User:Pierre-Alain Gouanvic/PAG Proposal

Recruitment, localization, and a new oral tradition

These three interlocking proposals reinforce each other.

Recruitment, localization, and a new oral tradition

The Citizendium is about bringing together different teachers and learners to enable them to communicate with each other, exchange their roles, to produce a coherent discourse that subsumes subspecialities and common assumptions.

Hyperlinks, in Citizendium, must allow transdisciplinary learning; each article should meet the extraordinary challenge of being accessible to all citizens, a feat only achievable through ample, concerted, horizontal communication between articles.

This communication leads to originality. It is not neutral. Many experts wish they could contribute to the definition of core notions and to the presentation of facts that are too often called anomalies. The endeavor of the Citizendium is to create knowledge out of data. Be careful what you ask for!

Knowledge, when taken seriously, is much more fragmented, localized, than one might think after reading the first Google hits of any of the top-1000 searches. There is an hungarian view of x, a norwegian perspective on y; this study group in Harvard sees the fundamental issues in a given speciality quite differently from how this other group from Pittsburgh sees it. As long as we see knowledge as neutral data gathering, we're fine with that. But anybody with some level of sophistication in his own field, I contend, will say that this is what makes the quest for knowledge wondrous.

Localization, recruitment, and a new oral tradition

What is the difference between inter-language translation and knowledge translation?

According to several thinkers in neurocognitive sciences, knowledge proceeds through embodied simulation, a process taking place in several neural assemblies that behave similarly whether the person is performing and action, an utterance, a meaningful gesture and when this person watches, listens or imagines (with the help of some external cues) another person doing the same. These neural assemblies are called mirror neurons, and in some cases echo neurons and empathy neurons). Against the solipsistic tendencies of the Western philosophic tradition, thinkers interested in the mirror neurons system argue that the innate ability of humans and primates to stage oneself and others underlie learning; the amazing ability of neonates to mimic adult's gestures, showed by Meltzoff in the early '70s, explains how each personal experience of meaning, is translated from one to the other.

Mirror neurons are the Rosetta stone of communication. Brain areas devoted to tool manipulation, in primates (including humans) and areas devoted to language overlap.

It is acceptable amongst some philosophers, phenomenologists in particular, to use the first person. When I learn something, I can sense the subjectivity of the person who is teaching it to me. This is neither an hallucinatory paranoid perception, nor an articulate epistemologic stance. It is the position of somebody who has his own place in the world of knowledge. In the process of learning, I ask myself other questions, which were, before, called mischief, and are now called hyperlinks. If you are a student and you don't feel comfortable with the idiosyncrasies of your teacher, or if you are an expert and you think that too many teachers have idiosyncrasies, you ought to join the Citizendium -- and hope the best to Wikipedia.

I, as a professional layperson, have lived more than once the experience of thinking so much like another person (I mean, an expert -- but without the extreme sophistication), only to realize that he was living in the same city (or province, or country or continent) as me. I cannot explain it, but I can utter some evocative value judgements. When I envision a Chinese, or an Indian Citizendium, I can tell that knowledge will not be the same when it is accomplished. The edit wars that you have seen in your favorite WP article, that made you leave WP or take some healthy distance, are fought by a handful of persons with a comfortable relationship with the dominant discourses. But the dominant discouse may change, because we might witness the first decentralization of knowledge.

Meanwhile, many naively think that knowledge is not centralized enough, and should be centralized, through online encyclopedias.

A new oral tradition: strategies for recruitment and localization

Stevan Harnad