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|Theory Type=Definition
Authority Delegation (Overgaard-Loiselle-2016) (view source)
Revision as of 19:14, 3 March 2017
, 19:14, 3 March 2017no edit summary
{{Theory
|Theory Type=Definition
|Topic=Authority Delegation
|Formulation Text=Community A is said to be delegating authority over topic ''x'' to community B ''iff'' (1) community A accepts that community B is an expert on topic ''x'' and (2) community A will accept a theory on topic ''x'' if community B says so.
|Formulation File=Authority Delegation (Overgaard-Loiselle-2016).png
For a simple example, consider a relation of authority delegation between physicists and biologists. A community of physicists can be said to be delegating authority over the life sciences to a community of biologists, so long as the community of physicists ''both'' accepts that biologists are experts in the life sciences ''and'' will accept a theory on the life sciences if told so by the biologists.
|Resource=Overgaard and Loiselle (2016)
|Prehistory=At its base, the concept of authority delegation concerns negotiations among epistemic communities regarding what is known. Philosophers have long sought to understand knowers and knowledge. Early in the twentieth century, epistemologists concerned with philosophy of science tended to a logical positivist approach. In the mid-twentieth century, cognitive scientists conducted laboratory studies of human cognition. It was a hallmark of all these approaches that they focused on the individual knower in an ideal setting.
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 Knorr Cetina’s intensive ethnographic study of two scientific communities: those working in high energy physics (HEP) and those working in molecular biology.[[Cite ref::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.[[Cite ref::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, Cognition in the Wild.[[Cite ref::Hutchins (1995)]] Hutchins 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.”[[Cite ref::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. [[Cite ref::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.
John Searle also highlights communal cognitive processes in his attempt to unearth the logical structure of human society, to formulate a social ontology.[[Cite ref:: Searle (2006)]] Searle begins by noting that classical attempts to understand social reality made the critical error of taking language for granted. He argues that the social contract does not arrive after language; rather, he claims, “if you share a common language and are already involved in conversations in that common language, you already have a social contract.”[[Cite ref:: Searle (2006)|p. 14]] At the core of Searle’s analysis is “collective intentionality,” by which he means the capacity to engage in cooperative endeavours based on shared attitudes. Within scientonomy, it is clearly such collective intentionality that defines an epistemic community.
Based on collective intentionality, Searle suggests, society establishes institutional facts by assigning “status functions,” which confer authority on those who hold them. Thus, a licensed surgeon has the authority to perform surgery, a dollar bill has the authority to be exchanged for goods, and a corporation has the authority to perform certain person-like functions. Similarly, within science, those with demonstrated expertise in a particular area (art authentication or neutrino detection) are assigned a status function via collective intentionality by the mechanism of authority delegation.
Returning to a historical perspective, it is interesting to note the recent suggestion of a conceptual resonance between the current notion of distributed cognition and early twentieth century functional psychology and pragmatic philosophy.[[Cite ref::Osbeck and Nersessian (2014)]] In contrast to experimental psychology, and consonant with recent dynamic systems approaches, functional psychology attended to adaptive cognitive processes of the organism situated in its environment. Similarly, the focus within D-cog on defining the boundaries of the system resonate with the important role of perspective within pragmatism. Moreover, the functionalist emphasis on the interactional nature of meaning resonates with the pragmatist focus on the importance of value in problem solving.
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