Attribution and History

The latest of these possible creditors is C. S. Peirce, John Dewey and G. W. F. Hegel, even though I only read them in passing while an undergraduate. Although I am already buried under a pile of books I need to read, I have decided to add those philosophers to the pile. After all, I don't want to be accused of plagiarism, but, how far does one have to go?

I think this is a deeper problem than most people recognize. At one end, there have been the obvious cases of intellectual fraud, deceit and outright theft which have appeared with increasing frequency in the academic press. I have been particularly alarmed about those cases which appear in the scientific literature, as we place great store by the supposed dispassionate objectivity of scientific journals. Less disturbing is the sort of copying that occurs all the time in the liberal arts, because that area is more permeated with opinion, preference and shades of meaning. Yes: it occurs all the time in the liberal arts, and in a lesser way in the sciences as well. Should we not reference Peano or Frege every time we write a formula including simple addition?

I think this last question fairly states the depth of the problem, for almost everything we think and do begins with what others have done. We are very good at copying, so we copy our ancestors. That fact is one secret of Historical Inertia: even our intellectual processes are habits which are ritualized in language productions (verbal, visual, written ,etc). In that sense, everything, including this essay, owes a debt to others. Should I reference X-, who invented the word "reference" some 10,000 years ago?

In fact, we assume a lot. It's not practical to reference every symbol, every word. In principle, every mark on this page would have to be referenced, if I wanted to be totally honest about the provenance of this typing. But, were I that honest, I would have had to write a library full of references just upon setting down the very first letter. Obviously, that principle involves an nearly infinite regress because every item in the library would have to be referenced. The problem would be solved, if there were an accurate record of everything that had ever happened since the Big Bang which we could reference just once.

I sidestep this problem, as do most other intellectual workers, by using a different standard of reference. My standard may not be exactly the same as others, as I feel obliged to cite those who had similar thoughts, if I know about them by the time I set out my version. It's interesting to see what others think about something, as almost always they have a different take on the same problem, or, at any rate, what I believe is the same problem. This has the disadvantage of making my work longer and more tedious, or so I am told by my auditors. Nonetheless, I feel it's the blind men and the elephant over and over again. But, even here there is a problem: what if, as I discover many times to my embarrassment, some past genius has already stated some idea I believe I conceived on my own? I do not resent ceding priority in such cases, as I firmly believe in giving credit where credit is due. On the other hand, one might ask why I didn't know about that great genius? If auditors believe I should have known about that one, they will discredit my credentials and my work. But, what if it was an oversight, or a blind spot?

The problem comes down to this: how far should we go? Everyone who ever did anything can be accused of being a copycat, if we want to push the case far enough. It's not feasible to do that, because of the infinite regress involved in the criticism applied to itself as well as its object, so we come up with other standards. The scientific literature search, for example, usually stops about one human generation back. The implicit standard is that we reference our immediate teachers, in the hope of creating a great chain of referencing. It all works, if our teachers referenced their teachers, etc, and if someone is willing to research the links. That is a recursive theory of referencing.

In my work, simple recursive referencing doesn't fit very well. Some of my thoughts are the result of an evolution of very ancient ideas and arts, such as Heraclitus' poetic saying that one cannot step into the same river twice. There are the ancient thoughts and feelings recorded in works of the Greeks, Chinese and Indians that survive to our day. Other thoughts are the results of recent work, such as Kahneman & Tversky's Prospect Theory, the idea that we value loss and gain differently. Perhaps those are the easier cases. There is the muddle of things I have drawn from my intellectual predecessors, the founders and developers of the modern world in which we live.

There are some principles I have emphasized in my work, such as the Principle of Equality, which are nothing new. Many Enlightenment philosophers either took Equality as a starting point or used the notion in developing their theories, with astonishingly different results. There are a few ideas I have which I do not attribute to my predecessors, even if they may be implicit in others' work. For example, I believe I thought up Truth Preference and Good Enough without assistance. Truth Preference is the idea that truth is preferred over falsity, without specifying what is true or false. Truth is a ranking without an anchor. Good Enough is a rule for applying Truth Preference, and the subject of this essay: when do we call it quits? In adopting Truth Preference, I believe I departed from the tested ways of my ancestors, for Truth Preference does not lay any burden on moral agents to seek and tell the truth, nor does it prohibit inventing a lie. In my thorough-going relativism, what is more true is relative to some other, lesser truth. The immediate difficulty with such a conception is Good Enough: how do we rank "truths" or other values?

Short digression I have also set forth the idea that Ethics is fundamentally social, not individual. Morals apply to individuals. This closely connects Ethics and Law. Most philosophers are cool to both those notions, but maybe I have a precursor in G.W.F. Hegel. I didn't think I was influenced by Hegel, especially as I have not studied him in any great detail. (Hegel was one of the great bugaboos of my lifetime, thanks to the fear of Marxism and Communism in the West, the rejection of Hegel by many Marxists, and the association of Hegel with a vainglorious German State.) Hegel is usually considered the greatest of the post-Kantian German Idealists, but that is also to point out that he was, as I am, post-Kantian. The formative influence on much of my thought, as it was with Hegel, is Immanuel Kant. Kant, I believe, nearly single-handedly re-invented philosophy, in much the same way Sir Isaac Newton indelibly stamped modernity on physics. Those two, and the other estimable founders of our era, not only finally separated modernity from the Medieval, but threw off even more ancient tethers to ancestral homes. What's different about modernity is that now we are on our own.

I have no way out the problem of ranking true and false, good and evil: it's all relative. I cannot posit some abstract truth or good to justify the ranking without falling into the snapping jaws of those critics who surround heavenly Truth, Beauty and Good. Values must bootstrap themselves into existence, which is not unusual for me, as I believe the Universe started the same way, from nothing. Since I subscribe to the subjectivist view that values are something we assign, not something found, it is relevant that most creatures in this world do not do that. That is, at some stage of biological evolution, having values showed up. It looks like brains and sufficient neural organization are necessary coinditions of having values. Increasingly, it looks like other primates have some sort of ability to formulate values. What recent biologicial knowledge implies is that what we know and what we value are ordered on an evolutionary scale. While this is not a proof of claims about Truth Preference, it is an indicator suggesting it is a useful concept.

In order for Good Enough to make sense, it must serve as a self-anchoring rule for Truth Preference. One such Good Enough method is, naturally, statistical, because we can always correlate things, provided we have some way of identifying (discriminating) individual components or factors. Those individuals need not themselves be atomic, they need only be treated as atomic in the aggregation and calculation. Thus, we have Avogadro's Number as an essential definition of molar quantities, even though chemicals are composed of hundreds or thousands of much smaller entities. So, one kind of measure of Good Enough is the median or central tendency of statistics. Note that the existence of solutions to statistical equations does not entail the existence of the calculated quantities, but does allow us to entertain thoughts of averages, distributions, etc.

But, how does any of that apply to seemingly incalculable things like the influence of one person on another? Well, it must, because each of us makes such estimates all the time. For example, I have a theory about the supposed influence of Hegel on me. The facts of the case are that I haven't read Hegel per se since the early 1960s, and I remember only a few salient points about him. I have, of course, run into Hegel over the years, as represented in various works of those who are familiar with him. Generally, I relied on the veracity of those authors in their representations of Hegel; e.g., Francis Fukuyama in The End of History. I occasionally checked some facts about Hegel by reading encyclopedias or secondary sources. On the whole, while I have a general impression of some things Hegel is alleged to have proposed, I do not recall any specific source of those impressions. On the other hand, in all those things, and another, I am at second remove from Hegel; i.e., I have a second order relationship. Another connection runs through Kant, the father of us both. Once infected by Kant's ideas, it is not unreasonable to come to some of Hegel's conclusions or my ideas. Just as siblings usually bear a family resemblance, sometimes even twin-like, thoughts bear the resemblances of their parentage. It is unavoidable, for thoughts have an inner logic (itself a Hegelian, derived from Kant, sort of term) which take us to certain endings. That is also like the classical formula of tragedy, which we see happen before us, although the principle characters are unaware of their fate. No matter what Oedipus does, the prophesy of the Oracle will be fulfilled. Now, those allusions are not to introduce a mystery into these proceedings; rather, it is to point out that we can create a story, even if fictional, which is a chain of causation. Such an story may not fit easily into conventional statistical equations, but it does allow us to give an accounting by other means. The important thing is that the account is self-anchoring, for it takes us from one thing to another thing, without having to specify any first causes or final ends.

The foregoing suggests two methods of establishing precedence: statistical correlation where calculable, and evolutionary process where identifiable. There is another, more abstract and less certain method: ideological distinctions. In this method, we classify various people and ideas into schools of thought,. Thus, there are Platonists (realists), Aristotelians (naturalists) and Kantians (idealists) and a panoply of other thoughts and their combinations. In principle, this system of classification is a self-anchoring correlation, as it is not at all historical. What counts is the clustering of thoughts, not any particular time or place. We use this method in establishing the various departments of the University and the skills and trades of our economies. Blacksmithing is a recognizable trade during the entire course of human development since the invention of metal working. In that sense. Heraclitus is a founder of Existentialism. The problem with this method is that most of us are bastards, offspring of one night stands and millions of other secret matings. Thus, Hegel's concern with ends seem to have some Aristotelian teleology in it, suggesting an undisclosed parentage, although Hegel's idea seems to have a stronger Kantian resemblance on its face. But, maybe it was Kant who was the product of dalliance.

I don't prefer this last method of classification, just because of all the suspicions it creates. In the absence of a clear-cut genetic test or distinction, everything is related to everything. Thoughts exist in the minds of those who think them; they do not have an independent existence of their own. Platonists and other believers in Forms (eidos) will challenge this last assertion. For them, there may be some validity in establishing categories of thought and classifying thoughts accordingly. Such mental worlds might be quite interesting to behold, but the rebuttal of claims about their existence is simple enough: (a) where are they and (b) why does not everyone share those categories? The last case is the more telling, because those who supposedly agree with some system of classification invariably find themselves objecting to some placement or other. The problems of classification by schools of thought are the same as those of evolutionary biologists who propose evolutionary trees. Before the advent of evolutionary genetics, placement of an organism in the tree of life was based on phenotypes, observable characters that imply relationships. Unfortunately, there are many cases of convergent evolution which confuse parentage. When is a duck-billed creature a bird, not a platypus?

I do not doubt that, at the bottom of everything, everything is related to everything. I am just the latest descendant of some bit of protoplasm that maybe looked like a bacterium or a slime mold. But I need useful distinctions in living my purposeful life. I don't think that is something some virus is worried about. So, once again, I must make a distinction between the long and short terms. In the short run, things matter. In the short run, things have causes and effects. In the long run, the Universe began from nothing and made a Big Bang and, if Prof. Hawking is right, it ends in a whimper after the decay of all the black holes in a multi-googolish number oif years. I am awed by the immensity of it all, by my simultaneous insignificance and connectedness, but I do not live my life that way.

So, how should I solve the problem of attribution? Obviously, not exactly. Clearly, we should attribute whenever we have cause to do so; i.e., whenever there is, subjectively, a drect connection between my thoughts or deeds and another. So-and-so said this, therefore I thought that. In such cases, I am under the further obligation to explain how that saying led to that thought; i.e.,  to set forth the sequence of events which I claim in toto is causal.

I think, as a matter of integrity, one needs to explain one's general heritage as in, 'I belong to such-and-so school of thought,' or 'I support St. Augustine's idea of redemption.' But, such offerings need not be applied to every single word, or even a large collection of words and deeds, more than just enough to remind observers of that context. Such assignments are professions of faith that may color one's doings, and they should be taken into account by observers, but they are very unlikely to be the causal explanations of specifics. People who profess strict adherence to a religious cult often enough behave otherwise.

Then there are the troublesome relations between club memberships and personal belief. My approach to these is on again, off again. When I learn someone has written or done something similar, I try to learn about it. Then I place what the other one does in some sort of context. Did I copy that person's performance? Or, because we are similarly constructed or presented with the same problem to solve, did my doings converge with the other's? Or, do we live in "parallel universes?" If I believe the other's performance is relevant, I cite it. That decision is arbitrary.

So, at first approximation, Good Enough is whatever is good enough for me. This, unfortunately, is all too similar to Charlie Wilson's famous nostrum: "What's good for GM is good for the country." But I have no other choice in those matters which cannot be readily calculated or for which some reliable genealogy can be established. Since the readers are always free to challenge and correct my absurdities, I will hope a self-correcting process ensues.