Epistemic Authority after the Paper Mill
What does a signature still guarantee?
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
Most of what we know we have not tested ourselves. In 1991 John Hardwig turned this simple fact into a philosophical subject: epistemic dependence. A non-expert relies, quite rationally, on what an expert says, and even experts in large collaborative research rely on the work of colleagues they cannot check. Hardwig concluded that trust is not at the edge of knowledge but at its core. So the real question is this: whom do we trust, and on what grounds?
In A Social History of Truth Steven Shapin showed that in seventeenth-century England the credibility of experimental reports was tied to the social standing of the reporter: a “gentleman’s” word was acceptable because he was considered free and beholden to no one. Modern science replaced these marks of class with institutional ones: the reputable journal, peer review, a university affiliation, and today a digital identifier. But the logic stayed the same: credibility was entrusted to outward forms that were meant to signal integrity.
Paper mills forge precisely these signals. A paper with no research behind it receives, through the journal’s name, a digital identifier and an institutional affiliation, the same credibility as a real one. At the same time, researchers from India, Nigeria or Bangladesh who have done real work are judged less credible through the very same mechanism of signals: their English is “not fluent”, their affiliation “unknown”, their country’s journal “not indexed”. Miranda Fricker calls this testimonial injustice: giving a speaker less credibility because of prejudice about who they are.
The injustice has two layers. Fake text gains credibility through outward form, and real knowledge from the periphery loses it by the same route. The answer is neither a return to the gentleman nor more severity towards the margins. Credibility must be detached from markers of prestige and tied to traceable answerability: a name that can be found, versions whose history can be seen, data that can be checked, and critiques published beside the work.
A signature still guarantees something, provided its link to the work holds. A signature connected to drafts, data and replies to criticism builds credibility. A signature placed only beneath a finished text is, from now on, no guarantee at all.
Questions for discussion
- Without institutional signals, can a non-expert reader judge the credibility of a work?
- Does full traceability place a new burden on researchers with few resources?
- What part do indexes and citation databases play in reproducing testimonial injustice?
References
Hardwig, John. 1991. “The Role of Trust in Knowledge.” The Journal of Philosophy 88 (12): 693–708.
Shapin, Steven. 1994. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.