Casati/Eco on the Web

Comment on Roberto Casati's comment ("The infinite regress problem") on Umberto Eco's "Authors and Authority." http://www.text-e.org/debats/ Further commentary invited at that site. ------------------------------------------------------------------- No "Quis Custodiet" Problem Peculiar to the Web Stevan Harnad CASATI: "Eco points out a filtering problem which resists various filtering solutions. The problem is how can we tell, on the web, relevant (useful, good) from irrelevant (useless, bad, misleading) information? " The question is: Who are "we"? We have a problem far worse than infinite regress if we want to treat as a single problem, and find a single solution, for a "we" that includes children looking for games, teenagers looking for music, house-wives looking for recipes, consumers looking for products, relatives looking for medical information, students looking for reference material, and scholars/scientists looking for refereed research. The obvious solution is to partition cyperspace into sectors, just as everything else is, and tag the "authoritative" sectors (such as the peer reviewed literature) as such. To put it in context, consider a related non-problem: the "universal search engine" problem -- the one that will find for you, reliably, the needle that you are searching for in the ever-expanding cosmic haystack of the web. People are fond of declaring this problem insoluble; but is it really a problem at all? Our thinking is based on the following, I think: The prototype, the gold-standard, is the library, the written Gutenberg corpus. It is that sort of order, reliability, retrievability that we are looking for, as indexed and shelved in our libraries, catalogues and bookstores. There would be no "universal search-engine" problem, but rather the contrary, a welcome solution, if the Web consisted of all and only this canonical Gutenberg corpus. But it does not: It consists of a lot more (and, alas a lot less, for most of the Gutenberg corpus is not yet available online). Now let us simplify, to get to the heart of the matter: Suppose the Web consisted of the entire canonical Gutenberg corpus, suitably tagged as such (I will return to this), PLUS every single word ever spoken (or thought) by every man, woman and child, from the prehistoric onset of language to the present day, updated daily. Would we now have a "universal search engine" problem? Of course not. For we would use the "tags" distinguishing the canonical literature (and of course all of its subtags, including "refereed journal" and "journal-name") to restrict our search to ordered subsets of cyberspace whose rules we would inherit from the paper canon. End of story. No new problem. Just a matter of tagging and isolating the old solution, and not being misled by the fact that, in principle (and with Dan Serber's dictascript, augmented perhaps by some future telescript), every single verbal production of every single human mind can be converted to writing and consigned to the web. So what? We know how to ignore idle chatter in the oral medium. We will continue to be able to do so on the Web. Yes, there are some new borderline cases, spawned by the web: Non-published teaching materials, pearls of wisdom in the chatter, etc. Those are special cases, and will evolve their own sectors. But sectored and tagged they will be. And in the meanwhile, let us not try to be holier than the pope: As a special case, the canonical corpus (or as much of it as is up there so far) is as tractable on the Web as it was on paper (indeed moreso). And the rest is just dictascript, which need no more be "navigated" than what transpires on the airwaves of chat TV or a hairdresser parlour. http://oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu/pipermail/oai-general/2001-June/000036.html CASATI: "This is an epistemological problem. Harnad claims that this is not a new problem and that there already are stable solutions to the problem. He would hence delete the 'on the web' clause." Indeed. What we want to continue to be able to access and navigate is the authoritative corpus. Let us simplify and say that this corresponds to the peer-reviewed corpus. If/when that is all online, it is all only a reliable metadata tag away from being navigable at least as reliably as it was on-paper (and in fact infinitely more efficiently). CASATI: "But if I understand Eco correctly, the web environment poses the filtering problem in a new light, for which old solutions are not easily available. The problem is best framed from the viewpoint of the lower-end user, someone with no information at all on the Holy Graal, say, who browses the web in order to improve his knowledge. Assuming that the relevant bit of information is available, it has to be separated from irrelevant or misleading bits of information. How can you find the relevant bit of information?" Vide supra. (And ask, if there had been no Web, how would this generic user do it? Do we have to worry that he may be gullible, and ready to believe whatever he runs into in conversation, on TV, on the drugstore magazine counters? Or that he has the good sense and capacity to resort to the library index catalogue?) CASATI: Surely an expert would help. Suppose now that an expert on the Holy Graal is somewhere available on the web. How can you find the expert? Well. Maybe there is a meta-expert somewhere on the web, but again, How can you find the meta-expert? And: How can you find the meta-meta-expert? And so on and so forth. Obviously infinite regress haunts Ecos solution. " Nothing of the sort. Why is there no "infinite regress" in the Gutenberg corpus? There is of course one on Chat-Radio (whom do you trust?), but authenticating all the opinions and misinformation that come out of human mouths, and even those that find their way onto public airwaves, is a hopeless (and pointless) task: There's always more opinion than expertise; it's more like combinatorial explosion than infinite regress. We are, in other words, using a spurious tertium comparationis here, in applying the desiderata of the authoritative Gutenberg canon to the PostGutenberg Galaxy. But the solution is simple. Carve out the subspace of cyberspace that corresponds to the old canon as a special case, tag it accordingly (augment it with any new hybrid productions worthy of inclusion), and restrict your serious searching to that sector alone. And let the erstwhile experts (peer review) continue to be your "authority." CASATI: "Peer reviewing, as invoked by Harnad, works very well for people who already know about academic journals and standards, but wont work for the lower-end user. How do you know about the good and the bad journal, the good and bad learned society? At some point the circle has to be broken by some hearsay type of contact." How did the "lower-end user" know about it in the Gutenberg age? Same answer. CASATI: "But this is not available in the pure version of the problem. Probably the real solution is in those same large numbers that create the problem. It is in the link-structure of the web, the same structure that is exploited by Google's search strategy. Linking is, to some extent, like a vote given to a page after a review of its content. Each of us is a peer reviewer. And if we are good peer reviewers, we will attract links from other pages." Ah me! If the authority is (democratically? capitalistically?) ceded to opinion polls among those same multitudes who cannot be assumed to know how to use a library, where will we be! On replacing expertise by nose-counts, see: Harnad, S. (1998) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (c. 5 Nov. 1998) http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html Longer version: http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue5/peer-review/ http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html "Peer Review Reform Hypothesis-Testing" http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0479.html "A Note of Caution About 'Reforming the System'" http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1169.html CASATI: "Expertise, in an universal linking system, is diffuse and microscopic. There are advantages to this solution. It avoids regress. It takes authority out of a few hands. It generalises the stable peer reviewing solution to the pre-web relevance problem." Or throws out the baby with the bathwater, substituting sheer quantity of popular opinion for qualified expertise. (Is this perhaps the current fashion of ceding all authority to market economics and dollar-democracy, along with a dose of PC populism, now making a bid for "privatizing" science and scholarship, as has already been done with the arts?) CASATI: "There are shortcomings. The link structure is poorly understood, and some studies will be necessary as to the possible distortions that the linking system may undergo, as in any other diffuse system from which we hope to extract information, such as the system of prices in various types of economy." Shortcomings there will indeed be. Let us hope we will first look at what sort of quality this link-economy would yield, before committing ourselves too deeply to it... Stevan Harnad