The Matter With Things. Chapter 13. Institutional science and truth.

McGilchrist opens this chapter with these two aptly chosen quotes which pinpoint the key arguments he is making in this chapter.

‘Most human institutions, by the purely technical and professional manner in which they come to be administered, end by becoming obstacles to the very purposes which their founders had in view.’ (William James, 1909, A Pluralistic Universe)

‘Specialization is for insects.’ (Robert Heinlein, 1973, Time Enough for Love)

This chapter is a bit different to others In The Matter With Things as it focusses less on hemisphere correlates and is not heavily reliant on the hemisphere hypothesis. Instead McGilchrist explores the question of whether we can trust science’s claims on truth and examines the limitations of the institution of science.

I recognised most of the key points McGilchrist makes in this chapter as I think would anyone who has a background in research and publication, especially but not solely if these are related to science. Many of the same issues arise in humanities disciplines. McGilchrist discusses the limitations of the institutions of science under four headings; Specialisation and its impact on original thinking; How reliable is scientific evidence? The problems of publication; and Peer review.

Specialisation and its impact on original thinking.

‘Science is a victim of its own extraordinary success’. (p.502) The explosion of scientific knowledge has led to increasing specialisation, such that scientists can only be an expert in a small area. When even a very good scientist talks about science, unless he is talking about his own area, he is taking it on trust/authority. We need to think about the worthiness of this trust/authority.

Specialisation drives scientific disciplines apart, leads to ‘narrowness, technicalisation and fragmentation, at the expense of breadth, humanity, and synthesis’ (p.508). McGilchrist argues that whilst of course we need specialists, we also need generalists. We need both the flies eye view and the birds eye view. He describes this as follows:

‘If perceiving shapes is how maths and science progress, as I believe it is, you will see those shapes only by rising above the hole where you are digging. The view in the valley floor is good, but if you never climb, you will not know that there are many other valleys, and mountain ranges nearby, which are not only beautiful in themselves, but help you see why good work needs to be done down in the valley floor at all.’ (p.504)

Specialisation also leads to specialised jargon.

‘Increasingly, the heavily acronymic jargon of research papers seems to me to present an almost impenetrable barrier to anyone other than the most highly specialised reader, and even then, if they are to get anything out of the exercise, they must have a huge capacity to tolerate boredom’. (p.507)

(McGilchrist’s writing often makes me smile 😊)

How reliable is scientific evidence?

In this section McGilchrist discusses the problems involved in interpreting data, taking mirror imaging (a way of knowing what is going on in the minds and brains of people) as an example. Brain activity scans are difficult to read accurately. The data require interpretation and therefore cannot be assumed to be objective or truthful. Every way of looking at the brain has its limitations. Whenever you are looking at a complex system, you can’t assume that the bit you are looking at is the crucial one. We should use as many ways as possible to look at the brain, and not rely solely on scanning.

In scientific research, for a result to count as important it must be replicable, reliable, and reproducible, but ‘A survey of 1,576 researchers across scientific disciplines published in Nature revealed that more than 70% of researchers had tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half had failed to reproduce their own experiment.’ (513)

A widely cited paper by John Ioannidis (2005) – ‘Why most published research findings are false’, concludes that most research is not adequately designed to prove what it claims to show, that ‘The hotter the scientific claim, the less likely the research findings are to be true’, and that ‘the greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field the less likely the research findings are to be true’.

There are now huge temptations (in terms of financial and reputational rewards) to commit anything from a minor misdemeanour to recognisable fraud (fabrication of results), and McGilchrist provides examples of these in this chapter.

McGilchrist also includes an Appendix (3) on the reliability of public health policy which makes for interesting reading. If you have cut salt out of your diet, you might want to think again, or read the Appendix!

The problems of publication

Most academics will recognise the exhortation to Publish or Perish!

Institutions put enormous pressure on their staff to publish, whether or not they have anything to say; quantity is more important than quality, as is publishing in high impact journals. This leads to corner cutting and inflation of claims. It also leads to a focus on writing short papers rather than books, which take a long time to write and require fallow periods. McGilchrist’s view is that this is ‘inimical to free thinking.

‘Scientific thinking gets crystallised too early, before it has had a chance to broaden and deepen; there is no longer a chance for ideas to evolve, to enter the necessary fallow period of unconscious gestation, without being prematurely forced into explicit form, and worse still in sliced form, so that what might have come to be a dawning new Gestalt is forever lost. And in the end, science is not about producing data so much as thinking, to which the acquisition of data can be only a prelude or addendum.’ (p. 516/517)

This pressure to publish can also lead to deliberate gaming of the system, where authors chase citations by working in ‘highly populated’ areas of science (even though ‘it is estimated that only 20% of cited papers have actually been read’, p.158), or even pay to have their work published in predatory open journals (See Beall’s list ) As soon as there is payment for publication, the whole system is corrupted.

And then, there are the fake papers. McGilchrist devotes Appendix 2 to some of these – papers such as those that are created by computer programs but nevertheless succeed in getting published, despite being, literally, gibberish.

So, we may ask, what happened to peer review?

Peer review

How effective is peer review? Richard Smith (Editor of the BMJ) wrote that far from being an objective, reliable and consistent process, peer review is ‘a subjective and, therefore, inconsistent process ….. something of a lottery’. (Smith, 2006, ‘Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals). As McGilchrist states:

‘Bias is intrinsic to human life. We just waste a lot of time and money pretending we’re avoiding it, and then kid ourselves that the outcome was ‘objective’ – a more dangerous position, because it introduces complacency and is a much more difficult thing to fight, precisely because of its appearance of objectivity’. (p.529)

Peer review is a laborious progress which takes up researchers’ time, which is given for free, and so takes them away from their own work. Interestingly, McGilchrist tells us that until the 1930s/40s peer review was never part of the publication process. Papers were reviewed by the editorial committee. Einstein, for example, refused to subject his work to peer review – only one of his 310 publications underwent peer review. Presumably once was enough to convince him of the flaws in the process.

There is also evidence that peer review can be prone to bias against innovation and radical new ideas, such that no-one wants to publish a paper that will rock the boat. Those who step out of line pay a huge price. In addition, reviewers have been shown to regularly fail to spot major errors in research, such that the process is obviously open to fraud.

The bottom line is that science is not exempt from human fallibility.

McGilchrist ends this chapter by discussing the need for a new paradigm, one that recognises that the essence of good science is originality and original thinking takes time. Science cannot avoid operating under the existing paradigm, ‘because, without such a paradigm, its findings could not cohere’ (p.536) but working within the prevailing paradigm also ‘militates against those great insights that change the direction of scientific history, despite this being widely believed to be precisely what science is about.’ (p.536)

McGilchrist believes that contemporary science is not scientific enough in that it is not willing to be aware of its limitations. On the concluding page of this chapter, McGilchrist defends science in the following terms:

‘Science is, or should be, a source of wonder that opens out our understanding of the world and gives us one of the touchstones on the path towards truth. Just because science cannot answer all our questions does not mean that it is not the very best way to answer some of them, and a helpful contributor to answering many more. And that there is corrupt practice in science does not make it different from any other human enterprise.’ (p.544)

For discussion of this chapter between Iain McGilchrist and Alex Gomez-Marin, see

References

McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter With Things. Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press.

The Matter With Things. Chapter 11. Science’s Claims on Truth

Another interesting and enjoyable chapter in this very long book, which I am not even halfway through, despite having bought it very shortly after publication in November 2021. At this rate it will be 2024 before I finish it!

As mentioned before, the book is in three parts. The first part is made up of nine chapters and a coda, in which McGilchrist writes about The Hemispheres and the Means to Truth. I have yet to finish reading the last two chapters of Part 1, but for notes on Chapters 2 to 7, see https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/the-matter-with-things-2/

In Part 2 McGilchrist writes about The Hemispheres and the Paths to Truth. In the first chapter, Chapter 10, he explores the question What is Truth? . Chapter 11, Science’s Claims on Truth is the second chapter. So far, I am enjoying Part 2 more that Part 1.

The main thrust of this chapter is that in the West, recent history has seen a move away from religion to science, and more particularly, to scientism (the belief that science will one day answer all our questions), in our search for truth. But, says McGilchrist, there are intrinsic limits to science, which tends to make exaggerated claims, use models that distort, and succumb to institutional pressures. Science has come to be thought of as the only path to truth and a discussion of its limits is often not welcome. Whilst McGilchrist is emphatic about the value of science, his concern is that it can’t answer the big questions; it can’t, for example, tell us what it means to be in love. Science finds it hard to deal with all that is experiential, but most of what we value in life is experiential, not observable, or measurable. The bigger the human meaning, the less science can offer. What we are asking science to do is to give us information/data but can that be converted into an understanding and what part does science play in the achievement of an understanding? Science can answer questions where explicit, mechanistic explanations are required, but not where understanding is required.

Explanation, metaphor, and models

Science cannot escape using models and metaphors because they are the basis of all understanding, so science depends on metaphors derived from concrete experience. All understanding depends on metaphor. Science uses models. Models are simply extended metaphors. The choice of the model is critical because:

‘We never just see something without seeing it as a something. We may think that our theories are shaped by observations, but it is as true that our observations are shaped by theories. This means that we can be blind to some very obvious things in our immediate environment. We don’t look where we don’t expect to see, so that our expectations come to govern what we can see.’ p.410

In the past the dominant model was a tree, a river, a family – something in the natural world. These days the dominant model is the machine (as favoured by the left hemisphere). The machine model is science’s defining paradigm, but it is a form of metaphor, and not all metaphors are good metaphors. All models are only a partial fit. A model determines not only what we do see but also what we don’t see, and we affect the model. No one model will ever be the perfect fit. We need to try and test different models, even though we may ultimately need to jettison them. Ideas of 100% truth cannot be sustained. In science certain things will be neglected. We may think that only things that are quantifiable are real (a left hemisphere perspective), but we have to rethink objectivity.

Objectivity

We cannot do without objectivity, but it is easily misinterpreted. To quote McGilchrist:

‘Science provides us with that objective knowledge by taking ‘us’ out of the picture, so removing subjective distortion from its objective presentation of how, in itself, the world actually is.’ p.413

We have already seen, however, that this aspiration to take ‘us’ out of the picture is compromised by the fact that science can’t get going without metaphor and metaphor is something from which ‘we’ cannot possibly be divorced.’ p.413

‘Objectivity is always someone’s position, situated somewhere and making some assumptions.’ p.414

Objectivity should be able to inhabit a lot of different perspectives – we ought to try to see from different perspectives.

Between us and the world there is always the barrier of our brains, and since we have two hemispheres in our brains each with their own view of the world, there are at least two views that science must take into account.

All methods rely on our judgements and values, even though these can’t be measured. Science frequently passes over what can’t be measured. It can’t cope with things that are imprecise or can’t be generalised. When considering objectivity, we need a more nuanced interpretation which recognises that existing answers are inadequate and provisional; there are always alternative answers. There are no whole truths, only half-truths, and context is of critical importance. Science tends to take things out of context. In trying to make science robust, we veer unstably between black and white positions, but we shouldn’t make statements that are too great or absolute. Instead of trying to make science robust, we should make it anti-fragile.

Hidden Assumptions

There are many assumptions in science. Science assumes that everything is understandable in physical terms, but science’s explanations both reveal and conceal. Sometimes assumptions are justified, but we must acknowledge them. Science can do very, very much, but not everything. As mentioned above, it cannot answer the very big questions, about values, meaning and purpose in life. Science is far from having all the answers – it is alive, provisional, and uncertain.

On p.420 McGilchrist quotes Max Planck as saying – ‘we have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.’

The scientific method

The scientific method is a myth. A belief in the notion of scientific objectivity, has led to a loss of imagination in science, but science requires imagination to come up with fruitful hypotheses. Chance and serendipity, intuition and inspiration play important roles in science.

Great discoveries are often made through images and metaphors rather than through chains of logic. Big insights are not made by following a logical linear sequence of steps, but by things like pattern recognition. Results can come in a flash of intuition and often precede arguments. Good hypotheses always ‘go beyond’ the immediate facts.

‘….. this does not discredit science in any way: it shows, instead, what an exciting and humbling business science is. We collaborate with nature, and with fortune, pay attention and learn from her. We neither withdraw the human element, as the myth of the scientific method implies, nor force nature to our preconceived ends.’ p.425

‘…. Just because what we rightly take to be scientific truths are not ‘objective’ in the sense that nothing human, contingent, and fallible enters into them, this does not mean they have no legitimate claim to be called true. … truth is never objective ….. All knowledge whatsoever is contextual and contingent. p. 429

Scientists must have faith, and science must be aware of its own limits.

For a discussion about this chapter between Iain McGilchrist and Alex Gomez-Marin, see:

References

McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter With Things. Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press.

The Matter With Things. Chapter 10. What is Truth?

‘I believe that, despite our always contributing to the reality we experience, there is something apart from ourselves to which we can be true – that reality, in other words, is not purely made up by the brain. There is a relationship there – something to be true to.’ (McGilchrist, 2021, p.379)

In the first chapter in Part 2 of The Matter With Things, Iain McGilchrist explores the relationship between the hemispheres and paths to truth , which he sees as science, reason, intuition, and imagination

But what is truth ? We will never fully know and there is no one overarching definition.

McGilchrist claims that each hemisphere has a different approach to truth, because each hemisphere experiences the world differently, but these approaches are not equally valid. The right hemisphere has an intuitive embodied awareness of the world – the world ‘presences to us through the right hemisphere’; the left hemisphere experiences the world as a mental re-presentation from which we are quite separate.

For the left hemisphere truth is a ‘thing’, an element there for us to find, something outside of ourselves that represents correctness. Here is how McGilchrist describes this approach to truth:

‘Truth, this thing, would be conceived of as existing in the realm of subjectivity (in the mind) as a suitable representation of something conceived of as existing in the realm of objectivity (outside the mind). From this point of view, the way to approach truth would be to start with a secure set of facts, and then work upwards by rules of logic, to a series of other facts, putting one secure item on top of another, to build the pyramid of (represented) truth. In principle this truth would be impersonal, something that could be transmitted, as it stands, directly to another; timeless and unchanging – and independent therefore of context; ultimately single, in that if the path is rigorously followed, everyone should reach the same conclusion; and ultimately perfect, precise and certain – theoretically attainable goals that are not yet achieved, so the argument would go, only because we have not yet concluded our deliberations.’ (p.382)

The other idea about truth, the right hemisphere’s perspective, is that of unconcealing, clearing away misconceptions, and opening a space to make contact with the truth. From this perspective truth is a process, not a thing achieved by confirming one element to find the next element. From this perspective truth has a relational aspect and is an encounter with reality. From this perspective, truth is a process that is continuous and alive, intrinsically incomplete, and uncertain.

The right hemisphere, ‘…. Instead of seeing a subjective realm and an objective realm which should as near as possible mirror one another, [sees] a constant reverberation between two (never completely distinct) elements within our consciousness – thoughts and experiences – whereby they ‘answered’ or co-responded to, one another this ever better accord, or attunement, would be the evolving truth’ (p.384)

Truth is neither wholly independent of us, nor wholly made up by us; truth is not dissociated from the speaker, but in ‘the betweenness’. But betweenness is not the same as compromise. We need both opposed positions, both the left hemisphere and right hemisphere ‘s perspectives; they are mutually necessary but not equally veridical. The left hemisphere’s vision is limited; the right hemisphere’s is more capable of disclosing reality.

The test of truth is whether or not we are caught out by experience, whether it corresponds with the totality of our experience. Truth does not exist by analysing elements that are in relationship, but in the whole relationship; but the fact that we don’t know the whole of truth, doesn’t mean that the facts that we do know aren’t true; we can only establish some things as truer than others.

Truth is not a proposition but a disposition and is related to trust. We live in a post-truth era, an era in which trust, and truth are suffering from an epidemic of decay. McGilchrist believes that the basis for our decision making is the two different perspectives of the hemispheres. In Part 2 of The Matter With Things he looks at the strengths and limitations of the paths to truth through these different perspectives, starting in this first Chapter 10 with the question What is Truth. McGilchrist feels that it is a disaster that science and philosophy have separated from one another, and in these chapters tries to bring them together.

Part II opens with a quote from Alfred North Whitehead (1938, 87)

A philosophic outlook is the very foundation of thought and of life. The sort of ideas we attend to, and the sort of ideas which we push into the negligible background, govern our hopes, our fears, our control of behaviour. As we think, we live. This is why the assemblage of philosophic ideas is more than a specialist study. It moulds our type of civilisation.

There is more in this chapter than I have written about here. See for example McGilchrist’s discussion of presencing versus re-presentation (p.380), correspondence and coherence theories of truth (p.387) and the subject-object divide (p.393). Also see his discussion about this chapter with Alex Gomez-Marin.

References

McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter With Things. Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press.

Whitehead, A.N.  (1938). Modes of Thought, New York: Macmillan Company. Reprinted New York: The Free Press, 1968.

Mackness, J. (2016). Where Can We Go for Truth? (Blog post)

Mackness, J.  (2018) Truth in a Post-Truth Age. (Blog post)

What are Values? A talk by Iain McGilchrist

This talk was given by Iain McGilchrist at the Field&Field conference in the Cotswolds, UK, October 2021. It relates to Chapter 26 of his new book, The Matter with Things. Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World.

I have now received my copies of the two volumes of The Matter with Things (TMWT) and can see that there is very much more content included in Chapter 26, than was covered in the talk I listened to. I have included here elements of the talk that I found interesting, with reference, in some places, to the text of The Matter with Things for further clarity. Any errors in the content of this post are mine, and should not be attributed to Iain McGilchrist.

In this talk Iain discussed values as essential elements in the cosmos, in particular truth, goodness, and beauty, which, he said, are not simply painted onto the surface of life, but are ontological primitives. The cosmos is beautiful whether we are there or not to appreciate it. Life brings into being the capacity for value. As Thomas Nagel said, ‘Value is not just an accidental side effect of life; rather, there is life because life is a necessary condition of value.” (Nagel, 2012, 122-123). Values evoke a response in us and give meaning to life. Valuing depends on a relationship.

Truth

Science has one overarching value and that is truth, but science cannot help us understand the nature of values and may indeed help us misunderstand them. Science regards values as secondary phenomena, and when it does turn its gaze on values, regards them in a utilitarian way.

‘Truth carries within it the whole purpose of science, and gives meaning to its activities. However, science will not admit anything that is not empirically verifiable – yet the value of truth, like all value, is incapable of empirical proof.” (TMWT p.1123).

Truth is not the same as utility. “Values are not just validated by the outcomes they achieve; they are inseparable from our deepest emotional experience.” (TMAHE, p.1125). Useful assumptions are not always truthful and true assumptions are not always of practical use. Truth is not a function of another value. Truth is an act, a process; one of trust in or faithfulness towards, whatever is; an unrevealing of something. This process leads to a foundational web of interconnectedness. Not all values, e.g., utilitarian values, are fundamental in this way.

Since the whole of Part 2 of Volume 1 of The Matter with Things is devoted to the question of what is truth, and what are the paths to truth, Iain did not spend a lot of time on truth as a value in this talk. However, I have heard Iain give a complete talk on just truth in the past. Here is a link to the related blog post: Exploring the Divided Brain – Where can we go for truth?

Goodness

Like truth, goodness is not an add-on to life, but part of the nature of consciousness. In our culture the dominant approach to ethics is utilitarianism. This is the governing value of the left hemisphere which is focussed on outcomes rather than the essential interiority of morality, but the evidence from brain studies shows that the right hemisphere is more important for morality. Utilitarianism is a characteristic of brain damage, as seen in psychopaths. Morality is intrinsic in our cosmos and it is our duty to respond to it. Moral values and judgements can’t be explained in a calculating way; they rely on intuition and everything we know from experience.

Thought experiments are often used to illustrate the moral dilemmas we face. Should a doctor sacrifice the life of one patient with healthy organs, so that five other patients can receive organ transplants and live? Thought experiments like these seem to presume that we are machines, but ‘Normal judgements of morality require full interhemispheric integration of information critically supported by the right temporal parietal junction and right frontal processes. In moral decision-making, then, the right hemisphere is more important: it takes into account intention and context.’ (TMWT, p.1133). Moral and immoral behaviour are deeply bound with the right and left hemispheres respectively.

Goodness and morality are irreducible to utility. ‘There comes a point where one has to say ‘certain things are wrong: if you can’t see it for yourself, I can’t help you.’ (TMWT, p.1137)

Morality is a nexus, not a chain; it is a disposition towards the world. Utilitarianism overvalues individualistic pleasure and determination, but “A pleasure-filled life is not the same as a happy life, and a happy life is not the same as a meaningful life.’ (TMWT, p.1139). We’re not just here to enjoy ourselves. We need to balance hedonic pleasure with eudaimonic pleasure, taking into account the happiness of others. We are not squalid, selfish apes. When we act intuitively, we are often gracious and generous. Prosocial behaviours tend to result from intuitive behaviour. Evolution involves both competition and cooperation; collaboration is the best survival tactic. The prevailing view of science is cynical, i.e., that we are blind, selfish mechanisms, that altruism must be covert selfishness, and that we maximise our self-interest. But cynicism has been shown to be related to lower intelligence. ‘Cynicism appears to be a coping strategy by the cognitively less gifted, to avoid being duped by others’. (TMWT, p.1143)

Neither a utilitarian, nor a deontological approach to ethics solves the problem of how to understand moral principles. Instead, Iain suggests virtue ethics as an approach that is not so much concerned with outcomes as with an attitude founded on the ontology of the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere acknowledges moral ambiguity and that goodness is in some form constitutive of the cosmos.

Beauty

A utilitarian view of beauty is to see it as a means of ensuring sexual attraction, necessary for evolution, but when we start making things, we want them to be beautiful, not just utilitarian. Darwin recognised that how a sense of beauty is first acquired is not known, even if it is used afterwards for sexual attraction. Our sense of beauty, e.g., the beauty of nature or of the landscape serves no utility. Beauty is not a luxury or superfluity as many scientists think. People’s wellbeing depends on being surrounded by beauty. Schools should be beautiful. Hospitals too.

Like truth and goodness, beauty is foundational. It is one of the things life is for. It is not a human invention. It is not a luxury that we can afford only once our basic survival needs have been met. Appreciation of beauty is a primal instinct.

Beauty doesn’t have designs on us; Its purposiveness is without purpose. As Emily Dickinson wrote:

Beauty – be not cause – It is –

Chase it, and it ceases –

Chase it not, and it abides

Beauty is more universal than we have been taught to think. It is not purely culturally determined. There is enormous commonality across cultures in what people find beautiful. Watch, in this video (06.35), how an Amazonian tribe respond to the beauty of Maria Callas singing Bellini’s ‘Casta Diva’, despite knowing nothing about her, or her music.

The essence of beauty is harmony, the appreciation of the relations between things. This is a strength of the right hemisphere. A sense of beauty aligns with tolerance of ambiguity, appreciation of asymmetry, and understanding the implicit and embodiment in nature. These are all characteristics of the right hemisphere which appreciates beauty through a broad, open, receptive gaze. The left hemisphere’s gaze is sharply defined and grasping. This is similar to how the Navajos have two ways of looking at the landscape; with hard and soft eyes. Soft eyes are used for taking in beauty. The left hemisphere fails to make sense of beauty.

Iain ends Chapter 26 of The Matter with Things, with the following two sentences:

‘Beauty, morality and truth have been downgraded, dismissed or denied. If you want to see the consequences, you need do no more than look around you.’ (TMWT, p.1165)

References

Iain McGilchrist (2010). The Master and His Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

Iain McGilchrist (2021). The Matter with Things. Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the Western World. Perspectiva Press

Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. New York: Oxford University Press.

Source of Image: Libquotes

Truth and Politics: Hannah Arendt

Between Past and Future: Truth and Politics

In this chapter/essay Arendt explores questions around truth, facts and lies and their relation to politics, politicians and truth-tellers. Her thinking is as relevant today as it was when she originally published the essay in the New Yorker in 1967. I will quote her footnote, on the first page of the chapter in full, as it explains where she is coming from in this writing.

“This essay was caused by the so-called controversy after the publication of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” [for which Arendt received a lot of flak – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem]. Its aim is to clarify two different, though interconnected, issues of which I had not been aware before and whose importance seemed to transcend the occasion. The first concerns the question of whether it is always legitimate to tell the truth – did I believe without qualification in “Fiat veritas, et pereat mundus?” The second arose through the amazing amount of lies used in the “controversy” – lies about what I had written, on the one hand, and about the facts I had reported, on the other. The following reflections try to come to grips with both issues. They may also serve as an example of what happens to a highly topical subject when it is drawn into that gap between past and future which is perhaps the proper habitat of all reflections.” (p.223)

It’s extraordinary to think that this was written in pre-internet and pre social media days!

Arendt recognises that there are different kinds of truths. In this essay she focusses on factual truth (so not logical, historical, political, philosophical, mathematical, rational or other kinds of truths), and the distinction between facts and lies. How do we experience factual truth as unique individuals and how do we share these experiences with the world? What do we do when someone attacks our world, our perception of reality? How do we form opinions and strengthen our own opinions, to then take them into the public realm?

In the modern era factual truth is under attack; lying is eroding the common fabric of society, but truth and politics have always been on bad terms with each other. Since the beginning of political theory, truthfulness has never been regarded as a political virtue, and lying has always been regarded as a necessary, justifiable and reliable tool in the political realm.

Why do we value lying in the political realm and what does this mean for the nature of political truth?

Truth telling is a dangerous position and truth-tellers, such as Socrates, who died for telling factual truths, stand alone outside the public and political realm, and the realm of human affairs (p.255). Arendt distinguishes between philosophers, who pursue truth by engaging in dialogue, and politicians, who use rhetoric and the art of persuasion. She tries to unpick and understand the differences between truth, fact and opinion.

“Philosophical truth, when it enters the market place, [the market place of ideas] changes its nature and becomes opinion, because [of] a shifting not merely from one kind of reasoning to another, but from one way of human existence to another …”

….“Factual truth, on the contrary, is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstance in which many are involved; it is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony; it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about, even it if occurs in the domain of privacy. It is political by nature …” (p.233)

Factual truth is fragile because the world of human affairs is always changing. Facts are the outcome of us living together. When power and politics chip away at facts with lies, this destroys the world that we share. Arendt is concerned that factual truth is not going to survive the onslaught of power in the modern era. 

Factual truth is always a question of plurality and is political by nature. To share our experiences of the world we need a common language, a common understanding of the facts. The world is something we make together. Plurality is important in the formation of political opinion.

“Facts and opinions, though they must be kept apart, are not antagonistic to each other; they belong to the same realm. Facts inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth. Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.” (p.234)

The more people we talk to, the stronger our reasoning becomes. We have to enter into the public realm, make public use of our private opinions, and encounter other opinions that are not our own, but expressing one’s political opinion has become a dangerous business. We are met with increasing hostility and less dialogue.

Arendt then moves on to ask the question, How do we form political opinions?

“Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them….. The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion.” (p.237)

Forming political opinions is an intellectual thinking exercise about the relationship between truth and politics. We don’t blindly adopt viewpoints and it’s not just a question of empathy. We have to maintain and protect the integrity of our thinking and our internal thought partner. The quality of our opinions depends on the degree of their impartiality. We have to be able to discern for ourselves, different arguments and opinions.

“In matters of opinion, but not in matters of truth, our thinking is truly discursive, running, as it were, from place to place, from one part of the world to another, through all kinds of conflicting views, until it finally ascends from these particularities to some impartial generality.” (p.238)

The opposite of factual truth in modernity is the lie, the deliberate falsehood. The modern lie is not just about hiding the truth or deceiving others, but is about mass manipulation of fact and the remaking of the world. Consistent lying pulls the ground out from under our feet and provides no other ground on which to stand (p.253). We lose the capacity for thought; our ability to judge is under attack. Truth is always powerless when it comes to clash with power, but although power can destroy truth, it can never actually replace truth. You cannot eradicate truth. Truths reassert themselves.

“Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.”  (p.259)

In the modern era there is the possibility that politics can eradicate truth, but truth is an existential pre-condition for human life. Human life is not possible without truth. Mass manipulation of facts destroys truth and reality wobbles.

“The experience of a trembling wobbling motion of everything we rely on for our sense of direction and reality is among the most common and most vivid experiences of men under totalitarian rule.” (p.253)

How can we prevent this and preserve a non-political realm; preserve an outside of politics affirmation of truth telling, an affirmation of spaces in which truth will be told?  There are four possibilities:

• The solitude of the philosopher
• The impartiality of the historian or the judge
• The isolation of the scientist
• The independence of the fact-finder, witness, reporter

What holds up the world is not politics, but the humanities. We need storytellers and artists to teach us how to reconcile with reality. Truth has lost the war with opinion, but the war is still raging with factual truth. It is now easy to deny fact, and when facts are unreliable we lose faith in the world. You are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts. Facts need agreement and consent. Factual truth comes into existence when men get together.

In the last section of this chapter, Arendt writes:

“To look upon politics from the perspective of truth, as I have done here, means to take one’s stand outside the political realm. This standpoint is the standpoint of the truthteller, who forfeits his position – and, with it, the validity of what he has to say – if he tries to interfere directly in human affairs and to speak the language of persuasion or of violence.” (p.255)

I am aware that I have used a lot of quotes from Arendt’s book in writing about this chapter. For me her words are powerful and so relevant to the political situation which we experience today, that they are best quoted in full.

References

To write this post I have drawn heavily on the following sources. The freely accessible video presentations and discussions produced by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, have been very helpful, thanks to Roger Berkowitz  and Samantha Hill.

• Arendt, H. (1961). Between Past and Future. Penguin Classics

• Introduction to “Truth and Politics” by Hannah Arendt. https://youtu.be/eUs2TP7WPI4 (32.34 mins)

• Reading Group Discussion. “The Crisis in Education” by Hannah Arendt. https://youtu.be/iPmz1oz2XEc (1.34.51 mins)

Source of image: https://iai.tv/articles/hannah-arendt-on-why-its-important-to-break-your-bubble-auid-1180

The Value and Limits of Reason

In this post I will share the notes I made when hearing Iain McGilchrist speak about the value and limits of reason on 4-day Field & Field course I recently attended in the Cotswolds, UK. For a background to the content of this post, see my previous two posts relating to this course and the page on this blog devoted to The Divided Brain and Iain McGilchrist’s work.

• Coming to Your Senses with Iain McGilchrist
• The Value and Limits of Science
• The Divided Brain (page of blog posts written over the past four years or so)

Iain McGilchrist described this talk as ‘a series of soundbites’ and I expect this is how these notes will come across. My note-taking can be lacking in both accuracy and coherence, and as such, I stress that these notes are mine. They are a record of what I heard, what I noted as significant for me (and by no means everything that Iain said), and necessarily reflect how I interpreted what I heard. I want to stress that any errors are very definitely mine. Please feel free to challenge or correct me in the comments.

A bit of background

Iain has written about reason before. There is a section in The Master and His Emissary devoted to a discussion of ‘Reason Versus Rationality’ (p.64), where Iain argues that there are different kinds of reasoning and that although linear, sequential argument is better executed by the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is better at deduction and less explicit reasoning (p.65).

Rationality involves a causative linear way of thinking in a limited environment. Reason seeks a global, holistic understanding which only makes sense in the round.

This discussion about reason and rationality in Iain’s book invited a response from author Kenan Malik, who in 2013, wrote an article critical of Iain’s arguments – to which Iain wrote a robust response. This discussion/debate was not referred to on the Field & Field course, but it is probably worth reiterating before sharing my notes that at the beginning of The Master and His Emissary, Iain makes it clear that he is not demonising reason.

I hope, however, it will be obvious from what I say that I hold absolutely no brief for those who wish to abandon reason or traduce language. The exact opposite is the case. Both are seriously under threat in our age, though I believe from diametrically opposed factions. (The Master and His Emissary, p.6)

Equally this book has nothing to offer those who would undermine reason, which, along with imagination, is the most precious thing we owe to the working together of the two hemispheres. My quarrel is only with an excessive and misplaced rationalism which has never been subjected to the judgment of reason, and is in conflict with it. (The Master and His Emissary, p.7)

And a quote from Blaise Pascal

There are two equally dangerous extremes – to shut reason out, and not to let nothing in. 

The Value of Reason (NB these are my notes, based on my hearing, and my interpretation)

As Whitehead and Russell pointed out it is important to think logically. A widespread problem is that science fails to question its methods, so reason keeps us from complacency, but reason should also question its own methods.

Reason is a consistency tool, but it has to start from something. It starts from axioms (axiom comes from the Greek word axia, meaning values). Reason can’t make people see what you can see; it can only lead them closer.

As David Hume famously wrote in his A Treatise of Human Nature (p.415),  “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” So reason is a tool which we should control. It is our servant, but not our master. McGilchrist writes on p. 203 of The Master and His Emissary:

He [Hume] did not mean that unbridled passion should rule our judgments, but that the rational workings of the left hemisphere (though he could not have known that that was what they were) should be subject to the intuitive wisdom of the right hemisphere (though he equally could not have recognised it as such).

Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier have a different take on the value of reason, which they propose in their ‘argumentative theory’ is not principally to improve knowledge and make better decisions, but rather to win arguments. They believe that we do not seek truth, but rather arguments that support our views; we are, after all, competitive animals. For a more in depth discussion of this, see, for example, this post ‘Is reasoning built for winning arguments, rather than finding truth?’

Some Problems with Reason (NB these are my notes, based on my hearing, and my interpretation)

G K Chesterton is quoted as saying: “A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason”. Make of that what you will. My interpretation is that reason alone is not helpful. The full quote might help:

“If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

In this section of his talk, Iain alerted us to some of the potential limits of reason.

• Reason prioritises the system over reference to reality, which can lead to a false premise, e.g. as in the porcupine is a monkey syllogism (see p. 192 in The Master and His Emissary for further discussion of this).

1. 1. 1. Major premise: all monkeys climb trees;
      2. Minor premise: the porcupine is a monkey;
      3. Implied conclusion: the porcupine climbs trees.

• We judge many things on the basis of experience rather than reason, e.g. love. There are an infinity of such experiences that surpass reason.

• Reason does not get to unknown, unknowns.  Donald Rumsfeld is often quoted as saying:

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

• There are an infinite number of truths that we can’t get to with reason (I recently wrote a post that included reference to Julian Baggini’s book – A Short History of Truth, and I have heard Iain talk about truth before). Some things do come with linearity, e.g. rational people formulate goals and take the most direct route to achieving these goals, but some things can’t be pursued or willed. Happiness, for example, is a by-product that comes from forgetting yourself; it can’t be pursued. Sleep and appetite can’t be willed. Wisdom, humility, courage, love, faith, admiration, sympathy (and more) similarly can’t be linearly pursued. Understanding cannot be given, imposed or transmitted.

• Similarly, morals cannot be derived from reason alone. Moral values are not something we can work out rationally. They are not utilitarian. They come from within (see the work of David Hume and p.86 of The Master and His Emissary). Morals are irreducible aspects of the phenomenal world.

• Reason involves distancing ourselves from the natural world, but taking things out of context (abstraction) can be a mistake. John Dewey warned against the neglect of context. “I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context”  (see The Philosophical Fallacy – and p.144 The Mater and His Emissary). Things change as context changes. The response to this is often to categorise things on the basis of a single feature, but we need overlapping contexts. It is the left hemisphere that categorises things on the basis of a single feature. The right hemisphere looks for general similarity. For the left hemisphere there is a need to focus attention narrowly and be precise, but serendipity plays a big part in determining what can be predicted, and the more precise and reduced something is, e.g. language, the less useful it is. Being too precise means losing the overall picture, just as a map has precision, but this does not reflect life and all that we cannot quantify, such as beauty, anger, hunger. Some values cannot be measured and being precise can be less helpful than being imprecise, and even entirely irrelevant.

As Edmund Burke said: ‘It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact’ and ‘A clear idea is another name for a little idea’. Similarly from Rabindranath Tagore:

• Finally, there is always a truth in the opposite of something. The left and right hemispheres both contribute to logic, but the right hemisphere makes a better contribution to deduction and the left hemisphere to induction. The right hemisphere is better at testing reality, but the left hemisphere gets swayed by what it already knows.

Iain ended this talk with reference to The Monty Hall Paradox to illustrate the point that the correct choice in this game is so counterintuitive it can seem absurd, but is nevertheless demonstrably true. The Prisoner’s Dilemma presents a similar paradox (see p.145 The Master and His Emissary). I took this to mean that adopting a right hemisphere perspective on the world and recognising that reason can have both value and limitations can seem counterintuitive.

Reference

McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and His Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

 

Truth in Education

To help us prepare for the Rebel Wisdom Summit on May 12^th , in London, participants have been sent links to a number of videos which feature the keynote speakers, Iain McGilchrist, Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying and Jordan Greenhall (see my last blog post for links to the videos). I have been particularly interested in the videos in which Heather Heying appears. Heying is an evolutionary biologist who, having been forced, in 2017, to leave her tenured position at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, together with her husband Bret Weinstein, now describes herself as a Professor in Exile.

Although I was not aware of Heather Heying’s story before watching the Rebel Wisdom videos, the idea that free speech is being curtailed in the name of political correctness and social justice, is not new to me. Mariana Funes and I discussed this in relation to the work of Jonathan Haidt in our 2018 paper When Inclusion Excludes: a counter narrative of open online education.  I have some personal experience of the negative consequences of ‘going against the grain’, so I was interested in what Heather Heying had to say in the video in which she and Bret Weinstein discuss ‘Having a Real Conversation” with David Fuller, a founder of Rebel Wisdom. According to some news reports, Bret Weinstein asked students for a ‘dialectic‘, a ‘real conversation’, rather than a ‘debate’ about the issues that led to his leaving Evergreen State College with his wife Heather Heying, but this did not transpire.

A lot of what Heying and Weinstein say in the ‘real conversation’ video is not new to me. My experience is that good teachers know that they have to ‘set the stage’ when starting a new course or a new term with school children, and that it is worth spending some time at the beginning of the course or term mutually agreeing how the class will work. Good teachers also respect their students and know that they must ensure that everyone has a voice and that alternative perspectives are respected. I am not an evolutionary biologist, so I cannot say whether the potential for conflict in evolutionary biology classes and similar subjects is greater than in, say, something like physics or mathematics, but I suspect that it may be, especially in America where there are schools teaching creationism.

At about six minutes into the video, Heather talks about freeing students from the yoke of authority and learning to think for themselves. At this point she also says, If we’re trying to figure out what is true, science is the best tool we have,  and If we find that we can’t do science on what you’ve said, what can we do to what you’ve said to make it falsifiable. The longer we can’t falsify it, the more likely it is that it is true. So she takes a scientific approach to truth.

I specifically noticed this because I have just finished reading Julian Baggini’s book, A short History of Truth. Consolations for a Post-Truth World. On the back cover of this book is written:

How did we find ourselves in a  “post-truth” world of “alternative facts”? And can we get out of it? A Short History of Truth sets out to answer these questions by looking at the complex history of truth. Renowned and respected philosopher Julian Baggini has identified ten types of supposed truth, and explains how easily each can become the midwife of falsehood’.

Baggini discusses empirical, authoritative and reasoned truths, the idea that truth should be grounded in evidence, that truths can be known and that reason can lead to truth. All these seem to be the kinds of truths that Heather Heying focuses on as the basis for real conversations with her students.

But there are also, according the Baggini, eternal truths, esoteric truths, creative truths, relative truths, powerful truths,  moral truths and holistic truth. These seem to emphasise different aspects to how we recognise truth than the empirical truth focussed on by Heying. This made me wonder whether the idea that there can be many types of truth was discussed by her students and how this idea might influence the outcome of a ‘real conversation’.

According to Iain McGilchrist we cannot go to science for truth. As I wrote in a previous blog post he believes that

Science cannot fulfil the role of purveyor of truth. Good science is always aware of its limitations, but science cannot discover the purpose of life nor tell us about God’s nature or existence and science promotes the use of models. There is always a model whether we are aware of it or not, but the model we choose determines what we find.

Science places a high value on precision, but what about things we cannot be precise about, where apparent opposites come together? Science passes over entities that cannot be measured; it takes things out of context and decontextualizes the problem. We put our faith in science because it is seen to be objective, but science is not value free. A lot of scientific research is not adequately designed; we know that the Hawthorne effect can influence scientific results and positive findings are more likely to be published than negative ones. We can’t ask science to do what it can’t do. A hypothesis cannot be proved nor disproved. Each comes with many assumptions. Proof used to mean a trial run (as in a printed proof).

Science cannot provide us with dependable ultimate truths. It’s not pointless, but it does not provide us with reliable truth. Philosophy equally has problems with notions of intuition, uncertainty, rationality, reason and the complexity of truth.

Given that both Heather Heying and Iain McGilchrist will be speaking at the Rebel Wisdom Summit, I will be very interested to see whether the question of truth comes up, and if it does the extent to which they agree or differ on the meaning of truth.

And I wonder what they would both think of Baggini’s simple rubric to help us nurture truth. This is how Baggini ends his book in a discussion of future truths. (p.107)

• Spiritual ‘truths’ should not compete with secular ones but should be seen as belonging to a different species.
• We should think for ourselves, not by ourselves.
• We should be sceptical not cynical.
• Reason demands modesty not certainty.
• To become smarter, we must understand the ways we are dumb.
• Truths need to be created as well as found.
• Alternative perspectives should be sought not as alternative truths but as enrichers of truth.
• Power doesn’t speak the truth; truth must speak to power.
• For a better morality we need better knowledge.
• Truth needs to be understood holistically.

References

Baggini, J. (2017). A Short History of Truth. Consolations for a Post-Truth World. Quercus.

Funes, M. & Mackness, J. (2018): When inclusion excludes: a counter narrative of open online education, Learning, Media and Technology, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2018.1444638 When Inclusion Excludes MF:JM 280218

McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and His Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, “Having a Real Conversation”: https://youtu.be/ZBkF-xJh6tU

A Conversation about Community in the Distributed web

This image created by Kevin Hodgson, a participant in the E-Learning 3.0 MOOC, as Stephen Downes said on Twitter, ‘basically completes the Task for week 8’.

For an interactive version of this image see: https://www.thinglink.com/fullscreen/1129211585894547458

The final discussion about the topic of community in the E-Learning 3.0 course centred on a Google Hangout discussion between Stephen Downes and Roland Legrand. The Hangout was open to anyone and there were a few people, including myself, in the chat, but only Roland Legrand in the Hangout with Stephen. This worked really well, allowing the conversation between them to develop and dig deeper into some interesting ideas. I can recommend watching the video recording, as their discussion helps to clarify some of the issues we have been struggling with in relation to this topic on community in the distributed web.

The discussion started with a review of how the week’s task had been experienced. Stephen had asked participants to create a community through consensus, without giving us any indication of how to do this, or what else to do, and ideally without using a centralised space. Laura Ritchie, Kevin Hodgson  and Roland put forward proposals on how to do this and ultimately we went with Roland’s initial suggestion, whilst also taking account of Laura and Kevin’s thoughts. Stephen pointed out in the Hangout that had the course attracted a larger number of participants the task would have been more difficult, because there would have been more proposals and people would have organised into groups. How then would we have chosen which community to join (the task stipulated only one community)? How do you solve consensus generally?

Roland thought that his proposal only required minimal commitment from participants, but Stephen thought that it could have been even more minimal. Whilst we all (those who participated) reflected on our course experience in our individual blogs, Stephen suggested that all we had needed to do was to provide evidence that we were there, maybe by posting the #el30 hashtag and stating that anyone who posted this was a member of the community. By making the task performative (writing a blog post) did it become exclusive? Roland questioned how posting a hashtag would work. Wouldn’t people be too dispersed?  He asked, ‘Why even talk about community?’

For Stephen (and see his summary for the week for further thoughts on this) the concept of community is important in the context of truth and facts. How do we know we belong to a community? This relates to how do we know a fact is a fact? And how do we know which facts to believe? How do we meet each other to discuss this?

Roland suggested that we need empathy and openness beyond the facts, because when faced with alternative facts our identities are threatened. The first thing people need is to feel recognised and safe. His question was, if we want people to meet each other to discuss alternative facts and perspectives, won’t the distributed web make things more difficult? Stephen agreed that lot of things are harder on the distributed web. It’s easier to build and work on a centralised platform, but as Stephen pointed out, we are already living in a world where information is distributed. For him centralised to decentralised is six of one and half a dozen of the other. He also pointed out that the decentralised web flourishes in the financial community and that there is no empathy in this community.

Roland questioned whether there is a planetary community and thought that the idea of a planet-wide lack of empathy was a bleak vision. He wondered whether we are too negative about it all, saying that humanity is more peaceful today than ever before, and most people can be trusted. But, as Stephen said, whilst most people the world over are ‘good’ there remain bad actors. We have to build resistance to bad actors and that’s why making things harder, through blockchain, encryption and managing our own data, might be a good thing. But Roland suggested that encryption and managing our own data might also be bad for security. Stephen agreed that there is tension between openness and privacy, and that a balance is needed.

They then went on to discuss whether we could set up some sort of community/forum to continue to discuss these complex ideas and whether this space should be open or closed, on a centralized platform or on the distributed web. Roland is keen to continue the discussion.

From my perspective the community topic has been very challenging, causing me to question my understanding of what we mean by community on the distributed web, and the role that trust, truth and consensus play in the formation of community on the distributed web. I have not come to any firm conclusions yet about how all the ideas fit together and why they are significant. But as I have mentioned in a previous post, I think it may be necessary to rethink the language we use when discussing how community is formed in the distributed web. A verse from the King James Bible comes to mind.

Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.

Many thanks to Stephen and Roland for a fascinating discussion.

Trust, Truth, Consensus and Community on the distributed web

The seventh topic in the E-Learning 3.0 MOOC  has been Community. I have invested quite a bit of my time over the years learning about community – or more specifically communities of practice. I have been a founder member of a community (ELESIG which is still going strong) and a facilitator/moderator in a community (CPsquare – which no longer functions as a community, but relationships still remain – see image below). I have attended courses on CoPs to dig deeper into the theory behind them (BEtreat workshops ), published three research papers about communities of practice and have written numerous blog posts. (I should add a page to my blog about this). I thought I had a reasonable understanding of what it means to be a member of a community, but this week has made me doubt this understanding.  Why?I have been asking myself this question for quite a few days now, and today it occurred to me is that it is a language problem. The way in which language related to community is being used in this course about the distributed web, i.e. what we mean by community, consensus, trust and truth in the distributed web, is not how I have previously understood it.

Let’s start with trust.

Trust is thought to be an essential component of communities of practice. In their book (p.8) Digital Habitats, Wenger, White and Smith write:

‘Learning together depends on the quality of relationships of trust and mutual engagement that members develop with each other, a productive management of community boundaries, and the ability of some to take leadership and to play various roles in moving the inquiry forward’

And in Wenger, McDermott and Snyder’s book, Cultivating Communities of Practice  (p.85) they have written:

The trust community members need is not simply the result of a decision to trust each other personally. It emerges from understanding each other. As one oil reservoir engineer observed, “Sometimes you can share an insight that is so useful it saves a well from going down, but you don’t save a well at the first meeting.”

In other words, communities take time to develop, which is also depicted by the diagram above.

But in the conversation that Stephen had with Pete Forsyth they both agreed that the internet is a trust-less environment. In his post on ‘The Problem of Trust’, Vitalik Buterin has written:

If you were to ask the average cryptocurrency or blockchain enthusiast what the key single fundamental advantage of the technology is, there is a high chance that they will give you one particular predictable answer: it does not require trust.

This suggests that trust either functions differently or doesn’t exist at all on the distributed web. Stephen and Pete both believe that trust is an aspect of community. So both trust and community on the distributed web, in their terms, seem to mean something different to Wenger et al.’s understanding of it.

Pete Forsyth suggested that in Wikipedia (which I have written about in a previous post) we put our trust in facts and not in people. I can accept that on the distributed web it probably makes more sense to understand trust in these terms. That’s not to say that there won’t be trust between people, but perhaps we don’t need this on the distributed web. So the meaning of trust might be more limited term on the distributed web?

But what about community?

In a draft document he has shared with us (I have typed draft in bold, so that we can acknowledge that it might change), Stephen distinguishes between what he calls ‘natural’ communities as opposed to ‘organised’ communities of the type discussed by Wenger and his colleagues. He describes natural communities, e.g. ‘your average city’, as lacking in trust, where there are enforcement mechanisms, because we don’t trust people to obey the law or rules. ‘Cities are polyglot, factional, disjointed. Yet, still – they are communities’, he writes. I have yet to be convinced by the idea that a city is a community.

I believe that there can be and are communities within cities, but that cities are not communities. I agree with the author of this post about ‘What does community mean?’ where s/he has written: ‘just living near each other, as in a suburban neighborhood, doesn’t mean you’re in community.’ (The rest of the post is also interesting). ‘Neighbourhood’ may be a more appropriate term for a city, as Mike Caulfield suggested for FedWiki – which could be described as a decentralized distributed wiki (see my previous post for further discussion) and ‘network’ may be more appropriate for the distributed web.

But there is a reason for Stephen’s focus on community this week, which seems to be that working on the distributed web requires consensus; consensus to agree on what information can be trusted to be true. How do we achieve this consensus on the distributed web where there is no ‘leader’ and no ‘common ground’? Stephen believes that we do this through community and that community is consensus.

My question is, do we have to have community for consensus on the distributed web?  Unless I have completely misunderstood this, the evidence from Preethi Kasireddy’s post How does distributed consensus work? would seem to suggest that the answer is ‘No’, unless we are attributing the word ‘community’ to non-human actors. I have a horrid feeling that I have completely misunderstood all this, but from where I am standing, the word ‘community’ being used in this context just does not fit with any of my prior understanding.

In relation to achieving consensus on the distributed web about what information we can trust, we are told by Waggoner et al. that there are many consensus methodologies, to the point where they have written a paper questioning whether there is a consensus on consensus methodology.  From this article we can see that many researchers are working on how to achieve consensus in relation to the trust we can put in facts on the distributed web.

But what about in society? What are the consequences of a consensus driven society which relies on agreement. As John Kay wrote way back in 2007 in his article ‘Science is the pursuit of truth, not consensus’, ‘Consensus finds a way through conflicting opinions and interests’. (The Financial Times has blocked me from posting a link to this article. You will need to ‘trust’ me that this is what he wrote!) Kay seems to suggest that consensus is often arrived at, at the expense of truth. If this is so, should we ‘trust’ in the ‘truths’ arrived at by consensus?

In his article: Fake News, Wikipedia and Blockchain (Truth and Consensus), Arthur Charpentier seems to suggest that the words we use matter. He writes:

This plurality of words, and the absence of a reference word, is not unlike the philosophy conveyed by crypto-currencies: instead of a centralised mode of governance (validation, certification), it is a global validation by a network, a consensus, which will prevail. Have we changed our definition of what truth is?

This resonates with me because this week I have been asking myself similar questions. What does community mean in relation to the distributed web? Can community function on the distributed web? Do trust, community and consensus take on different meanings on the distributed web? Perhaps we need to go back to what these words mean and whether they have taken on different meanings for use in discussion about the distributed web.

Stephen Downes’ summary of this topic – Community – Summary of the topic

https://el30.mooc.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=68638

Source of images

Stages of development of a community of practice  – https://www.slideshare.net/richard.claassens/communities-of-practice-stages-of-development-388654

Fake News, Wikipedia and Blockchain (Truth and Consensus) – https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/52608

Consensus and community in the distributed web

The topic for this week in the E-Learning 3.0 MOOC is Community. I struggled last week to understand how the concept of ‘Recognition’ was being interpreted in relation to the distributed web, and I suspect I am going to struggle this week to understand how the concept of community will be interpreted.

In his Synopsis for the week Stephen Downes writes that recent times have seen us shift from an idea of community based on sameness, to a time when society has difficulty agreeing on basic facts and truths. A whole blog post could be written about just this, but I will move on.

Stephen sees community formation, in this day and age of the distributed web, as dependent on decision making and consensus. Consensus is no mean feat, but is essential if we are to counteract the influence of ‘bad actors’ who distribute false information and fake news. A critical mass of society must check and agree on what information we can trust or not trust. In an interesting article by Preethi Kasireddy- How Does Distributed Consensus Work? – decision making and consensus at the level of algorithms is discussed and it is clear that artificial intelligence will have an increasing role to play in determining what we trust and how we perceive truth. But for now we will stick to a more familiar environment in which we can observe how decision-making to achieve consensus is achieved, by real people rather than robots.

This week Stephen’s conversation was with Pete Forsyth, Editor in Chief of the Signpost, a community newspaper covering Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement.  Their discussion covered what we mean by community and consensus in relation to how ‘Wikipedia approaches questions like managing fake news, reaching consensus, and managing content‘.

I’m not sure that a discussion of how Wikipedia reaches consensus is comparable to reaching consensus on the distributed web, since Wikipedia is built on a centralised platform, but it is a platform used by tens of thousands of people across the world, and therefore provides a good basis for exploring how consensus works across large numbers. According to Wikipedia’s own site an average of 561 new articles are written every day and Wikipedia develops at a rate of over 1.8 edits per second, with editing being carried out by about 10% of users. As of August 2018, about 1000 pages are deleted from Wikipedia each day.

How is this consensus achieved?  What can we learn from Wikipedia about how to trust that the information we are reading is ‘the truth’? These are some of the thoughts shared by Pete Forsyth.

• Wikipedia does not trust in people. There is no mechanism for establishing the authority of the writer in Wikipedia. It trusts in facts.
• Facts must be checked and backed up by sources. (Although this wasn’t mentioned, I think Mike Caulfield’s Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers – is worth remembering here).
• Trust should always be rooted in understanding. It’s important to check the history and discussion forums in Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia defines a reliable source as being independent of the topic.
• Trustworthiness of sources is on a gradient. Exceptional claims require exceptional sources.
• Wikipedia prefers consensus to democracy, i.e. decisions are not reached by voting but by consent, which does not necessarily mean agreement.
• Wikipedia promotes individuals as decision makers.
• Wikipedia is edited according to Be Bold, Revert and Discuss principles.
• A record of every edit in kept in the page history.
• Open process, open access and transparency are strongly held core values in Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia software is designed to focus on creating a space for interaction and keep the software out of the way.
• Wikipedia provides guidelines for interaction and editing.

Here is a video recording of the whole discussion.

For me the questions that remain are, is Wikipedia a community and what is a community?

Wikipedia is a community for some people – probably for the 10% using it who actually contribute to it, rather than simply use it, although on the Wikipedia page about the community, the community in the larger sense is defined as including: all casual and/or anonymous editors, ideological supporters, current readers and even potential readers of all the language versions of Wikipedia-the-encyclopedia.

My prior understanding of a community is more in line with their narrower definition: the community –  is that group of contributors who create an identity (either a user account, or a frequently-used anonymous IP), and who communicate with other contributors.

This is a better fit with my knowledge of Etienne Wenger’s work on communities of practice.  I mentioned this briefly in a comment that I made on Laura Ritchie’s blog post, where I wrote that in Wenger’s terms a community of practice exhibits the dimensions of mutual engagement, shared repertoire and joint enterprise. Laura identifies her orchestra as a community, which seems to fit with how Etienne Wenger sees a community.

In his blog post Kevin Hodgson wonders whether a community is the same thing as a network or affinity space. I have heard Etienne Wenger say that all communities are networks, but not all networks are communities (see p.19 in this publication).

I also noted when watching the video that Pete Forsyth described community as ‘an amorphous concept of affiliation’.

And Stephen in a comment on Laura’s post writes about ‘natural as opposed to organised communities’. I will copy his whole comment here as I think in it we have the essence of how we are to understand community during this week of the course, and for considering how community might be thought of on the distributed web:

When we look at (what I’ll call) natural communities (as opposed to organized communities) they have two major features: lack of trust, and lack of mutual engagement, shared repertoire and joint enterprise.

Think of your average city. There may be a lot of what we call ‘trust’ (eg. people stopping at stop signs) but in nearly all cases there’s also an enforcement mechanism, because we don’t actually trust people (eg. to actually stop).

Similarly, while in a city we can talk about engagement, repertoire and enterprise (and we should) in most cases there is no engagement, repertoire and enterprise that is _common_ to everybody in the city. Cities are polyglot, factional, disjointed. Yet, still – they are communities.

The challenge (indeed, maybe even the challenge of our times) is how to understand and improve communities where people are *not* engaged in the same enterprise as everyone else.

From all this I am beginning to think that the word ‘community’ has too much associated history to be useful when considering how to communicate, interact, make decisions and reach consensus on the distributed web. It leads to a set of expectations that may not be useful in this context. On the Wikipedia page about community is written: The essence of community is encoded in the word itself: come-ye-into-unity. That’s a lovely way to describe community as I have always understood it. But my understanding of this week’s topic is that we no longer want or need unity. Instead, we need consensus on what is true.

I don’t believe that the traditional idea of community or a community of practice will be lost. We will all interact in communities of one sort or another; Laura in her orchestra, Kevin in his classroom, me in the village where I live, and so on. But we will probably need to think differently about community when considering what information we can trust, and what is true, on the distributed web. A new way of thinking about it may become more obvious the more we interact on the distributed web.

The idea of a distributed Wikipedia was briefly discussed by Stephen and Pete, with reference to Ward Cunningham’s Federated Wiki. In 2014, I explored the potential of FedWiki with a few others. It is a wiki with no centralised space i.e. each person has their own site, from which they can link to other people’s sites and select or reject edits of their own pages. Looking back at my blog posts, I see that I found it intriguing but not easy – a bit like this course, which seems to challenge a lot of my prior understanding about learning on the web.

Mike Caulfield described Fed Wiki as a ‘neighbourhood’, not a community, nor a network. Would this be a better word than ‘community’ and if not what would? I think a different word would help with the change of mindset needed to understand all this.

Resources

How Does Distributed Consensus Work?
Preethi Kasireddy, Medium, 2018/12/05
The brief basics of distributed systems and consensus. Nakamoto Consensus is truly an innovation that has allowed a whole new wave of researchers, scientists, developers, and engineers to continue breaking new ground in consensus protocol research.

What is Blockchain?
Lucas Mostazo, YouTube, 2018/12/03
Blockchain explained in plain English Understanding how blockchain works and identifying myths about its powers are the first steps to developing blockchain technologies.

Education Blockchain Market Map
Stephen’s Web ~ OLDaily, 2018/12/05
HolonIQ, Nov 30, 2018 Though dated last June this market map appeared in my inbox from Holon only today. It reports five sectors of the education blockchain market: credentials and certifications (the largest by far), peer-to-peer ecosystems, payments, knowledge and marketplace. The website describes each briefly and links to some representative startups. The site reports, “Blockchain’s significant potential in education – from powering efficiency to collapsing costs or disrupting the current system – is becoming clearer to technologists, educationalists and governments alike.”

Consensus decision-making
Wikipedia, 2018/12/04
Consensus decision-making is an alternative to commonly practiced group decision-making processes. Robert’s Rules of Order, for instance, is a guide book used by many organizations. This book allows the structuring of debate and passage of proposals that can be approved through majority vote. It does not emphasize the goal of full agreement. Critics of such a process believe that it can involve adversarial debate and the formation of competing factions. These dynamics may harm group member relationships and undermine the ability of a group to cooperatively implement a contentious decision. Consensus decision-making attempts to address the beliefs of such problems.

Wikipedia:Consensus
Wikipedia, 2018/12/04
Decisions on Wikipedia are primarily made by consensus, which is accepted as the best method to achieve Wikipedia’s goals, i.e., the five pillars. Consensus on Wikipedia does not mean unanimity (which is ideal but not always achievable), neither is it the result of a vote. Decision making and reaching consensus involve an effort to incorporate all editors’ legitimate concerns, while respecting Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines.

How Wikipedia dodged public outcry plaguing social media platforms
Pete Forsyth, LinkedIn, 2018/12/05
Wikipedia has problematic users and its share of controversies, but as web platforms have taken center stage in recent months, Wikipedia hasn’t been drawn into the fray. Why aren’t we hearing more about the site’s governance model, or its approach to harassment, bullying? Why isn’t there a clamor for Wikipedia to ease up on data collection? At the core, Wikipedia’s design and governance are rooted in carefully articulated values and policies, which underlie all decisions. Two specific aspects of Wikipedia innoculate it from some of the sharpest critiques endured by other platforms.

Hacking History: Redressing Gender Inequities on Wikipedia Through an Editathon
Nina Hood, Allison Littlejohn, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2018/12/05
This article explores the “experiences of nine participants of an editathon at the University of Edinburgh on the topic of the Edinburgh Seven, who were the first women to attend medical school in 19th century United Kingdom.” The authors argue “it was through the act of moving from consumer to contributor and becoming part of the community of editors, that participants could not only more fully understand issues of bias and structural inequities on Wikipedia, but also actively challenge and address these issues.” It makes me think of the slogan: “no knowing without doing.”

Wiki Strategies. Making Sense of Collaborative Communities – https://wikistrategies.net/