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Authority Delegation (Overgaard-Loiselle-2016) (view source)
Revision as of 21:34, 3 March 2017
, 21:34, 3 March 2017no edit summary
In recent decades, philosophers and historians of science, along with a few anthropologists and cognitive scientists have adopted a different approach. Focusing on the practice of science, they studied groups of knowers in action – in their natural habitat – and began to pay attention to how knowers talk among themselves. This approach brought us closer to the questions underlying the concept of authority delegation. Where does knowledge reside? Who (or what) counts as a knower? How is knowledge transmitted? Such questions highlight the importance of the division of epistemic labour and therefore of communication within the community (testimony). It also leads some to suggest an epistemic role for artifacts and experiments, and to question the primacy of the individual knower.
An exemplar of the genre is [[Karin Knorr Cetina]]’s intensive ethnographic study of two scientific communities: those working in high energy physics (HEP) and those working in molecular biology.[[CiteRef::Knorr Cetina (1999)]] She argues that these two communities have distinctly different ways of knowing and of negotiating authority. Within HEP, she claims, expertise and authority are necessarily distributed among community members, simply because no one person can know everything required to perform the experiment. Knorr Cetina provocatively proposes that under such conditions, the individual ceases to be an epistemic subject. [[John Hardwig]] takes a similar position in his study of a paper reporting on the lifespan of charm particles.[[CiteRef::Hardwig (1991)]] No one author of the paper under discussion understands everything contained in the paper. This leaves us with a choice. Either a single author “knows” what is reported, but without understanding what he knows. Or we must only claim that the community knows; that is, we can accurately report that “we know that p” but not that “I know that p.”
The locus classicus of the notion of distributed cognition (D-cog) is anthropologist [[Edwin Hutchins]]’s 1995 book, [[Hutchins (1995)|''Cognition in the Wild'']].[[CiteRef::Hutchins (1995)]] Hutchin’s argues that we will achieve a better understanding of human cognition if we study it not in an artificial laboratory setting, but rather in its natural environment, which is “rich in organizing resources.”[[CiteRef::Hutchins (1995)|p. xiv]] He conducted an ethnographic study of a community of sailors on board a United States Navy ship engaged in the communal cognitive project of navigating the ship’s course into harbour. Focusing on the central importance of the division of labour, Hutchins describes the communal cognitive process as a computational process that entails “the propagation of representational state across a variety of media” in which both persons and tools play an essential role. [[CiteRef::Hutchins (1995)|p. xvi]] He argues that human cognitive powers are critically dependent on the artificially created environment in which they are exercised. From this he concludes that human cognition is not merely embedded in a complex sociocultural world, but is itself actually constituted as a cultural and social process.
