloria Origgi and Roberto Casati
Candidates are invited to submit an application (in English) including a detailed curriculum vitae, a list of publications, a statement of interest, and two letters of recommendation. The application should be sent directly both to Gloria Origgi at origgi@ehess.fr and to Roberto Casati at casati@ehess.fr .


We are seeking to recruit a post-doctoral researcher as part of an international project entitled LiquidPublication. Funded by the European Commission, the project will bring together a highly interdisciplinary team of researchers and experts in order to explore how ICT and the lessons learned from software engineering and the social Web can be applied to provide a radical paradigm shift in the way scientific knowledge is created, disseminated, evaluated, and maintained. The goal to exploit the novel technologies to enable a transition of the “scientific paper” from its traditional “solid” form, (i.e., a crystallization in space and time of a scientific knowledge artifact) to a Liquid Publication (or LiquidPub for short), that can take multiple shapes, evolves continuously in time, and is enriched by multiple sources. We call these new, dynamic objects, Scientific Knowledge Objects (SKO). More details on the project and its partners are available at: http://project.liquidpub.org/

Keywords: social epistemology, web epistemology, scientific evaluation, information design, social simulation, human-computer interaction

The post-doctoral researcher will be based in Paris, at the Institut Nicod (Ecole Normale Supérieure and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, www.institutnicod.org ) and will have the opportunity to (1) work in an interdisciplinary team, (2) learn to manage an international research project (3) present research plans and findings to specialist audiences at project workshops and conferences, and (4) disseminate their research in a wide range of project publications.

The core expert consortium on the project includes Project Coordinator, Professor Fabio Casati (Department of Computer Science, University of Trento), the Spanish National Research Council, the academic publishing house Springer Science, the University of Fribourg and the CNRS in Paris.

The post will start in late May 2008. Candidates are welcome to submit their applications from now on. Applications will be accepted until the position is fulfilled. The position will be initially for 12 months. The project will continue thereafter for a further 24 months and post-holders will be eligible to apply for continuing post-doctoral research positions. During the first 24 months, research will mainly be based at the Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS, EHESS, ENS) in Paris, France. The researcher will be required to develop a programme of research under the supervision of Gloria Origgi and Roberto Casati (CNRS) on "Defining Processes and Roles of Scientific Knowledge Objects (SKO)", that is, understanding the mutual interaction between different actors in the creation of a liquid document: authors, collaborators, readers, evaluators, publishers, and designing a prototype version of SKO and its related plug-ins. The candidate will be also involved in research on copyright policies and will be encouraged to explore already existing solutions on the Web 2.0 to diffuse and evaluate academic research.

The post-doctoral researcher should fill the following requirements:

A background in epistemology, web-studies, media studies, information design, human-computer interaction. An interest and experience in web-based design and evaluation of knowledge. An interest and experience in the Web 2.0 social tools Some programming skills for Web development (PhP, SQL)

Doctoral degrees must be completed before appointment to the post.
Candidates should be effective team players and independent researchers who can work to deadline and who are able to communicate effectively across disciplines.

Fluent spoken and written English is essential.
The salary is €2000 per month (net). French social security and retirement benefits will apply.

Candidates are invited to submit an application (in English) including a detailed curriculum vitae, a list of publications, a statement of interest, and two letters of recommendation. The application should be sent directly both to Gloria Origgi at origgi@ehess.fr and to Roberto Casati at casati@ehess.fr .
The successful candidate will be given ample leeway. Our objective is to create a leading group in web epistemology, and SKOs, and thereby to make sure that our candidate will establish her or himself as a leading figure in the domain. We will be thus flexible in redefining assignments during the life of the project.

The candidate is expected to contribute to the scientific and the management aspects of the project.

1. Participate in the research and design process:
-Writing up a state of the art on evaluation policies and software (in the early months)
-Contributing to the definition of SKO roles and the information design of the SKO prototype
- Contributing to the software development of the SKO prototype
-Producing two scientific papers per year in international peer-reviewed journals), on themes defined in coordination with the principal investigators.
-Tracking the relevant communities (such as Bp3 and Researchblogging): search for relevant communities, follow up of activities, production of periodic executive summaries.
-Participate in the creation of guidelines for SKOs (copyright design, etc.).

2. Management
-Effectively managing the project on behalf on the Institut Nicod, under the direction of the principal investigators, including: implementing project policies, keeping in touch with the coordinator, producing reports, ensuring the timely production of deliverables for WPs, liaising the CNRS and the European Commission, organizing meetings, keeping track of knowledge (e.g. by contributing to the project website and blog).
-Providing creative solutions for making the LiquidPublication community members interact in an efficient way, and for outreaching to other communities.

For enquiries, email Gloria Origgi origgi@ehess.fr.

A pdf copy of this call can be retrived here.

Dan Sperber's Templeton Research Lecture. The causes of religion

Dan's First Templeton Lecture on Religion, Nashville, April 2008. Bravo Dan.

A Vision of Students Today

What university is and what will be. This video has been made by some American students in Anthropology. And they are perfectly right. We are maintaining a higher educational system that has no more contact with reality. Ex-catedra classes are useless nowadays. Students would gain much more from a serious and personalized supervision by their teachers while working with collaborative tools through Internet. We are informationally overloaded today: students do not need teachers to get information: they need them as guides, as connoisseurs who can transmit a talent in browsing the corpus of knowledge and selecting what is worth studying.

We are maintaining disciplinary boundaries whose only interest is to reproduce a cast of academics who will feel comfortably established in each particular discipline. We are maintaining a mode of scientific production that is old, based on the XIX century model that fitted Prussian universities, in which the scientist was seen as a public officer whose productive constraints were determined by societal needs, while we all know today that the impact of a single result can change the course of science, given the speed at which it will be diffused through Internet. We all know that many research programs are hopeless today, that entire departments could just shut their doors without any serious cultural loss (apart from the feeling of loss that some people resent each time an "endangered species" disappears, but it is true: most disciplines are endangered species and they would naturally and rapidly disappear if they weren't kept alive by the old-fashioned academic structure).

There is a lot of mutual connivance in the Academy today, that creates an incredible inertia: people prefer to stick to traditional modes of production of knowledge because they are comfortable with them, even of they know very well that they are sub-optimal for students and for the advancement of research in general. The appeal to normative standards of truth and scientific quality are still used to defend a system whose only beneficiaries are those who produce it.

Qu'est-ce que la confiance?

My book on Trust is now out in French.

Mon livre sur Qu'est-ce que la confiance? est paru chez VRIN, Paris.

Description:
Vrin, « Chemins Philosophiques ». 128 p., 11 × 18 cm. ISBN : 978-2-7116-1870-5.

Concept-clé pour comprendre notre action sociale et morale, la confiance reste cependant l’une des notions les plus difficiles à traiter de la philosophie et des sciences sociales. La confiance est un état cognitif et motivationnel complexe, un mélange de rationalité, de sentiments et d’engagement. Faire confiance implique donner aux autres un certain pouvoir sur nous-mêmes et accepter la vulnérabilité que cela comporte. Ce volume analyse cette notion sous ses différentes dimensions : sa dimension morale, affective, épistémique et politique, en posant des questions de fond : Avons-nous des devoirs de confiance? Face à un médecin, avons-nous vraiment le choix de faire confiance? Faut-il faire confiance à ceux qui nous gouvernent?

Trust, Authority and Epistemic Responsibility

Draft. Do not quote. Paper submitted for a collective volume on Epistemic Justice.

Trusting others is one of the most common epistemic practices to make sense of the world around us. Sometimes we have reasons to trust, sometimes not, and many times our main reason to trust is based on the epistemic authority we attribute to our informants. The way we usually weight this authority, how we select the “good informants”[1], which of their properties we use as indicators of their trustworthiness is a rather complex matter. Indicators of trustworthiness may be notoriously biased by our prejudices, they may be faked or manipulated by malevolent or just interested informants and change through time and space. Discussions around the way in which these criteria are established and shared in a community range from history of science, to contemporary epistemology and moral philosophy. Their flavour can be more descriptive - as in Steven Shapin’s account of the role of gentelmanry in the establishment of scientific reputation in XVII century in Britain – or normative, as in Miranda Fricker’s work on the virtue of epistemic justice as the basic virtue that a hearer must have in order to judge in a non-biased way his or her informants.[2] Here, I do not want to propose some other criteria for ascertaining the reliability of our informants, rather, I would like to discuss the variability of these criteria within different contexts of communication. Communication is an active process through which interlocutors not only transmit and receive information, but negotiate new epistemic standards by constructing together new reasons and justifications that are heavily influenced by the moral, social or political context and by the interests at stake on both sides, the speaker and the hearer. The kind of “doxastic responsibility”[3] hearers exercise on testimonial knowledge is sensitive to the way the communicative process takes place and to the many contextual factors that influence its success or failure.

The overall picture of trust in testimonial knowledge I want to suggest is due to some ideas I have developed upon the relations between the epistemology of trust and the pragmatics of communication[4]. What I want to defend here is that the way we gain knowledge through communication is influenced by the responsibility we take in granting authority to a source of information. Our responsibility is not just a moral quality we happen to possess or have learnt through experience, but a way of approaching our communicative interactions, a stance towards credibility and credulity that is shared, in successful cases, with our informants. It’s a dynamic stance, which varies through contexts and contents at stake, but it is necessary for any epistemic enrichment of our cognitive life, apart from the marginal cases of epistemic luck[5]. An obvious advantage of a pragmatic approach to epistemology of testimony is to avoid an artificial image that depicts the hearer as a rational chooser who has the option of accepting or refusing a chunk of information that is presented towards her by a speaker. In most cases we just do not have the choice: we learn from others because we’re immerged in conversational practices whose output is exactly the chunk we end to believe or disbelieve. There is no a priori information to gain that is not constructed in the process of communication.

In order to illustrate my main point, I will present in the rest of the paper a series of examples - some real and some other fictional - that show how epistemic standards vary through contexts, how different is our way to weigh evidence as our interests at stake change and, finally, how the interplay between pragmatic effects of communication and its epistemic consequences is a dynamic feature of our way of accessing new information. As contexts and stakes change, what we may have considered once as just a pragmatic vagary of conversation may become a crucial epistemic cue that orients our allocation of credibility and moral authority to our informants.

Let me start with a political example - which had a huge impact of the credibility and authority of many political leaders in United States and Great Britain – namely, the search of evidence and the rhetoric of justification that surrounded the decision of attacking Iraq in 2003. It is interesting to notice that this historical example is probably the first case, at least to my knowledge, in which epistemic reasons were so involved in the justification of a political choice that they were used in the public debate in order to get consensus. Getting evidence on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq became at a certain point the key issue in order to possess a political justification to go to war. But the story I’m going to tell has also an interesting epistemic moral: there are epistemic standards which people care about and whose violation is heavily sanctioned in terms of credibility. The social order of a society is dependent also on its cognitive order and the back-lash of public opinion on political leaders when the expertise they appealed to proved unreliable and its political exploitation disingenuous was a clear demonstration of this. I underline this point because there is a post-modern tendency today - in social science and in social epistemology too - to consider that all public opinion stems from ideology, and that the reasons given to justify an idea depend only on power. Yet, I think that people are smarter and more responsible epistemic agents than post-modernists tend to consider: their awareness of epistemic standards orients their choices and the formation of their opinions, at least in mature democracies.

But let’s stick the facts.

On February 3^rd 2003, The Intelligence of the British Government released a dossier entitled: “Iraq- Its infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation” on how Iraq's security organisations operated to conceal weapons of mass destruction from UN Inspectors, the organization of Iraq Intelligence and the effects of the security apparatus on ordinary citizens. The report was previously sent to Mr. Colin Powell who used some of the material for his well known presentation at United Nations (Monday, February 3^rd).

Few days later, Channel 4 News learned from the Cambridge academic Glen Rangwala - a lecturer in Middle Eastern politics - that the dossier had been massively copied from an article written by a post-graduate student, Ibrahim al Marashi, published on September 2002 on The Middle East Review of International Affairs, and some other articles in Jane’s Intelligence Review. Glen Rangwala was able to disclose the plagiarism by spotting the government’s duplication of material of his own site on Iraq weaponry and Middle Eastern affairs[6]. The news was rapidly confirmed by Downing Street and the government apologized for the plagiarism, which actually revealed as a very lucky case of “blind” trust in expertise: further controls confirmed the accuracy of al-Marashi evidence about Iraq Intelligence. But the back-lash on public opinion was strong: the impression left was that of an up to the minute Intelligence analysis with no serious search of evidence. Furthermore, that Colin Powell could have used such shallow evidence in order to justify the necessity of an attack on Iraq in front of the world was perceived as a lack of moral and epistemic responsibility. In Bernard Williams’ terms, one can say that the loss of credibility was due in this case to a lack of accuracy about truth than to a lack of sincerity[7]. This is interesting because there is a rich moral tradition which severely sanctions deception as one of the worst sin against our conspecifics. Our ties of trust are built on the credibility of the words we exchange to each other, hence lying is a betrayal of our human nature, a deep violation of the fundamental – almost natural – rules that make up human communities. Montaigne says for example:

Verily, lying is an ill and detestable vice. Nothing makes us men, and no other means keeps us bound one to another, but our word; knew we but the horror and weight of it, we would with fire and sword pursue and hate the same, and more justly than any other crime […] Whatsoever a lier should say, we would take it in a contrary sense. But the opposite of truth has many shapes, and an indefinite field.[8]

Kant’s well-known position on lying is that it can be never justified under all possible circumstances. Not lying is a universal law, with no exception: “This means that when you tell a lie, you merely take exception to the general rule that says everyone should always tell the truth”[9]. In his exchange with Benjamin Constant, who objects to the German philosopher the existence of a “duty to tell the truth”, Kant restates his position even in response to an extreme example that Constant submits to him. Constant, who wrote against Kant that: “The moral principle stating that it is a duty to tell the truth would make any society impossible if that principle were taken singly and unconditionally”[10], presents the following example as a clear case in which the duty to tell the truth is objectionable: If someone were at your door to murder a friend of yours who is hiding in your house and asks you where he is, do you still have the duty to tell him the truth? Kant replies in a text entitled: “On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns”, that yes, even in such an extreme case you have the duty to tell the truth: “Truthfulness in statements that cannot be avoided is the formal duty of man to everyone, however great the disadvantage that may arise there from for him or for any other”.[11] So, sincerity seems to be a much more important duty than accuracy in the history of philosophy. Inaccuracy is a more recent “moral fault”, that comes with Modernity and with the idea that trust in governments should not be based on the moral virtues of governors, rather, on their expertise and on the reliability of the procedures that assure the good functioning of the State[12]. In a “disenchanted world” in which politics doesn’t depend anymore on virtue, truthfulness has to be based on evidence, and an epistemic flaw in providing such evidence in support of a claim which has political consequences is a moral weakness as well as a way of undermining the grounds of trust that sustain a society.

But let us go on with the story.

On June 2003 Alastair Campbell, Director of Communications of Tony Blair’s government, was accused by the BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan to have “sexed up” another report, released on September 24, 2002 on Iraq ‘s weapons of mass destruction, that the Government unprecedentely decided to publish with a preface of the Prime Minister. Based on the testimony of an insider expert who contributed to the report, Gilligan affirmed that the claim made in the dossier that Iraq could be ready to use chemical weapons in forty-five minutes was known to be exaggerated by the Government at the time they decided to include it in the dossier. Here also, the use of evidence is surprisingly new: Traditionally, political propaganda in support to war wasn’t committed to use evidence to justify its choice: appealing to rhetorical values such as “Loyalty to the Nation” or “Duty to defend our boarders from the enemy” was all that governors felt the duty to share as information with citizens. Here, though, the British Government felt the urge to share with its citizens the information contained in the dossier, at its own risk: responsible receivers of this information were able to disclose another flaw, even if of a different kind. In Harry Frankfurt’s crude terms, Campbell’s mistake is more of the order of a “bullshit” than that of a “lie”. Bullshits are common in our informationally overloaded societies: given that there is too much information around, bullshits are a way of “sexing up” information in order to get attention to it.[13] It’s a way of playing with the relevance of the information, by adding some appealing pragmatic effects to it, hence having more chances to be heard. But in this case, a not-so-innocent pragmatic manoeuvre was perceived as a grave violation of the epistemic standards that a decent society must endorse in order to sustain trust relationships between citizens and politicians. The consequences of this act are well known.

On July, the name of Gilligan’s informant was revealed to the press by the Defence Office. On July 18^th the microbiologist David Kelly, adviser of the Foreign Office and the Defence Office about the chemical weapons, was found dead, two days after a very tough audience at the Parliament on July 15^th. Having learned about his death while travelling in Japan, Tony Blair declared that an independent inquiry would be open on the case. Lord Hutton was charged to establish the facts around David Kelly’s death.

In January 2004, Lord Hutton released his report. After having heard 74 testimonies and analysed more than 300 claims, Lord Hutton established the following facts:

• David Kelly killed himself under no pressure by any other person
• In his conversation with Mr. Gilligan on May 23, David Kelly was in breach of the rules governing disclosure of confidential information even if part of his job description as an adviser of the Foreign and Defence Offices concerned speaking to the media and institutions on Iraq’s weapons.
• It is dubious that David Kelly said to Mr. Gilligan that the claim about 45 minutes was exaggerated.
• There were no effective pressures of the Government for “sexing up” the dossier.

The rest is known: The main responsibility for the affair fell on the BBC, Gilligan lost his job and the Director General of the BBC, Greg Dyke, resigned.

The result of the inquiry was disappointing for the public opinion, because it was perceived as a way to acquit the government from its responsibilities. But here I do not want to enter the debate on the moral responsibilities of the UK government. Rather, what interested me in this example was the role played by epistemic standards shared by responsible citizens in evaluating the credibility of the government’s testimony on Iraqi military power. The way in which information was filtered and evaluated was different in the two cases I’ve discussed: in the first case, the flaw was due to inaccuracy whereas in the second one to insincerity: yet, the fact that in both cases there were people able to detect it and severely judge it, shows that real standards exist, that people usually have quite an accurate conception of them and that it is not easy to fool everybody without paying a price in credibility.

This is also a particularly illuminating example of the strict relation between epistemic authority and political authority in democratic societies. Social epistemology today is becoming also a “political epistemology”: political authority is the more and more sustained by various forms of epistemic authority: experts, reports, oracles, think-tanks, independent inquiries, have to provide the evidence on which a political choice is going to be taken and judged.

Here are some of the provisory conclusions on trust in authority that I want to draw from this example:

1. Governments rely on experts on technical matters to take decision. But the unprecedented choice of the British Government to publish the September 2002 dossier shows that the use of experts in this case was more than just for acquiring information about the facts in Iraq: it was also a way of legitimizing its political action on the basis of the information contained in the dossier. The political authority appealed to the epistemic authority of its experts to justify its action.

2. In the February 2003 report, the expertise of Intelligence was questioned because of plagiarism: the information revealed correct, but the way it was acquired was unreliable and inappropriate. It seems so that justification of epistemic authority matters for public opinion: an institution that has epistemic authority not only must hold the appropriate information but it must be justified in holding it. The “epistemic luck” of acquiring the right piece of information by chance (or through an unreliable method) deflates the authority of the institution.

3. Even if the September 2003 dossier was obviously produced for political reasons, that it, with the aim to establish the facts that would justify the invasion of Iraq, a direct influence of the political authority on the presentation of facts is intolerable for the democratic functioning of a society, in particular on such a delicate matter as the decision to send people to war. In general: when the potential consequences are grave, standards of evidence, objectivity and impartiality must be raised. An institution that has epistemic authority knows the facts that may have justified a political decision but its authority depend on its autonomy from the political power.

4. A political independent authority, Lord Hutton, is then charged to check the facts and assess the responsibilities of all the actors of the affairs, experts, media and political authorities. His moral authority gave to his report a special epistemic status of “ultimate truth about the case”. Our trust in the “cognitive order” of our society - that is, who holds knowledge, on what rules and principles knowledge is distributed and diffused in a society, on what grounds experts should be believed – influences our trust in its social order and is influenced by it. Yet, as I said, real standards play a role, epistemic justice is a shared value and massive violations of it are difficult to maintain at least in democracies which ground their consent in the autonomy and epistemic responsibility of subjects.

On the second part of this paper I would like to explore how these real standards vary nonetheless, according to time, places and contexts of communication. For example, what could have been perceived for my father’s generation as a form of gallantry and well mannered way to deal with women in conversation, as hiding the price list in a restaurant to women guests, is nowadays perceived as an unjust way of blocking access of information to a special category of people. Or else, the paternalistic way of doctors to hide part of the information about a patient’s health in cases of serious diagnoses has been now evacuated as a legitimate communicational practice from medical ethics. A contractualist relationship based on informed consent has become the standard way of dealing with ethical issues within medical decision making. This practice aimed at readjusting the balance between the power of doctors and the autonomy of patients in order to avoid the risks of abuse that a blind trust relationship would expose the patients too. Informed consent ha been introduced as a moral and legal requirement for any medical intervention be it research or therapeutic, by the 1997 European Convention of Human Rights and Biomedicine[14].

These examples show a continuum that I wish to explore between communicational practices and epistemic standards. How we talk to other people - what we say and don’t say – is more than just a matter of linguistic preference for a certain style of conversation. We can adjust our language to what we want to give access to in terms of information. And, as hearers, we always adjust our interpretations according not only to our pragmatic expectations, but also to our epistemic needs.

For example, authority is an important epistemic cue in interpreting what other people say. Nice experiments show that the same text given to two different groups of people while indicating to each group two different sources, one authoritative and the other not, gives very different results in the interpretation[15] given by the readers. In the case of the authoritative source, even if the text may result obscure, people tend to overinterpret it in order to make sense of it. While in the second case, the effort of interpretation is more limited and, if the text is too obscure, people rapidly conclude that it’s nonsense (many of us have experienced the same “authority” effect in reviewing articles from colleagues and students…This is one of the reason why the peer review process is anonymous!). Authority biases are thus extremely relevant to what we come to understand and believe from our informants: but this is not a on/off process in which we believe in authoritative sources and don’t believe in non- credible ones: it is the way we process information that comes from authorities, how we adjust our interpretation in order to make sense of what they say that determines what we come to believe. It is thus the stance we take towards our informants, the way we exercise our epistemic responsibility, that makes us believe or not believe what we are said. Thus, the construction of testimonial knowledge is a shared responsibility between informants and hearers: there are not purely unbiased informants - apart from some uninteresting cases like the timetable of trains in the station – as there aren’t naïve receivers of information. Even children, who have been considered for longtime as the paradigmatic case of naïve credulous creatures, have proved more sophisticated epistemic subjects than what we used to think: they take into account cues of credibility in order to accept what an informant says and check the linguistic consistency of their informants in order to adjust their credibility investment[16].

Epistemic responsibility is thus a matter of adjusting our way of interpreting what other people say to our epistemic needs: if I’m involved in a small talk in a party in which someone is talking of the possibility of an invasion on Iran because of its military nuclear plan, I can accept loose evidence for the sake of conversation. But if I hear the same rumour coming from an insider of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and if the consequences for my life are that my son may risk his life by fighting in a potential war, then it is my responsibility to raise epistemic standards and to ask for further evidence about Iran’s military nuclear plan.

The interplay between linguistic practices and epistemic concerns may seem as a trivial claim. But, surprisingly, there is little work in philosophy and epistemology that ties the debate on the pragmatics of communication and the acceptance of testimonial knowledge. For example, in discussing hearer’s responsibilities in gaining knowledge from testimony, McDowell refers to a vague “doxastic responsibility” that the hearer should exercise before accepting testimonial information.[17] But what this doxastic responsibility consists of is left largely unexplained. I think that a fruitful way of conceiving this responsibility is to place it in the inferential process of interpretation of what others say, in the responsible stance we assume to dose the epistemic weight we give to what we hear.

In communication, people do not look for true information, but for relevant information, that is, information that is relevant enough in a particular context to deserve our attention. But what is relevant in a context is a good proxy for information that has an epistemic value for us[18]. We trust other people to provide us relevant information, and adjust our epistemic requirements according to the context in which the interpretation takes place. We exercise our “epistemic vigilance”, to use an expression coined by Dan Sperber[19], during our interpretation by adopting a stance of trust that our interlocutors will provide relevant information for us. Any departure from the satisfaction of our expectations of relevance may result in a revision or a withdrawal of our default trust.

Let me illustrate this interplay between epistemology and interpretation with two fictional examples: the first one whose aim is to show that a departure from relevance may have effects on our epistemic stance, and, conversely, the second that illustrates how a change in our stance of trust may result in a different appraisal of relevance in interpretation.

Consider this case. Arianna is late tonight for the Parent-Children Association meeting at her son’s school. It’s not the first time she’s late at these kinds of events, and feels awfully guilty. She justifies herself with the President of the Association by telling her a long and detailed story about a series of accidents and unforeseen events that explain her delay. She adds a little bit too much to her story: Not only the underground did stop for 15 minutes due to an alarm, but also she fell on the stairs and broke her umbrella, and had to shelter from the rain under a roof. Then she met a very old friend who announced her a serious illness and was too touched to brusquely interrupt the conversation…The President is listening with the lesser and lesser attention: the relevance of what Arianna is saying is decreasing: too many details just for explaining a delay. This lack of relevance of what Arianna is saying weakens her stance of trust: Why all these details? May be isn’t she telling the truth?

Or consider this second example. A typical Parisean fraude that may happen in the street is to be approached by a stranger, who pretends to be Italian, is very friendly and, after a conversation, tries to convince his “victim” to buy some fake leather jackets he has in his car. He deceives his “clients” by asking them to buy the jackets because he’s unable to bring them back with him in Italy for custom reasons, and therefore it’s a very good bargain to buy them. Now, imagine that Jim is crossing the street and is approached by a guy with a strong Italian accent, who introduces himself as “Jules”. He starts a conversation, with the default trust he usually displays, but at a certain point he remembers that a friend told him about this kind of fraude. He stays still, unable to withdraw immediately the attention he granted to the guy. But Jules’ words are no more the same to his ears. For example, Jules says: “Are you in a hurry?”. Jim is not in a hurry, but interprets this as an invitation to spend more time with Jules and accepting his bargain proposals. He answers “Yes” and flies away.

These two stories illustrate the interplay between trust and interpretation as I intend it here – that is- the search for relevant information (information whose cost to have is balanced with the effort to treat it) . In the first case, Arianna’s description is too detailed: she’s giving too much information to the President to be relevant for her, and this creates a suspicious attitude in the President. In the second example, Jules is no more reliable in Jim’s mind: this acts as a bias in his way of interpreting what he’s saying.

Our epistemic responsibility is first of all a matter of taking an opportune stance of trust towards our informants, a sort of “virtual trust” that doesn’t commit us to accept as true what is said in conversation. We weigh through our interpretation the authority and credibility of our informants according to our epistemic needs. On the other hand, the way the informants “pack in language” what they want to say has epistemic consequences on our allocation of credibility. And the epistemic duty of the informants amounts to be relevant for us in a context, thus suggesting to us some possible epistemic gains in listening to them. We may take the risk to take a trustful posture in the speakers’ willingness to be relevant and yet check their trustfulness and reliability through the process of interpretation.

Epistemic responsibilities are thus shared, but in a lighter sense than what is often intended in the epistemological literature on testimonial knowledge: we share a context of communication, and a practice of interpretation and take on both sides the responsibility of the epistemic consequences of our social life.

References

AA.VV. The Hutton Inquiry, Tim Coates Publisher, 2004, London.
Adler, J. (2003) Belief’s own ethics, Mit Press.
Clément, F.; Koenig, M.; Harris, P. (2004) “The Ontogenesis of Trust”, Mind & Language, 19, pp. 360-379.
Coady, A. (1992) Testimony, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Foley, R. (2001) Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others, Cambridge University Press.
Fricker, E. (2006) “Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy” in J. Lackey and E. Sosa (eds.) The Epistemology of Testimony, Oxford University Press.
Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice, Oxford University Press.
Gopnik, A., Graf, P. (1988) “Knowing how you know: Young Children’s Ability to Identify and Remember the Sources of Their Beliefs”, Child Development, 59, n. 5, pp. 1366-1371.
Holton, R. (1994) “Deciding to Trust, Coming to Believe”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 72, pp. 63-76.
Moran, R. (2005) “Getting Told and Being Believed”, in Philosophers’ Imprints, vol. 5, n. 5, pp. 1-29.
Origgi, G. (2004) “Is Trust an Epistemological Notion?” Episteme, 1, 1, pp. 61-72.
Origgi, G. (2005) “What Does it Mean to Trust in Epistemic Authority?” in P. Pasquino (ed.) Concept of Authority, Edizioni Fondazione Olivetti, Rome.
Origgi, G. (2007) “Le sens des autres. L’ontogenèse de la confiance épistémique », in A. Bouvier, B. Conein (eds.) L’épistémologie sociale, EHESS Editions, Paris
Origgi, G. (2008) Qu’est-ce que la confiance?, Paris, VRIN.
Pettit, P., Smith, M. (1996) “Freedom in Belief and Desire”, The Journal of Philosophy, XCIII, 9, pp. 429-449.
Pritchard, D. (2005) Epistemic Luck, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
A. Ross (1986) “Why Do We Believe What We Are Told?” Ratio, 28, 1986, pp. 69-88
T. Ruffmann, L. Slade, E. Crowe (2002) The Relation between Children’s and Mothers’ Mental State Language and Theory of Mind Understanding”, Child Development, 73, pp. 734-751.

M. A. Sabbagh, D. Baldwin (2001) “Learning Words from Knowledgeable vs. Ignorant Speakers: Links between preschooler’s Theory of Mind and Semantic Development”, Child Development, 72, 1054-1070.

Shapin, S. (2004) The Social History of Truth, Harvard University Press.

Sperber, D., Wilson, D. (1986/1995) Relevance. Communication and Cognition, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

Wilson, D. , Sperber, D. (2002) “Truthfulness and Relevance”, Mind, 111(443):583-632.

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[1] On the concept of « good informant » see E. Craig (1990), Knowledge and the State of Nature, Oxford, Clarendon Press, where he argues that our very concept of knowledge originates from the basic epistemic need in the State of Nature of recognizing the good informants, that is, those who are trustworthy and bear indicator properties of their trustworthiness.

[2] See S. Shapin (1992) A Social History of Truth, Chicago University Press; M. Fricker (2007) Epistemic Injustice, Oxford University Press, and M. Fricker, this volume.

[3] The expression is due to McDowell. See J. McDowell (1998) “Knowledge by Hearsay”, in Meaning, Knowledge and Reality, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

[4] Cf. G. Origgi (2004) “Is Trust an Epistemic Notion?”, Episteme, 1, 1.

[5] For an interesting and recent analysis of such cases, see D. Pritchard (2005) Epistemic Luck, Oxford University Press.

[6] Cf. http://middleeastreference.org.uk/

[7] Cf. B. Williams (2002), Truth and Truthfulness, Princeton University Press.

[8] Cf. Montaigne : « On Lyers », Essays, Book 1, Ch. IX.

[9] Cf. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Moral.

[10] Cf. B. Constant

[11] Cf. Kant « On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philantropic Concerns » published as a postscript of the Groundwork.

[12] See on this point Russell Hardin: “Trust in Governments” in

[13] Cf. H. Franfurt (2005), On Bullshit, Princeton University Press.

[14] Cf. on this case G. Origgi, M. Spranzi (2007) “La construction de la confiance dans l’entretien medical”, in T. Martin, P-Y. Quiviger (eds.) Action médicale et confiance, Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté.

[15] Cf. G. Mosconi (1985) L’ordine del discorso, Il Mulino, Bologna ; D. Sperber (2005) « The guru effect », unpublished article, on line at www.dan.sperber.com ;

[16] Cf. F. Clément et al. (2004) « The ontogenesis of Trust », Mind and Language, 19, p. 360-379; G. Origgi (2007) “Le sens des autres. L’ontogenèse de la confiance épistémique”, in A. Bouvier, B. Conein (eds.) L’épistémologie sociale, EHESS Editions, Paris.

[17] Cf. J. McDowell, cit.

[18] I’m using here the technical concept of relevance developed by D. Sperber and D. Wilson in their post-gricean approach to pragmatics. Cf. D. Sperber, D. Wilson (1986/95) Relevance. Communication and Cognition, Basil Blackwell. On the relations between relevance and truth, cf. D. Wilson and D. Sperber (2000) “Truthfulness and Relevance”, Mind.

[19] Cf. D. Sperber, O. Mascaro (draft) “Mindreading, comprehension and epistemic vigilance”

Yes We Can - Barack Obama Music Video

Gloria supports Obama!

Ce n'est qu'un début, continuons le combat !

La revue italienne Micromega, dirigée par le philosophe Paolo Flores D'Arcais, publie le 25 janvier 2008 un numéro spécial sur mai 1968. Parmi les textes, j'ai recueilli les témoignages d'Alain Touraine, à l'époque professeur de sociologie à Nanterre, et Dan Sperber, qui était jeune chercheur en anthropologie toujours à Nanterre. Ils racontent des jours de mai, du 3 au 13, la prise de la Sorbonne, la nuit des barricades, la manifestation du 10...A' lire (en italien) sur Micromega à partir du 25 janvier. Dans le numéro, je raconte aussi l'histoire d'Antanas Mockus, maire visionnaire de Bogotà, en Colombie, le dernier grand utopiste...

What I have changed my mind about. New ideas for 2008

This texts was written as a response to the annual question that a famous literary agent asks each year to a bunch of intellectuals. But I was unable to stick to my changes of ideas about the abstract world and fell in the trap of autobiography, as it happens to me the more and more often, which made the text irrelevant for that debate. So, I decided to post it on my blog as it is still for me a big change of mind. Draft. Do not quote without permission.

I have changed my mind about antidepressants. I know that it may be not a knock-down discovery, but for me it was a major change in my way of thinking. Coming from the humanities, I used to think of depression as something oscillating between the highest possible existential experience – a fundemental insight on human condition that connected in my mind such different readings as the Ecclesiastes, Shakespeare, Auden, Virgina Wolf and Tolstoj – and a sort of mourning state, as Freud describes it: a longing for something lost. I was quite persuaded by Freud’s interpretation of depression as a mourning over loss of libido. And I was persuaded that the only way to recover from depression was to undertake a long psycholanalitic therapy in order to understand what past experience was responsible of that feeling of libidinal loss.

Then, last year I went through months in which I was in a (mild) depressive mood, and, after a while, I decided that the benefits of my therapy were too slow and that I needed another solution in order to get back to work and enjoy life as before. So I went to my doctor and asked for the first time of my life a chemical help to overcome my situation. She prescribed to me Paroxetine, a molecule that belongs to the class of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI). Three weeks later I was a new person. My brain had started to work as before: I felt much stronger, motivated to work and yet able to keep my emotions alive.

For me it was quite a choc: the idea that my periodical encounters with the Divine were reduced to a bad functioning of a neurotransmitter between my synapses was hard to swallow at first. But the benefits were so great that I humbly accepted this sort of “disenchantement” of my psychical life and came back to Earth with much more energy and determination than ever.

Had the writer of the Bible, or Shakespeare, or Virginia Woolf, taken antidepressants, would the history of our litterature be much different? I don’t know. Probably there will always be ways of accessing deep human experiences and profound insights, but maybe without all the suffering that has usually accompanied them.

My skeptical friend Diego Gambetta, the brightest sociologist I’ve ever met, told me last week that probably Paroxetine has just changed my mood enough to change my mind about antidepressants. May be he’s right; still for me it has been a major change of mind that helped me to accept that even the highest emotional and intellectual experiences are deeply rooted in our brain and flesh. That’s what make us humans.