Keith’s Conundrums: Collective Opinions

What’s a Collective Opinion?

Recap:

Last time I did a column on some matters related to (as Plato might have said) “the small”. The Platonic echo in Penrose’s title is almost certainly deliberate so I’m happy to make fun light of it. Nobody commented and I’m going to delay doing “the large” until the new year, as something else interesting has come to my attention.

The new:

A few days ago (at the time of writing), I caught a Front Burner show where the subject was about universities and collective opinions. This subject was interesting (I often catch up on this show on weekends and so I can pick the order I want) and was astonished (in a way) to hear that one of my professors from my graduate days in philosophy (Andrew Irvine – who I did nonclassical logics and  philosophy of mathematics with) was suing UBC! I guess I missed this at the time it got started – the news review I did for this column tells me they (he’s part of a group, though was the only one named in the program) have been at it since April. I am not going to comment on any aspects of the suit legally, ethically, etc. but as usual I will draw a metaphysical aspect out, the aspect that got my attention in the headline. The university itself is being accused of taking political positions (in violation of statute), and this phrasing was in the Front Burner show and is in various other places.

Front Burner took one possible reading of the “university expresses an opinion”, namely that is unproblematically the opinion of the administration it is expressing. Note however that this does not mitigate the puzzle. A system of people do not have a brain, do not think as such collectively (or do they?) and hence do not at least have an opinion in the same way that you or I do (or maybe the Dennettian pandemonium architecture is correct, and there’s more of an analogy than we thought?) 

It might be thought that this confusion is solved by “reducing” it to a problem in social choice. Social choice theory is sometimes described as the theory of aggregation of preferences, and studies political arrangements (especially voting), markets, etc. in the “abstract”. This therefore sounds plausible as a way in. However, it is arguable that this also misses the point: it explains how a social system can “agree” on which action to take, but it does not justify the use of the “opinion” label as such. Why? Because a system we can agree has no opinions can nevertheless take action this way (pick a sufficiently dumb computer).

Could it be, to pick another idea, that the opinion of the university is the opinion of a person selected to “be the opinion of the university” – like the “mouth of Sauron” in The Lord of the Rings? This is plausible enough metaphysically, especially in the fictional case, at least at first glance. However, one should notice that “university” plays no role here; we could just as easily call this person “the opinion generator of Pacific Spirit Park” or the like and it would have the same effect, at least by itself.

It seems then to me that the problem with the previous proposal that it is too individualistic – not surprising, given that we sort of started with a critique of a holism. Let’s see if we can therefore find a systemist compromise.

At work I encounter a lot of problems with systems that don’t give information back “upstream” in the right way – they lack feedback cycles. So, maybe because of that, I propose that the “opinion giver of the university” should be given a feedback mechanism. This does raise questions of accountability (to whom?) and a few ethical questions I will still ignore. Let’s keep our concentration on the metaphysics that this involves. 

Assume for the moment that the feedbacks go in both directions, which I will call “inbound” (to the opinion giver) and the one in the opposite direction, “outbound”. Presumably the idea for the inbound is that members of the (public, university community, ?) can send in their criticisms and suggestions and have the opinion giver change her views when appropriate. This seems reasonable at first, provided that she can function “as her own person”. This raises questions of what is called “doxastic voluntarism” – whether we are able to choose (however understood) our beliefs. I will leave this thread here.

The other way, the outbound feedback, is less problematic metaphysically and seems to only raise practical questions, or at least epistemological ones. 

That’s it for now; there are many other metaphysical and other problems of collective action and belief; feel free to bring them up in the comments and I’ll talk about them next time. If you want to talk about the ethical and legal ones, feel free to do that too.

Happy New Year!