Thinking this, thinking that

 Introduction

We usually present our knowledge in fragments. We can identify the capital of France, or state the number of quarks in a proton. Sometimes the fragments will be more complex than single sentences. We can for example set out the IS-LM model of an economy, or the replication mechanism of DNA, or the progress through Parliament of a particular piece of legislation. But even a large fragment will have context that is omitted when the fragment is presented in isolation.

Full understanding, sufficient to make intelligent use of a fragment, may require awareness of a substantial context. In our examples this may be awareness that France is a country and that countries have capital cities which are important political or economic centres, awareness of what particle physics is all about, awareness of supply, demand, investment, output and interest rates, awareness of how molecules interact, or awareness of the relevant political system. It is reasonable to present our knowledge in fragments because we can take it that our audience will know enough context, or at least (if we are teaching them) will steadily build it up as the pieces of knowledge we supply accumulate in their heads and are woven together.

There is another kind of context. This is the context of a field of possibilities. It is the context of an indefinite and ill-defined range of things that are not asserted. And it is the context that will interest us here.

This context can be important in different ways, which we shall explore through the thought of four different thinkers. We shall start with Gareth Evans, whose work shows that the ability to have alternative thoughts is required for us to have the thoughts we in fact have. Then we shall move on to Robert Musil, who takes the view that we need to appreciate the existence of a field of possibilities in order to see the actuality of what is the case. Our third thinker will be Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, with a comment on the importance of knowledge of other languages. Lastly, Ludwig Wittgenstein will provide an additional perspective on knowledge of languages.

Gareth Evans

Gareth Evans, in The Varieties of Reference, section 4.3, focused on how a grasp of some propositions required an ability to grasp other propositions of the same nature, rather than focusing on awareness of a context of propositions of any different nature. He pointed out that someone who can have the thought that some object a is F, for example that John is happy, can also have the thought that some other object b is F, for example that Harry is happy, and the thought that the original object a is G, for example that John is sad. (We shall abbreviate the contents of these thoughts in the conventional way as Fa, Fb, and Ga.)

We can detach this idea from Evans's larger project, and make use of it for our purposes. Taking the contrapositive, we can say that if someone could not think that Fb or that Ga, he or she could not think that Fa. He or she could not do so given that the thought that Fa has to be a structured thought in order for it to be the thought that it is. Thinking that Fa involves recognising that an object a and a property F are to be linked. It is not a mere trigger for some automatic response to the presence of F-ness, or even to the presence of F-ness in some form that makes the instance of particular concern to the thinker. The object itself has to be identified and a particular property has to be attributed, casting the object in the role of a carrier of F-ness without reducing it to being nothing more than a carrier of F-ness. To put it another way, "a" in "Fa" is a name, and the use of a name in a thought of the type at issue here involves picking out an object and then attributing some property to that object. The structured nature of the thought is inevitable, and then the contrapositive goes through.

The required context for fragments that is implied by Evans's claim and its contrapositive is at first sight a narrow one. It extends only to alternative combinations of objects and properties. And it seems to be about conditions for the proper use of language in pretty basic ways, rather than being about any rich fabric of knowledge in which a human being might revel.

Evans's implied context does however have the potential to be of broader significance. An ability to pick out different objects implies an understanding of the nature of objects in the relevant field. Having such an understanding is for example easy with individual animals but a bit harder with genera and species of animal. And in some fields, for example particle physics, it requires an ability to think in ways that most of us find counter-intuitive. Moreover, an ability to attribute various properties implies an acquaintance with at least some of the conceptual map for the relevant field.

Robert Musil

At the start of chapter 4 of Robert Musil's novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities), we find this: 

Wenn es aber Wirklichkeitssinn gibt, und niemand wird bezweifeln, daß er seine Daseinsberechtigung hat, dann muß es auch etwas geben, das man Möglichkeitssinn nennen kann.

But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility.

Here we have something, the broad significance of which is more obvious than that of what we may extract from the portion of Gareth Evans's work we have highlighted.

We are also moved up a level, from pieces of knowledge to the framework within which one may locate alternatives like those which Evans required (Fb and Ga, to go alongside Fa). At least, we are moved up a level if we take ein Möglichkeitssinn, a sense of possibility, to be not merely an ability to imagine what we do not observe but also an awareness that we are exploring possibilities as possibilities. And we should take the sense of possibility of which Musil wrote in that way. We must do so if the Wirklichkeitssinn, the sense of reality, with which it is paired is to be an awareness that things are in a certain way, and not merely an awareness of some facts that happen to obtain.

In what follows we shall generally substitute "a sense of actuality" for "a sense of reality". This is so as to emphasise the sense that things are in a certain way as awareness of a single second-order fact about the world which we must face if we are not to delude ourselves.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Goethe commented on our grasp of languages:

Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen. (Maximen und Reflexionen, 91)

He who does not know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

This comment takes our discussion in a new direction. Knowledge of a language is primarily a skill rather than a body of factual information. And if other languages were to be context, a fragment of knowledge in the terms of our discussion would be competence in the whole of a single language. Such a competence can be free-standing. Many people are competent monoglots.

While all this is so, there is an aspect of knowing one's own language that brings such knowledge within the scope of the topic that is indicated by our discussion of Evans and Musil. This is knowledge of the language's expressive powers, of its limits, of why it has those powers and limits, and of its existence as a living entity with its own history and potential for future development. Such knowledge may be acquired most easily by seeing how other languages do things differently.

Knowledge of this sort is far less important for everyday purposes than competence. Indeed, outside the scope of poetry or richly evocative prose, its possession may be of little practical use. It is not the knowledge that has been analysed by Michael Dummett in his paper "What Do I Know When I Know a Language?", and by other authors in response to that paper. It is however knowledge that can be valued for its own sake, as well as being useful in relation to some special forms of writing and oratory.

Could one have such knowledge of one's own language other than through knowing other languages? We can imagine a book about a single language that would set out the relevant information without reference to other languages. But while it might cover the ground systematically, it would be a long and laborious read. It would be far more efficient to make use of another language inside one's head and in that way get a feel for points of similarity and difference so as to become a finer user of one's own language. Moreover, picking up points in that way would keep one closer to the activity of using a language that would for most people be the main reason to learn about its powers, limits, workings, history, and potential. Knowledge that is picked up in action has a different flavour to knowledge that is picked up abstractly, even if it would be risky to go so far as to say that it had different content.

We may compare Goethe's remark with what Gareth Evans said. To go on from thinking and saying that Fa to thinking and saying that Fb and that Ga is to discover that one can think and say different things. Doing so brings a fuller realisation of the content of the thought that Fa. One comes to realise that it is a structured thought. Likewise, when ability in a second language allows one to have and utter thoughts in ways that would not come naturally in one's first language, that will confer a fuller grasp of the things one thinks and expresses in that first language. It will do so by disclosing things that expressions in the first language do not in any direct way say or suggest. One becomes aware of what one is steered to think and say in one's first language by seeing what the second language could have done.

(We have here run together thinking and saying. There are arguments that thought is to some extent independent of all language, or alternatively that it is conducted in its own language, a language of thought, which is separate from the language in which the thinker speaks. We do not wish to get into that debate, and our discussion could be conducted even if we were to regard some underlying practice of thought as detached from the thinker's language of speech. Our concern is with the need to be able to have a range of thoughts in order fully to grasp some of them. That case could be made whether or not thoughts were somehow detached from languages of speech. The only proviso is that if a single individual's language of thought or some other mechanism of thought could facilitate all possible thoughts, with no support from particular languages of speech, we could not make Goethe relevant in the way that we do. But that would be a very strong and contentious hypothesis about a language of thought or about some other mechanism of thought.)

We can also apply Musil's thought to languages. Another language is a possibility for oneself, giving a sense of the actuality of one's own language. One can come to see the fact that one's own language does certain things and does them in a certain way as a second-order fact about the language's actuality, rather than merely a collection of first-order facts about the methods used within the language. One can do so when one comes to see that the other language does some additional things, does some of the things that one's own language does differently, and does not do some things that one's own language does.

Mere awareness of other languages, filled out with a few examples of their alternative vocabularies and sentence structures but falling far short of competence, could be enough here. So we would at this point only require a very minimal type of knowledge of other languages, even though Goethe for his purposes envisaged competence. And if the languages of which one were aware did not differ very much from one's own language, all being within some small group such as the West Germanic languages, one could rely on the known existence of similar languages to extrapolate to the possibility of more radically different languages. Thus from a minimal basis one could acquire a sense of the actuality of one's own language. But the minimal basis would have to include the idea of the possibility of other languages, and it might not be reducible to that mere idea without at least some fragmentary examples drawn from other languages.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

An additional perspective on knowledge of languages is provided by Ludwig Wittgenstein. He made this remark:

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. (Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 5.6)

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

What Wittgenstein meant is much debated, but we can still make use of the thought in ways of which he might or might not have approved.

We should join the thought with something Wittgenstein said in the foreword to the Tractatus:

Das Buch will also dem Denken eine Grenze ziehen, oder vielmehr - nicht dem Den­ken, sondern dem Ausdruck der Gedanken: Denn um dem Denken eine Grenze zu ziehen, müßten wir beide Seiten dieser Grenze denken können (wir müßten also denken können, was sich nicht denken läßt).

The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather - not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).

Knowing extra languages would not remove all limits of language that might limit thought or its expression. (This is another point at which we deliberately disregard the question of whether there is thought independent of all language, or thought independent of public languages but conducted in a language of thought, or only thought conducted in public languages, even though Wittgenstein's distinction between thought and its expression presses the question.) But additional languages might remove some limits of one's first language, while perhaps imposing other limits not imposed by one's first language.

More significantly for our purposes, knowledge of extra languages might give a greater sense of what some of the limits imposed by one's first language were. Then one might be able to think both sides of any limits imposed by one's first language which were not imposed by some other language one knew. This could be so even if there were no collection of languages, knowledge of all of which would allow one to think both sides of all limits.

Drawing the threads together

On reviewing the authors we have discussed, we see that there are disparate ways in which a context of thinking within a field of possibilities can be important.

Gareth Evans highlighted a consequence of the structured nature of our thought and language. There are objects and properties which we identify separately, and we can then combine them. In order to have the thoughts we do, we must be able to pull the components of those thoughts apart and put them back together in different combinations. Someone who only used a language in which each expression was a single whole sentence that could not, within the language, be analysed into components would not have the same thoughts.

This looks like a narrow point about human thought and language. But it is an instance of something wider. Our languages have considerable reach. We cannot set a precise limit to the number of possible thoughts, or the number of possible sentences, although we might be able to set some upper bound based on the capacities of human brains which would be far above any hypothetical least upper bound. The particular form of reach that is given by a scope to recombine objects and properties can be seen even without recourse to the sophisticated analyses that are given under the rubric of transformational grammar. And it was straightforward for Evans to show that this simple form of reach followed naturally and that its availability was necessary for us to have the thoughts we have.

It would be less straightforward to show that the availability of wider forms of reach, for example the reach that was conferred by the scope to use elaborate recursive structures, was necessary in order for us to have the thoughts we had rather than some deceptively similar thoughts. But the potential is there. When someone thinks something, part of the significance of the thought is that he or she could have thought something which differed from the actual thought in some way that would place the actual thought and the potential thought in some meaningful relation. Perhaps the two thoughts would pick out different objects, or attribute different properties, or refer to different times, or imply different directions of causation, or different degrees of confidence in what was being thought.

Thus the idea we take from Evans is that it is part and parcel of our thought to be able to open up possibilities by exploiting the resources of our language. This ability facilitates our noticing facts about the world (for example, instances of Fx or of Gy). The idea we take from Robert Musil involves extending our grasp of the world in another way. The extension is not an increased grasp of first-order facts, a greater understanding of how things are. It is a second-order grasp, a grasp of the actuality of how things are which is conferred by an understanding that there are unactualized possibilities.

This understanding that there are unactualized possibilities could be obtained without thinking of any specific possibilities, simply by putting free variables in place of names of objects and properties in sentences true of the actual world and observing that unspecified other names of objects and properties could be substituted for those variables. But it would be psychologically easier to imagine particular unactualized possibilities, and then to note that they were unactualized and that at least some of them were obvious variations on the facts. For example, if as a matter of fact Fa, then Fb and Ga would be obvious variations, although Fb might be slightly more obvious because the identification of objects does not require thought that is as abstract as is required for the identification of properties.

Entertaining the thoughts that Evans says we need to be able to have, Fb and Ga, is therefore a basis for having the sense of possibility that Musil requires us to have in order to have a sense of actuality, although one would then need to think beyond that basis in order to achieve the required second-order grasp.

Goethe's maxim has a different primary focus. Knowledge of other languages gives us a sense of alternatives to our own language, and therefore a sense of the actuality of our own language. Attention is directed inward to our minds, and outward only to our linguistic interactions rather than to the world in general.

Nonetheless, knowledge of other languages can contribute to our sense of possibilities in the world. (We here require the competence in other languages that Goethe had in mind, rather than the mere awareness that there could be other languages to which we alluded above.) Such knowledge can show us how to look at the world differently, and identify different features. With that additional awareness will come new options to vary in imagination how the world is, allowing us to entertain new possibilities. This would not be needed in order to have a sense of possibility in general, and therefore of the actuality of the world in general. That sense could already be possessed by monoglots. But what it may give is a sense of possibilities in particular areas, and therefore of the actuality of the world in those respects.

The most obvious examples come from knowledge of the language of mathematics. For example, once one starts to talk in terms of derivatives, that is, in terms of rates of change, rates of change of rates of change, and so on, one sees concretely that any such rate could have been different. That confers a sense of the actuality of the rates there are. And the sense of actuality that is achieved is much stronger than it would be if rates could only be seen as what they happened to be, so that they were mere immobile facts about the world.

Other examples can be found in the languages of various natural sciences. In physics, knowledge of the languages of fields and of unified spacetime allows one to identify specific ways in which things could have been different, creating a sense of the actuality of how things are. And in biology, knowledge of the language of metabolic cycles, including concepts such as those of metabolic pathways, anabolism, catabolism, and catalysis, gives a concrete grasp of how the mechanisms of life could have been different (and how in certain respects they could not plausibly have been different while still being close enough to the actual mechanisms to count as variations on them).

Moving on to the social sciences, similar things could be said about economics. In particular, the language that is used when modelling whole economies is very much designed to handle variations in economies and how changes in the values of some variables may lead to changes in the values of others. The sense of possibility conferred is much more concrete than a general sense that things could have been different in some way or other.

Technical languages of some of the other social sciences may also be able to perform the same task of giving a concrete sense of possibilities, although it may be less obvious that they can perform that task because values of quantitative variables are typically less central. Examples are given by the concepts used to characterise and explain instances of social stratification, concepts such as those of class, status, cultural capital, and openness of a given stratification to mobility.

All of these examples might be thought of as vocabulary and (particularly in mathematical disciplines) grammatical rules in mere sub-languages, constructed within natural languages. The extent to which we should see sub-languages and the extent to which we should see new languages that have broken free from the natural languages of their originators could be debated, although the more abstract, and in particular the more mathematical, the greater would be the reason to see new languages.

Examples based on people with one natural language that is unenhanced by scientific knowledge learning another unenhanced language, the sort of thing Goethe actually had in mind, may be harder to find. Some natural languages may be restricted in their grasp of number, or may not have words for some things, or may have unusual grammatical constructions that allow special forms of comparison or ways to capture our relationship to the future or to the otherwise unknown. But the fact that natural languages serve the purposes of human life, which are largely although not entirely the same in all societies, means that acquaintance with new natural languages is less likely than acquaintance with their artificial (and mostly scientific) daughters to open up a grasp of new possibilities and hence a grasp of the actuality of specific things along the lines that Musil's words suggest.

This is no criticism of Goethe. As we have noted, his concern was with knowing one's own language rather than with grasping the actuality of the world in general. But thoughts derived from Goethe can make a connection between languages and Musil's claim, in that knowledge of new languages can open up new possibilities for our consideration. On the other side of Musil, Evans's work gives particular and carefully specified examples of thoughts that would allow someone to gain the sense of possibility that Musil's claim requires us to have in order to have a sense of actuality. Thus Musil emerges as the central figure in our enquiry. But why should having a sense of actuality and a sense of possibility matter?

The importance of senses of actuality and possibility

It is vital to know how things actually are. And it is part of the process of discovery to consider how things might be, both in order to work out how to discover which possibilities are realised and in order to devise new theories and new technologies. But all of that is at the first-order level of facts and putative facts. It is not obvious that there would be much benefit in ascending from awareness of specific facts and possibilities to a general sense of actuality and one of possibility. We can see the enormous benefits of making the comparable ascent from first-order logic to second-order logic. But what about the senses of actuality and possibility we discuss here?

The benefits are primarily psychological. They may arise both in the area of theory, and in the area of practice.

In the area of theory, a sense of actuality gives us a sense that some statements are true and others are false. And it gives us that sense prior to any determination of which statements are true. So we understand in advance of any research that there will be correct answers and incorrect answers to our questions. It would be a bold leap to say that a sense of actuality would in itself suffice to turn us away from the kind of relativism that does not allow for a boundary between the correct and the incorrect which is independent of our thought. But the leap might be made, and it would be a great benefit of a sense of actuality if it did suffice to see off such deplorable relativism.

Staying in the area of theory, a sense of possibility reminds us that things might have been different. It also reminds us that things might in fact be different from how we think them to be, so we should continue our research and never assume that matters are finally settled. And it reminds us that in at least some areas in which we lack knowledge, we do not merely draw a blank. Instead we have a range of plausible possibilities, a grasp of which can help us to design our research.

In the area of practice, a sense of actuality confronts us with the need to face the world as it is. We see that we must work if we would like the world to be different. A sense of possibility encourages us to explore options for change, knowing that there may be scope to make changes which would bring actuality into line with the more attractive possibilities.

In both areas, theory and practice, a general sense of actuality that is not tied to particular current facts or factual beliefs has the advantage that the same sense can continue to perform its functions while facts or our beliefs as to the facts change. Likewise a general sense of possibility can remain the same sense, able to do its work, regardless of what possibilities are or are believed to be available.

References

Dummett, Michael A. E. "What Do I Know When I Know a Language?". Chapter 3 of Dummett, The Seas of Language. Clarendon Press, 1993. https://doi.org/10.1093/0198236212.003.0003

Evans, Gareth. The Varieties of Reference. Clarendon Press, 1982.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Maximen und Reflexionen. In Goethes Werke XII: Schriften zur Kunst, Schriften zur Literatur, Maximen und Reflexionen. Christian Wegner, 1955.

Musil, Robert. Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften, herausgegeben von Adolf Frisé. Rowohlt, 1999. 

Musil, Robert. The Man Without Qualities, translated by Sophie Wilkins. Picador, 1997.

Wittgenstein. Ludwig. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Suhrkamp, 1963

Wittgenstein. Ludwig. Tractatus logico-philosophicus, translated by C. K. Ogden. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1922.

Publication and the shape of the knowledge base

 Introduction

This post is about the dissemination and use of pieces of work that set out the results of research, that review specific pieces of research, or that survey fields of research.

Journals are the established form of dissemination. But technology has facilitated both new ways to make works available and new formats for individual works.

Old and new ways

The traditional journal is managed by an editorial team, printed on paper, and sent out by post (as well as often being available online). The number of papers per year is for practical reasons tightly limited. Submissions routinely far exceed capacity. Decisions as to what to publish are taken by editors, either at sight or on the basis of reports received from referees.

Consequences of this system are a degree of prestige for those authors whose papers are published, the rejection of a great deal of work that is of a perfectly good standard, and a degree of confidence among readers that published papers have been scrutinised and meet appropriate standards of quality. Readers do not however have grounds to think that published papers are better than at least a substantial number of the papers that are not accepted for publication.

This long-standing system remains significant, with the modification that some journals now only exist in online format. But original research of perfectly good quality can now appear in other ways.

Most conspicuously there are online repositories such as the arXiv and the Social Science Research Network. These repositories accept papers subject only to very light quality control, and they do not limit the numbers of papers accepted. Some of the papers will be modified by their authors, and the arXiv in particular has a system for keeping successive versions available. Some of the papers will go on to be published in more traditional journals, again perhaps in modified form. Such a traditionally published version is then regarded as the version of record, the one to cite when others refer to the research.

There are also online overlay journals which pick out papers in online repositories and link to them, sometimes with comments from the editors of the overlay journals. The idea is to bring together some papers particularly worth reading in a given field, and to add a layer of quality appraisal that is not provided by the repositories.

An environment of repositories and overlay journals separates the two tasks of making work available and directing attention to work of high quality, tasks which are combined in traditional journals. Far more work is made available, but those who want to have their attention directed to work that might well have made it into traditional journals can rely on overlay journals. Breaking down a single process into two tasks that can be performed separately has its advantages.

There are also ways to make work available that exist outside even the structure provided by organised repositories, although they carry a correspondingly low (but not zero) probability that links to the work will appear in overlay journals. Authors may post work on their own websites or blogs, and may draw attention to the work by posting links on social media.

Finally, long-standing journals may find themselves in competition with new ones that retain some of the features of their forebears. A recent example is the new journal Political Philosophy, which has been created by former editors of the Journal of Political Philosophy. The new journal is published online only, by the Open Library of Humanities, but it is too early to know whether this means that far more papers will be accepted than would be practical with a paper journal. Peer review is carried over from the traditional journal model. One thing that is facilitated by this new journal's online model, and by the fact that no commercial publisher is involved, is that articles will be free to access while no publication charge is imposed on authors. 

Publication and citation

There are those who do not regard papers placed on websites or in online repositories as published. They reserve that term for papers which have appeared in journals of the traditional sort, where there is an expectation that there will be quality control through peer review, through a restriction on the number of papers published even among papers that meet some standard which can be applied without full peer review, or through both. The view is that publication requires not only dissemination, but also a gatekeeper. 

It is tempting to see this as a grumpy old establishment keeping control of its territory. But there is another aspect. Works get cited as support for arguments in later works. Earlier works present arguments and results on which the authors of later works seek to rely. There is a case for saying that only works which have got past a gatekeeper should be considered respectable enough to be cited in this way. And it might be thought convenient to take publication in the traditional sense as the primary indicator that works are good enough to be cited.

There is however scope to challenge a view that the gatekeepers of traditional publication are the ideal source of quality control. One may doubt that the gatekeepers of traditional publication are always good at their job. A mere restriction to papers which strike the editors as good enough to outrank others in competition for the available space in journals is certainly not likely to weed out all or only the papers on which others should not rely. And peer review can vary greatly in its quality, both because reviewers may lack expertise in every aspect of a paper's topic and because time-pressured and unpaid reviewers may not devote great effort to the task. It does not help that reviewers' reputations are usually not on the line. It is normal for them to remain anonymous and for their reports not to be shared at all widely.

An alternative that would address such concerns in the new world of online repositories would be no control over initial acceptance but then open comment, by individuals who would be named so that their expertise could be assessed, either on papers as wholes or on specific points. So long as the comments were collected in repositories alongside the relevant papers, everyone could benefit. And adverse comment on one element in a paper, which might have led to a refusal to publish in a traditional journal (even if the verdict was to revise and resubmit, if the author could not or would not revise to meet the objection), would not deprive people of access to other elements which might be of considerable value to them. Moreover, an easy way to add comments would make it easy to add new material which might change one's view of the original paper or of parts of it. In the traditional system, drawing the attention of readers of the original paper to relevant new material may need to await publication of a whole paper which comments on the original paper. And the authors of such later papers may be so concerned to convey their own views that they do not bother to make all the points on earlier papers that they could make.

Overlay journals provide an additional quality control mechanism in the world of online repositories. They may suffer from the same disadvantages as traditional journals. Publication in an overlay journal is neither necessary nor sufficient for a paper to be worth reading. But overlay journals can provide the kind of gatekeeping that traditional journals provide, while the repositories over which they lie ensure that papers which would not pass a gatekeeper still become available.

Finally, we should note the different degrees of significance of the controls discussed here in different areas of work.

The risk of being driven to inappropriate conclusions as a result of relying on mistaken content of earlier work which might have been corrected if the earlier work had been subjected to better quality control arises most frequently and on the whole most severely in mathematics and the natural sciences, less frequently or severely in the social sciences, and least frequently or severely in the humanities. One reason is that deductive or close to deductive chains of reasoning are most common in mathematics and the natural sciences, and least common in the humanities. Some mistaken content of earlier work may drive the author of later work directly to a mistaken conclusion whenever the chain of reasoning is deductive or close to deductive, but if links in the chain are weaker an earlier mistake is less likely to drive the author of later work to a mistaken conclusion. If the links in the chain are nowhere near deductive and a prospective conclusion happens to look doubtful on some other ground, there will often be scope to place little weight on the earlier content even when it is not recognised as mistaken. This is however only how things stand on the whole, not universally. For example, a historian might misdate a document and that mistake might deductively rule out certain analyses by other historians of events in which the document played a role.

Turning to the use of research to choose practical actions, the greatest risk of serious mistake by relying on mistaken content of earlier work again arises when the earlier work was in mathematics or the natural sciences. Conclusions of such work come across as more solid than other considerations when choosing actions, so they are likely to carry considerable weight. Such conclusions can also have the potential to rule out certain actions absolutely. So undetected mistakes can have significant consequences. When it comes to the social sciences, there is likely to be more wariness of reliance on conclusions because it is clear that conclusions in the social sciences are less soundly based than those in the natural sciences. There is also less likelihood that a conclusion will rule out an action absolutely. Finally, conclusions in the humanities are not of a kind that should lead directly to choices of action, although they may well inform the outlooks of people who make such choices.

The shape of the knowledge base

Traditional publishing gives us individual papers which contain references to other papers. Within each paper one finds a large number of pieces of information. They are not explicitly isolated from one another as detachable items. Isolation might in any case be impractical without extensive re-writing because pieces of information are stated in ways that rely on their having the context of the rest of the paper. And connections between pieces of information are not usually set out explicitly in a web of links. Thus the largely implicit connections between pieces of information within a paper are mostly of a different nature from that of the connections to other papers that are given by explicit reference.

None of this need change with a move to online publishing in repositories, with or without overlay journals. But online technology does allow changes. In particular, papers no longer need to be confined to the linear form.

Let us present a radical possibility, while acknowledging that actual developments may turn out to be less radical. A paper could comprise a number of different files, which we shall call notes even though they might be in a final and polished form. Each note would set out one piece or a few pieces of information, with links between the notes and a contents list which would include links to all of them. That list could optionally set out the notes in a hierarchical structure or provide a suggested order in which to read them. Each note would have its own public identifier to facilitate linking to individual notes by other authors.

The overall effect would be that of a published Obsidian vault for each paper, or for all the work of a given author, with links between notes (whether in the same vault or in different vaults) as well as links to papers that were in more traditional forms. Ultimately, if this style became the norm and many links were also made between notes created by different authors in their own vaults, the effect would be much the same as that of one giant Obsidian vault which was made up of all the vaults of individual papers or authors.

One would want to maintain separate vaults for separate authors within such a giant vault, both to assign authorial control and to allow attribution. So the giant vault would be a notional one. But others could send an author their suggestions for amendments, which the author could accept or reject. Systems for recording versions and handling suggestions could be added, perhaps using software on the lines of Git.

There would be an effect on the ways in which authors used other authors' work. The notional giant vault would be full of notes that captured single thoughts or small groups of thoughts, notes of the sort that when they contain single thoughts are called atomic notes. Searches might tend to lead to the thoughts of several authors on a specific point, rather than to the thoughts of one author on that point and related points. On the one hand this would be an advantage. But on the other hand there would be an increased risk of gathering atomic notes from several authors and misinterpreting them because they were viewed outside their original contexts. The new context of the collection of notes on a single point would tend to drive the contexts of the original papers out of readers' minds.

Correspondingly, there would be less focus on individual papers. An imperative to read papers by authors B, C, and D on some topic would be replaced by an imperative to comb the giant vault for whatever had been said on particular points. One might gain in depth on specific points, but lose an appreciation of overall ways to handle topics.

Attribution

The traditional approach of complete papers which have named authors and which are accessed as wholes gives clarity of attribution. If a paper includes a piece of information, an idea, or an overall approach to a topic, then the information, idea, or approach should be attributed to that paper's author unless he or she acknowledges or should have acknowledged another source.

Attribution could be preserved even if all work was within the notional giant vault. Individual authors would have their own vaults, and new vaults could be created for specific groups of authors working together on single projects. There would be a minor complication when a team worked together so that they wanted a single vault but it was thought appropriate to attribute some particular piece of work within a project only to selected members of that team, but notes within the vault that related to such a piece of work could be tagged appropriately. The difficulty would be no greater than exists in the traditional system when a team produces papers that are to be attributed to selected members.

Attribution might however be affected, whether work was produced by one author working alone or by all or part of a team. When an idea is seen within a whole paper, the context can serve to distinguish it from similar ideas in other papers. If however ideas tended to be seen in an atomic way, detached from the contexts of the vaults in which they occurred, similar ideas might be seen as so close that it became unclear whether one author or another could really claim ownership of it. There might be visible priority in time, if all notes were time-stamped and the history of amendments to them could be viewed. But when the interval of time between two notes was small, the different authors were all working within the same intellectual context (a context which would be enlarged, merging contexts that might otherwise have been seen as different, by the existence of the notional giant vault), and both of the ideas could easily have developed from the context as it was shortly before either of them had been written down, such an order of temporal priority would be of little significance for the purposes of attribution.

(We may add that when notes written by different authors supplied the same idea, rather than similar ideas, or the same piece of information, and copying could be excluded, it would be appropriate simply to attribute the idea or the information to each of the authors independently.)

So a move from complete papers to atomic notes within a notional giant vault could at least sometimes reduce clarity of attribution. Would this matter?

From the point of view of individual authors affected, it might matter a great deal. People like to be given credit for their own ideas. On the other hand, if attribution ever came to be seen as unimportant, more useful work might be produced because producers would not devote any time or mental capacity to tracking down the sources of ideas and giving due credit except when that was necessary in order to show that some claim on which the new work relied had indeed been established by earlier work. More generally, if attribution came to be seen as unimportant, the focus would be on the corpus of knowledge that had been generated and was being enlarged all the time rather than on the contributions of particular people.

A bright future

If the dissemination of work were to develop along the lines indicated here, at least in the direction of a notional giant vault of atomic notes, then the future could very well be on balance brighter than it would have been in the absence of such development, whether or not the extreme of a notional giant vault was ever reached. Searches for material relevant to new work would be faster and more comprehensive, new work could be made available quickly and without being compiled into the currently recognised form of a complete paper, and gaps in knowledge could be filled in one by one as and when material to fill them occurred to individual authors.

On the other hand, the discipline imposed by the recognised form of a complete paper might be lost. There is something to be said for requiring an author to set out in sequence the question addressed, how evidence was gathered, what evidence was obtained, the argument to conclusions, the conclusions themselves, and a discussion of their significance. Such discipline could however be restored by a norm that a batch of notes would be accompanied by a table of contents with links to the individual notes, such that when the notes were read in the order given the traditional sequence would be followed.

One danger to avoid would be a slide towards centralisation, with some authoritative figures seeing a notional giant vault as requiring management and directing individuals to working on certain topics in certain ways. Fortunately software like Obsidian works perfectly well with individuals all doing their own thing, even if there is notionally a single giant vault. Equally fortunately, academics and the like are strongly inclined to do the work they choose and to do it in their own ways. If there is a danger, it comes from people in authority threatening non-conformists with obstruction to their career progression. But any such danger should not be allowed to obstruct the spread of new ways to disseminate work done, or the growth of banks of work in forms that may be more useful than the traditional forms.

References

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/

Git: https://git-scm.com/

Journal of Political Philosophy: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14679760

Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/

Open Library of Humanities: https://www.openlibhums.org/

Political Philosophy: https://politicalphilosophyjournal.org/

Social Science Research Network: https://www.ssrn.com/

Repeated encounters with works of art

 

1. The question

This post concerns encounters with works of art, buildings, and cityscapes. We shall refer to all of these as works. And encounters with works shall mean being in the physical presence of the originals and perceiving them in the ordinary, direct, way,  although perhaps with the aid of magnifying glasses or binoculars.

Many works repay repeated encounters. But many other works are waiting to be encountered for the first time. Our question is this. When a choice has to be made, what reasons might one have to choose repeated encounters with works already encountered over encounters with works not already encountered? (For brevity, we shall simply speak of repeated encounters and new works.)

In order to make the question a serious one we shall be concerned exclusively with works of great merit, such that there would be a real cultural loss in never encountering them. And when we use the term "works" without qualification, we shall mean works of great merit.

Within the category of works of great merit, we shall not think in terms of an order of merit. The number of truly outstanding works is small enough that one could get round most of those within one or two given artistic traditions, without having to miss out on too many other works of great merit within those chosen traditions. So not establishing an order between works of great merit will not limit thought along our lines. And to encounter the truly outstanding works within a large number of traditions would be too ambitious for anyone, unless perhaps one were never to encounter most of the other works of great merit within many of those traditions and thereby deprive oneself of a full understanding of the context of the truly outstanding works.

When one happens to live near works already encountered, there is only a very modest trade-off between repeated encounters and encounters with new works. But when works already encountered are in city C at some distance from one's home, and other works equally worthy of attention are in many other cities, also at some distance from one's home, from city C and from one another, there is a more serious trade-off. The extent of art and the brevity of life together mean that repeated encounters in city C will require forgoing even single encounters with new works in some of the other cities.

There may even be a serious trade-off when city C contains many new works, so that encounters with them can effortlessly be combined with repeated encounters in city C and the result might seem to be be a full life of artistic appreciation. This is because some artistic traditions may be far better represented by works in other cities, so that drinking one's fill in city C would still leave significant gaps in one's experience. Even if one only had a taste for a particular broad category of art, such as the art of Western and Central Europe or the art of East Asia, there would be many traditions and sub-traditions to explore. And a broad appreciation of those traditions and sub-traditions would enhance appreciation of particular works.

In what follows, we are only concerned to explore our question. We do not mean to put a returner to previously encountered works in the dock on a charge of irrationality. Choices like this are both unimportant to the rest of us and none of our business. We merely wish to investigate the reasons a returner, or another person who prefers new works to repeated encounters, might have for their choice. And we are concerned with personal benefits to the individual, rather than with what someone who might make a serious contribution to the discipline of the history of art should do for the sake of making such a contribution. We shall therefore not issue any prescription, or even try to reach an overall conclusion.

We shall investigate reasons to choose returns or to choose new works under two headings, the magic of the original and intellectual benefits. References are given at the end of the post.

2. The magic of the original

Take a work of great merit. There is something magical about being in the presence of the original. Photographs available online would not be enough. And repeated encounters would allow at least some magic to be experienced again and again.

This may be so, but would the renewed experience be the most worthwhile use of one's limited time? Or would it be better to move on to new works, simply on the ground of available magic (quite apart from the intellectual benefits of encountering a wide variety of works). After all, the magic is not a single magic of works in general. It is a different magic in relation to each work. Relatedly, experiencing the magic in relation to several works does not diminish the magic in relation to the next work one encounters. 

By far the largest dose of magic is likely to come from the first encounter. What is really special is to have been in the presence of the work, rather than to have been in its presence several times. To acknowledge this is not to fall into the vulgarity of "been there, done that, tick". Rather, it is to note that what is special about the original, as opposed to a perfect copy, is something intangible, a direct connection with the work's creation and subsequent history, and with the tradition within which the work originated (on tradition see Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", section 4). The direct connection is something to be felt rather than observed. And the most significant experience of any feeling is very often the first experience of it.

(On different causal connections and their effects on the worth of experience see Bertamini and Blakemore, "Seeing a Work of Art Indirectly: When a Reproduction Is Better Than an Indirect View, and a Mirror Better Than a Live Monitor". The studies reported there did however involve hypothetical rather than actual encounters with a work or with a reproduction, and they made the assumption that the original work would not be encountered in our sense at all. Our assumption is that some works have been encountered for the first time, and that new works can either be or not be encountered. In no case do we consider the option of only seeing photographs of a work or only having indirect perception without at some time actually encountering the work itself.

See also Newman and Bloom, "Art and Authenticity: the Importance of Originals in Judgments of Value". That paper is concerned with the relative values of originals and copies. But the authors do identify the importance of the artist's physical contact with the original, which they call contagion. One could extend the importance of contact to cover the chain of contact from artist to viewer that would at the very least be seriously weakened by the substitution of a copy for the original, even though the chain all the way from the artist to the viewer of a copy would still be causal. One reason for the weakening would be that the proximate human producer in the chain would be a mere copier, rather than the creative artist.)

While the first encounter is likely to give the largest dose of magic, there may also be significant additional magic to be enjoyed on repeated encounters. This is particularly so when features of a work at a higher level than its detail are of great significance. Works on a large scale provide examples. Some paintings and sculptures, and many interiors, buildings, and boulevards and cityscapes, impress partly by their size. How did the creator keep control of such a large work and create a harmony that endures as one moves from the whole to small parts and back again? Scale creates its own magic, and repeated encounters will allow the enjoyment of doses of magic that were not available on the first encounter. Likewise genius of composition or the fit of a work with other works, for example within a sequence of works intended to be displayed together, can be a source of significant magic on repeated encounters.

Even aside from such considerations specific to particular features of works, there might be fresh magic on second or later encounters with the same work which was of a different nature from the magic on the first encounter. There might for example be something like the special feeling of greeting a friend already known, which is not a weaker version of the feeling of encountering someone interesting for the first time.

We therefore have ample reason to allow that often, neither all nor nearly all of the magic will be given by a first encounter. There is good reason to encounter works of great merit more than once. So there is a trade-off between repeated encounters and encounters with new works.

If magic were all that mattered, one might seek a rule of thumb that would maximise the total magic enjoyed by a given individual over his or her lifetime. And we would want to allow different rules for people with different characteristics. But magic is not all that matters. We should also consider the intellectual benefits of studying particular works of art.

3. Intellectual benefits

Encounters with works may bring not only magic and pleasure, but also intellectual benefits. Even if one is not going to make a significant contribution to the discipline of the history of art, one's brain may be exercised and one's understanding of humanity and history may be enlarged. How does this affect the trade-off between repeated encounters and encounters with new works?

One might think that the intellectual benefits of repeated encounters could easily be replaced by the benefits of studying photographs available online. Study of a work may even be better done in that way, because one can zoom in to a work of art and get closer than would be permitted in a museum, or can study a building's upper reaches in a way that would not be possible from the ground. This would tilt the balance in favour of encountering new works rather than repeatedly travelling to view works already encountered.

However, when large scale plays a significant role, pictures online will fail to capture how the scale has been handled. And the same is true of small scale. An enlarged reproduction of a miniature does not fully reflect its nature. This may argue for repeated encounters with original works.

There may also be benefit from studying a work in its presence. One gets to exercise the brain to see what one can notice without the benefit of zooming in or otherwise manipulating the image. And one can see the work as its creator expected it to be seen, within the technological constraints of its time of creation. Thus one may come to appreciate how the creator overcame any limits on perception imposed by those constraints. Again, we have an argument for repeated encounters.

There is also a connection between intellectual benefits and magic. It is a feature of many works of great merit that there is always more to be seen, in the detail, in higher-level features such as the composition or the lighting, or in the way in which the artist worked. Even someone who is not a professional art historian can see enough to be able to write whole essays that explore works in such ways. (See for example the essays in Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art.) And there is a certain magic in getting the experience from the original. The artist reaches out to the viewer and the channel of transmission is the original work alone, with no stage of reproduction being involved. To the extent that this is so, repeated encounters may be amply justified by the attraction of further study.

References

Barnes, Julian. Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art. London, Jonathan Cape, 2015.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". In Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York, NY, Schocken Books, 1969.

Bertamini, Marco, and Colin Blakemore. "Seeing a Work of Art Indirectly: When a Reproduction Is Better Than an Indirect View, and a Mirror Better Than a Live Monitor". Frontiers in Psychology, volume 10, article 2033, 2019, pages 1-12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02033

Newman, George E., and Paul Bloom. "Art and Authenticity: the Importance of Originals in Judgments of Value". Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, volume 141, number 3, 2012, pages 558-569. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026035

What if there were no prestige?

 

1. Introduction

1.1 The question

Some people enjoy prestige. They may be given titles which carry a certain cachet. Their holding such titles may lead others to think highly of them, and that may in turn induce positive self-perception on the part of the holders. Even if no titles are involved, records of achievements may be read in ways that lead others to think highly of the achievers, and that may in turn induce positive self-perception on the part of the achievers. In either case, prestige takes us beyond what would be implied by the mere noting of facts and the detached evaluation of those facts as, for example, indicators of likely performance in future tasks. Prestige involves a bit of magic, albeit magic that is explicable entirely in natural psychological and social terms.

We shall speak of people being accorded prestige, meaning that they are widely thought of as being special. The according of prestige will often not be a conscious act. It will usually be just how people tend to think of a person, given that person's titles or achievements. Anthropologists sometimes speak of a prestige economy, alongside any monetary economy. Prestige is accorded in line with the norms of the relevant society, and it is found to be a valuable reward and motivator. 

We shall also speak of people having titles, awards or positions bestowed on them. Bestowal will be of interest to us when the titles, awards or positions are ones that on the whole lead recipients to be accorded prestige. Bestowal will be a conscious act on the part of those who have the power to bestow. It may or may not lead to the beneficiary being accorded prestige. It would be perfectly possible for the wider population to think nothing of the title, award or position. And someone could be accorded prestige without any title, award or position ever being bestowed, simply because the population admired some achievement.

If prestige is not accorded, it will vanish. It exists only in the minds of the beholders. Our question is as follows. What would be the consequences of this magic which we have called prestige vanishing in relation to everybody, so that there was never any sense that a title, award or position was anything more than a label with descriptive content and nobody took records of achievements to be of any significance other than to the extent that they were useful indicators of likely future performance?

1.2 Our scope

Our topic is prestige that is noticed in society generally or at least across a large class of people, rather than prestige that only arises in narrow settings such as a family or a small institution, the inner workings of which do not attract public attention.

Prestige marks out a proportion of a particular group of people, which must amount to a modest proportion of the (perhaps larger) group of people who accord the prestige.

If the two groups are the same, as for example with the prestige of some engineers among engineers generally, the proportion of that group must be modest. If most members of the group were accorded the prestige, it would not be valued.

If however the two groups are different, that restriction need not apply. For example, doctors might enjoy a certain prestige among the population as a whole simply by virtue of their profession. Merely being a doctor would not give rise to prestige among doctors, but it might do so among people in general.

Prestige may arise formally, out of the receipt of specific honours (prizes bestowed by institutes, election to national learned academies with restricted membership, honours bestowed by the state, and so on) or out of the holding of specific positions. Prestige may also arise informally out of achievements that are recognised to be difficult, either naturally difficult such as climbing high mountains or artificially difficult such as publication in certain journals where competition for space in them is fierce. And there are other things in between the formal and the informal, such as invitations to chair or speak at important conferences and distinguished roles in professional bodies. Indeed, some academics now include in their CVs not only lists of their publications but also sections headed "Indicators of esteem", where esteem may be seen as a step on the way to prestige.

We shall be concerned with prestige that attaches to distinctions, the achievement of which is easily identified and the quantity of which is tightly limited, whether by explicit or informal quota (as with state honours and membership of some learned academies), by the nature of the position (as when a council only needs one person to chair it), or by human nature (which renders it so difficult to climb high mountains or to make significant scientific discoveries that few people manage such things).

Identifiability of achievement excludes from our scope general recognition by colleagues. And tight limits on quantity exclude mere membership of an esteemed profession. Tight limits also allow us to distinguish prestige from mere esteem, which may be accorded by members of a group to a large proportion of that group.

One significant consequence of our choice of scope will be that the prestige which interests us is something that someone might well pursue by following a plan to obtain it.

We shall now explore our question as to the consequences of prestige's vanishing. We shall do so largely by going through the effects that the possibility of being accorded prestige may have.

2. Achievement

2.1 Motivation

To the extent that people like to be accorded prestige, its availability may drive them to work hard. It may also drive them to get a move on, given that we have limited lifespans and even more limited spans of time during which we are at the height of our powers.

So if prestige were to vanish, less might get done. This could be to the detriment both of the individual, who might fall short of fulfilment of their potential, and of society. But it is also possible for the pursuit of prestige to lead people astray, so its disappearance might not be wholly disadvantageous either to the individual or to society.

2.2 The distortion of choices

If someone's desire for prestige encourages him or her to work hard at tasks, success in which increases the probability that prestige will be accorded, that is likely to be beneficial. And it may be so even if the individual is motivated by the prospect of prestige rather than by any feeling that one should do the best job one can.

If however prestige is of great importance to the individual, he or she may be greatly concerned to do what other people will admire.

In some areas, the effect will still be very likely to be beneficial. What people admire will be aligned with what any rational agent would pursue. In athletics, what is admired by members of society is the same as what should matter to the individual: faster, higher, stronger. In those academic disciplines in which it is appropriate to think in terms of answers the correctness of which cannot sensibly be doubted until new evidence comes along, we see the same alignment. Getting those answers is admired and should also be the individual's aim. This can be said of mathematics, a large majority of work in the natural sciences, and a smaller but still substantial proportion of work in the social sciences and the humanities.

In other areas, the alignment between what people admire and what any rational agent would pursue will be far from guaranteed. Artistic achievement is the obvious example. Indeed, some now admired artistic movements were at first scorned. Impressionism suffered from that treatment. But the same misalignment could arise in politics, with some campaigns against injustice being more deplored than admired, or in business, where someone who sacrifices profit to what is perceived as socially responsible consideration for those known as stakeholders may be admired and someone who has a single-minded focus on profit deplored, even though the profit-seeker may not only obtain higher rewards but also have a better prospect of serving the customer well and keeping the business's employees in their jobs.

There are two potential disadvantages when someone is intent on prestige but there is no guaranteed alignment between what people admire and what any rational agent would pursue.

The first disadvantage is that effort may be wrongly directed. A new artistic movement which would in fact be of value may go undeveloped. An important political campaign may not be pursued. Or a business may not be run to best advantage, whether of the owner or of the customers or employees.

The second disadvantage is that the agent may fail to be true to himself or herself. Whether one sees this as a serious disadvantage will depend on how much one admires the person who insists on living on his or her own terms, and who refuses to conform merely for the sake of conforming. Some of us do see it as a great virtue to live in that way. For a powerful case in favour, and against the conformist pursuit of compliance with social expectations for the sake of prestige, see Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead.

Both of these disadvantages would be removed if prestige disappeared.

2.3 Manipulating the system

There would be other things to do in the pursuit of prestige which would not be directly detrimental to the quality of work. They would primarily be to the detriment of any relevant system of bestowal, bringing it into contempt.

These would include both the outright fabrication of achievements, and practices which were less obviously unacceptable. Someone might ask friends who were also friends of bestowers of titles, awards or positions to put in a good word for them. Another approach would be to put great effort into presenting a case for recognition, putting everything in the best possible light without exactly lying.

Moreover, it would often not be difficult to sway the judgement of bestowers. The criteria for bestowal are generally not wholly objective, other than in special cases such as awards for triumph in sports where there is a wholly objective measure of achievement (such as time or height, rather than style) or awards for being the first to solve mathematical or technical problems which have been defined in advance.

2.4 When prestige is incidental

People may act in ways that lead to their being accorded prestige, but without having prestige as a goal.

This may be the ideal, so long as prestige exists. If they have sufficient motivation, the lack of motivation from prestige will be no handicap. And they should neither be tempted to manipulate the bestowers of titles, awards or positions, nor be led astray by social conditions on the according of prestige.

One might indeed see lack of interest in prestige as a virtue in itself. Lack of interest would allow people to do things because they were seen as worthy things to do, rather than for any ulterior motive. And the vanishing of prestige would not matter to people with such an attitude.

3. Personal satisfaction

Prestige may give rise to personal satisfaction. It feels good to have one's achievements admired by others. And such admiration confirms that the worth of one's achievement is not a figment of one's own imagination. It may indeed be anticipation of such satisfaction that motivates the pursuit of prestige.

The perception of validation is however not always justified. We noted above that there are areas of work in which what people admire will be aligned with what any rational agent would pursue, and areas in which such alignment is far from guaranteed.

Someone who was accorded prestige for achievements in areas of the first kind could have considerable confidence in the judgement of his or her admirers, except when prestige was accorded only by a few eccentrics and the one who basked in the prestige refused to acknowledge this fact.

Someone who was accorded prestige in areas of the second kind might legitimately have confidence in the judgement of his or her admirers, whether the judgement of those who bestowed awards which were widely regarded as prestigious or the judgement of people generally who thought well of the specific bestowal of an award on that person or thought well of that person's achievements.

Someone who was accorded prestige in such areas might however have doubts. What if the standards of his or her admirers were inappropriate? What if prestige was in fact accorded largely on the basis of conformity to current norms as to what kind of work should be produced, so that mediocre but conformist work could earn it while excellent but nonconformist work would not?

What would be the effects of prestige's vanishing? Individuals could still be satisfied with their achievements, but they would lose one source of validation of their satisfaction. Among some people, this might reduce motivation to achieve. As for society, any loss of motivation might be unfortunate. But at least there would be a reduction in motivation to conform to inappropriate standards.

4. The allocation of resources

Institutions have to decide how to allocate scarce resources. Who will make the best use of them? The question can arise both in relation to resources for specific projects, and in relation to the allocation of longer-term jobs. Prestige can be used as a guide, on the basis that past performance is at least an indicator of having the talents needed for good future performance. We may ask whether it would be easier or harder to allocate resources appropriately in the absence of prestige.

If prestige were accorded on a basis which ensured that there was a high positive rank correlation with level of achievement, it would be sensible to use prestige as at least a rough guide to the allocation of resources. But if prestige were accorded on other grounds, for example on the basis of conformity to expectations which in fact deserved to be challenged, its use could easily lead to an inappropriate allocation of resources.

Even if prestige were accorded on the basis of level of achievement, there would be a difficulty. Unproven talent might be shut out. It is not that all new entrants into a field should get resources. Some would actually lack talent. But prestige would not be enough to ensure the best allocation of resources. There should also be an enquiry into work done by at least some new people. Sadly, that might be obstructed by a desire among those who currently enjoyed high prestige and control over resources to exclude challengers.

Overall, the disappearance of prestige might well reduce the misallocation of resources where prestige was not accorded on a basis which ensured a high positive rank correlation with level of achievement.

Where prestige was accorded on a basis which ensured a high positive rank correlation, its disappearance would remove a useful rule of thumb in the initial selection of potential recipients of resources. But that could be replaced by a cursory examination of the achievements of potential recipients.

A more detailed examination of their achievements and talents would in any case be needed to whittle down a shortlist to the list of actual recipients, if there was to be much prospect of the whittling down's leading to an allocation of resources which was not manifestly inferior to one or more alternative allocations. (We speak in these terms because it would be very unlikely that anyone could identify an optimal allocation, even supposing that an optimum would exist.) 

5. Power

Our discussion of the allocation of resources brings us on to the topic of power.

Having prestige can in itself give power, and the appropriateness of such power may be questioned. In particular, if the distribution of prestige reflects any considerations other than real talent and achievement, the influence on the distribution of power is quite likely to be inappropriate.

(We deliberately speak of appropriate and inappropriate distributions of power, not legitimate and illegitimate distributions. Our concern is with whether it would be sensible for certain people to have power in order that good results be achieved, not with whether it would be just for them to have power.)

We can see what might go right, or wrong, by considering different types of power that might be involved.

5.1 The power to influence other people's views

Having prestige may make it is more likely than otherwise that one's views on contentious topics will be accepted. If the distribution of prestige tracks real expertise, that may be beneficial. And a failure to have some way or other to indicate who had expertise and who did not would be unfortunate - although prestige might be too broad-brush an indicator to be ideal for this purpose. But if the distribution of prestige does not track real expertise, or does so only poorly, the result may be unhelpful. Views of people whose expertise is modest may be given more weight than views of others whose expertise is greater. The problem would disappear if prestige vanished. It would however be useful to have some alternative rule of thumb to identify those whose views were likely to be worth serious consideration.

Prestige may also make it easier than it would otherwise be to get one's views disseminated, for example by getting one's own works published or by having others report one's views. Here there is a serious potential disadvantage, even if prestige is well correlated with expertise. The question of whether views are worth considering can only be answered by those who have become aware of the views. It is reasonable to direct one's attention to those who have expertise, and to ignore people who manifestly do not, but within the range of experts one should at least cursorily survey all views, not just those from prestigious people. Otherwise one could very well miss valid challenges to established orthodoxy. Again, this problem would disappear if prestige were to vanish.

5.2 The power to influence selectors for positions

Having prestige may make it more likely than otherwise that one will be promoted to positions of leadership. The case here is slightly different from that with expertise, because effectiveness in leadership requires abilities that are less well defined than those which expertise requires but are more easily recognised by non-experts. So even if prestige is not ideally allocated, it may play a useful and relatively harmless role in getting candidates who enjoy prestige onto a shortlist.

Having said that, the final choice of candidate should be made without regard to prestige and should depend on actual possession of the required talents. The main area in which prestige can lead selectors badly astray is when someone comes from outside a given area of work, lacking a relevant track record but in possession of considerable prestige from some other area of work. For example, someone with great political or civil service prestige but little business sense might seek an appointment to run a business, and the selectors might be influenced by the prestige. If prestige were to vanish, this danger would go away. On the other hand, where this danger did not arise, a useful rule of thumb in the compiling of shortlists would be lost.

5.3 The power to allocate resources and positions

Prestige may make one more likely to have powers of allocation of resources and positions.

This gives rise to a serious concern. If resources and positions are allocated by people with high prestige, the result may be a self-perpetuating oligarchy. The resources may well, and the positions are very likely to, enhance the prestige of the recipients after a little while. Then they may inherit power to allocate resources and positions.

This concern would arise whether or not prestige was accorded in line with actual talent. A self-perpetuating oligarchy would be likely to slow down the progress of those who, while they would do perfectly good work, had faces which did not fit. It would also tend to perpetuate established views on how people in the relevant area should think and work.

Infinity and the unlimited

 I have recently placed a post on this topic on the blog of the sculptor Dr. Gindi. The post is here:

https://www.dr-gindi.com/essays/infinity-and-the-unlimited

Posts by others on the topic of the infinite are here:

https://www.dr-gindi.com/essays

Will future people adjust our present?

 Introduction

"If no one comes from the future to stop you from doing it, then how bad can it be?"

This slogan has been doing the rounds on social media. It is in a photograph of the title page to a spiral bound document. The document is attributed to US Robots and Mechanical Men Inc., a fictitious company in Isaac Asimov's Robot stories.

In this post we shall assume that people from the future could come back to our time and make adjustments on the basis of what they could see would be the consequences of actions taken now. They might do so in order to make things better for some people (perhaps us or themselves) at some time later than now. And they might do so indirectly, by leaving information that was relevant to predictions somewhere where we would find it. Even if they intervened directly, for example by changing people's brains just before they made certain decisions or by introducing fatigue into machines that people were using so that the machines did not carry out the actions that the people had chosen, the affected people would not be aware of the fact of the interventions. They might in retrospect be puzzled that they had taken decisions which were out of character, or that previously reliable machines had failed at critical moments, but that would be all.

What consequences might there be for some of our decision-making, and what would be the scope of and limits on the actions of the time-travellers?

In order to keep track, we shall give numbers to years.

Year 1 is now.

Year 600 is the year in which the time-travellers who visit us live. We shall assume that after visiting us they would go back there. It would be where all their friends lived and where the lifestyle was one to which they were accustomed.

Year 900 is a time when everyone alive in year 600 and in the next few generations after them will have died.

We shall speak of people living in, for example, year 600, to mean people who would be confined to that year and decades either side of it if there were no time travel. That is, the people who live in year 600 are the people for whom that year and decades around it are their home period of time.

The benefit for consequentialists

One of the problems with selecting actions in year 1 on the basis of their consequences is that it is impractical to work out more than a few of the consequences, or to work out the long-term consequences. It is possible that an apparently harmless action would in fact have disastrous consequences years into the future, although it is also arguable that little blame should attach to a specific action in year 1 because many other actions not yet taken would also influence what happened years into the future. Consequentialists would love to be able to foresee all significant consequences of actions, but they cannot do so.

Once one reached, say, year 50, it would at least theoretically be possible to see what the long-term consequences up to that point of an action in year 1 had been. It would not be easy, because many other things would have happened in the intervening years. And to do the job in a way that would be of practical help to consequentialists in year 1 who had magically gained access to information that was in fact only available in year 50, one would have to work out how the world would have turned out following all of the alternative actions or inaction that might plausibly have produced a better outcome. That might remain impossible, or it might require the running of many simulations on the lines envisaged by the simulation argument that Nick Bostrom puts forward.

This is the message of the slogan. If actions in year 1 would lead to disastrous consequences, people living in year 600 would come back to year 1 and either prompt us to different actions or make other changes so as to break the causal chains that would have led to disaster. Then consequentialists could do the best they could in year 1, and be confident that their truly massive mistakes would be nullified. But would people living in year 600 bother? Could they coherently intervene? And what might people living in year 900 do?

Would people living in year 600 bother?

We might expect people living in year 600 to intervene if it would make life better for themselves. And it might be that year 1 would be the easiest point at which to intervene, before the consequences of actions in year 1 had spread too widely and deeply. On the other hand, it might be hard to foresee the effects in year 600 of adjustments to year 1. Perhaps the best option would be a broad-brush adjustment to year 1 followed by finer adjustments to years 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 550 and 575, making adjustments to each year as it would be modified by adjustments to earlier years. (Later we shall note a reservation about making adjustments to years close to year 600.)

Would people living in year 600 care about people earlier than themselves? They might foresee bad consequences of year-1 actions for people living in year 2, or year 50, or year 300. Those people would include the ancestors of people living in year 600. There is a large philosophical debate about what we owe to our near and distant descendants. Here we ask whether, given the opportunity, people should benefit their ancestors.

There is a natural feeling that people probably would do so, assuming no significant cost to themselves. We care about the living elderly. We may not give much thought to the states of mind of the dead, given that there are no such states of mind and there is no current way to affect the states of mind of the dead when they were alive. But if we could do something that would have benefited them back in their lifetimes, doing so would be a natural extension of our current habit of caring for the living.

Having said that, if there were a significant cost to people living in year 600 of benefiting their ancestors, one can envisage them saying that if they did not act the ancestors would never be aware of the lost opportunity to be helped. But then, if intervention in the past became routine, people living further forward (say in year 800) might complain that they seemed to have get things wrong, say in year 799, making year 800 a bad year, and that they had not been helped by people living in year 1200. There might come to be an expectation that future generations, able to estimate the consequences of actions, should help. That expectation might be seen by those future generations as creating an obligation on them to help.

Could people living in year 600 coherently intervene?

The risk of incoherence

A common issue in discussions of backward time travel is that of coherence. If someone living in year 600 comes back and changes something in year 1, it seems likely that things in year 600 would have to change too because the intervening course of history would have been different. Moreover, all the history between years 1 and 600 would need modification.

There are extreme concerns over coherence, for example that someone coming back from year 600 might not have existed under the re-written history, which would at the least seem to make it difficult for them to return to year 600. Then there are apparently more modest concerns that things would have had to be a bit different in various years. 

Concerns of both sorts would however be of comparable severity in one sense. It is a fundamental principle that the world has, from any particular point of view, one history. At least, this is so subject to the isolation of some regions of spacetime from others on account of the finite speed of light and the expansion of space.

Call the history up to year 600 absent any intervention History-F (for first). An alternative, History-S (for second), would have to displace History-F from the point of intervention onward. Then what would have happened to History-F?

Multiple histories

One answer involves the idea of multiple histories. History-F continues to exist and play out, but at the point at which a visitor from year 600 to year 1 intervenes, History-S starts to run in parallel. Anybody after that point of intervention is either in History-F and can only look back over that history, or in History-S and can only look back over that history. The histories over which they can look back are the same at all times before the point of intervention.

Whatever merits this approach may have in the interpretation of quantum mechanics, it does seem a bit much at the level of human life. It could be correct, but it would raise further questions about which was the real history, where there would be space for all the alternatives, and so on. The counter-intuitive nature of an approach does not show that it is mistaken. We must put up with a great deal that is counter-intuitive in physics. But at the human level, it at least intuitively (and therefore perhaps circularly) seems that intuition should carry more weight, if not as a guide to what is correct then at least as an indicator of the manifest incorrectness of some ideas.

Such concerns would arise even if a split into History-F and History-S was followed by a merger well before year 600, so that the picture was like that of a main railway track and a track that branched off to one side, ran in parallel to the main track, and then rejoined it. There would be some points at which there would be two different histories running in parallel. Indeed, concerns over coherence would be more acute. Without a subsequent merger one might at least say that there was no instant of time at which two histories were running, because each history would have its own time. But with a  merger there would be much more pressure to accommodate a common timescale with two histories running at the same time, simply because one could count backward in time from a post-merger point. Moreover, there would be a question of which history should be considered to have preceded the merger. It would be a condition of merger that only one set of records and memories existed. So only one history would be written, and there would be no awareness of the branching and the merger. Nonetheless one could consider the unverifiable possibility of those events and the period of parallel histories having happened. This would challenge the intuitive idea that however obscure the causal pathways, the present was caused by a single past.

(We may note effects on motivation if there were such a merger, so that year 600 and years around it would be the same with or without the intervention. On the one hand the merger would make people living in year 600 more willing to intervene in the past, because it would make no difference to their lives. On the other hand they might say that there would be no benefit to them from intervening, so they might not bother. If the point of merger were before year 400, there would not even be any benefit to anyone whom anyone alive in year 600 had ever met.)

Now let us put all such concerns, with or without a merger, to one side. Just suppose that multiple histories would be created and that someone comes back from year 600 in History-F. They intervene and make a change to the benefit of people in some year later than year 1 (it need not be people living in year 600). That would make some people in History-S better off than they would have been had their history been the same as History-F. But it would leave unchanged the lives of everyone in History-F, including all of the intervener's friends back in the year 600 as it was when they set out on their journey (and as it would be on their return if there was a merger).

We could then ask what the benefit of the intervention would be. If it was to save people from some disaster, there would be a new set of people who did not experience the disaster but the old people, in History-F, would still experience it. So there would be extra people who would have a better life. If it would overall be a good life, we could see the point of the intervention. But then, would people living in year 600 bother to create better histories for people who would otherwise not have existed at all? There are connections both with the question we posed above as to whether one should care about people who no longer exist, and with the view that every positive life is worth creating which leads to Parfit's repugnant conclusion. (Intervention in the case we consider might however not be as repugnant as the breeding of as many people with even marginally positive lives as possible, because in History-S, and even in History-F, lives might be far better than marginally positive.)

One alternative which would remove many of the concerns we have raised would be to have the intervention wipe out History-F, so that it no longer occurred. This would however not be a panacea. It would go against our intuition that once a course of events has unrolled in time, the events cannot be undone. And interveners would have to leave a year 600 from History-F before returning to a year 600 from History-S. A question of the identity of the leavers with the returners would arise, although one might borrow from work on possible worlds and in particular David Lewis's counterpart theory. Alternatively one might claim that History-S was the only history there ever was, it being fixed from the start that the interveners would do their work. One might compare that idea with the conjecture of superdeterminism in quantum mechanics.

Changes at a safe distance

Another answer is offered by the possibility of changes made in year 1 by visitors from year 600 making no difference that would bother humanity before year 601. It is not that no change would be made anywhere. Information and its transmission have energy costs. There is no free information, and no free causation. But if the difference made, which would technically create a split in the universe, were parked somewhere out of sight, for example on a planet that orbited a distant star, the idea of a split history would not be so disturbing. Nobody would have to contemplate the existence of alternative human beings who had split off from them and who would have noticeably different lives, even if there were such splits in theory. The effects of the distant change would then work their way back to Earth at the appropriate time.

The challenge of possible incoherence would not go away, but at least it would not be so directly disturbing to our idea of how human lives play out in time. The effects of the change made by interveners who came back from year 600 would not enter into the human realm until year 601 or later, so there would be no split in human history.

The motive of interveners who came back from year 600 would also be clear. They would be making life better for their own society, including themselves once they returned to year 600. Indeed, the approach suggested here would not allow the interveners to arrange any benefit to people between years 1 and 600, on pain of reintroducing incoherence that would be visible in the human  realm.

On the other hand, if that were all that would be done, it would not be clear that there was much point in intervening in year 1. Why not just use, in year 600, the technology then available to change how things would be in year 601 or later years? It is plausible that if people living in year 600 had the technology for time travel and to effect changes far away from Earth, they would have the technology to effect local changes at reasonably short notice. And that would probably be safer, both because time travel might not work as intended and because the causal chain from some distant planet over a period of 600 years would be highly uncertain.

What might people living in year 900 do?

People living in year 900 would have more information than people living in year 600. They would know how the world turned out in years 601 to 899, and they might attribute some of the things that happened in that timespan to interventions made in years before 600 by people who lived in year 600. They might also have more information relevant to the choice of interventions that would influence years before 600, because they might have developed better methods of simulation of alternative realities.

It would therefore not be surprising if people living in year 900 intervened to over-write the work of people who lived in year 600, in addition to making changes in years from 601 to 899.

The layering of interventions on interventions in the period from year 1 to year 599 would not generate new problems of coherence, although the problems already identified would still arise, and in the slightly stronger form that there would be a need to handle three or more alternative histories instead of just two.

There would be a new concern for people who lived in year 600. They could have no confidence that their interventions would be final. But there would also be new reassurance for them. If their interventions were not in fact ideal, and if people who lived in year 900 cared enough, those people would intervene to make corrections.

The process could of course go on, with subsequent generations making further interventions. There would however be two possible restrictions, both of which might also apply to people who lived in year 600 who made the first set of interventions.

The first possible restriction is this. People at any time T might be reluctant to make changes directly within the lifetimes of people who were still alive at time T or who had been personally known to people still alive at time T. The thought here is that there might be a reluctance to disrupt the lives of people one knew or had known, in whatever sense of disruption was appropriate given how the problems of coherence and multiple histories were handled. And direct disruption at points within the lifetimes of those people might be considered to be significantly more offensive than disruptions at earlier points in time which would likewise change the lives of the people in question. Any such gradation of offence would probably be based on a feeling that people at the point of intervention would feel a sudden jolt. That would be likely to be a mistaken feeling, but unless the effects of intervention in the past became much better understood by year 600 than they are now, it would be hard to displace the feeling.

The second possible restriction is this. People might eventually lose interest in the welfare of people in the distant past, and would also think it safer to adjust their own welfare by making interventions in the more recent past so as to keep the causal chains shorter and their simulations less prone to serious error. So people living in year 600 might want to intervene as far back as year 1, but people living in year 900 might not go back further than year 300, people living in year 1200 might not go back further than year 600, and so on. This would limit the number of layers of intervention in any particular year that would build up.

The Prime Directive

In the science fiction stories of Star Trek, there is the Prime Directive. There does not seem to be a canonical text, but the gist is that Starfleet personnel shall not interfere in the normal development of any alien society, for example by introducing technology the society has not yet discovered for itself. Even intervention in order to save a starship or its crew is not allowed.

It is possible that people living in year 600, while they had overcome the technical challenges of time travel, would decide that the philosophical challenges were too great. Then they might adopt their version of the Prime Directive and leave us alone, even though we could hardly be called an alien society.