User talk:Timothy J Scriven

Wikipedian Philosophy "Experts"
I greatly respect the philosophical integrity of anyone who agrees with me that Wikipedia ought to be no place for "the subsitution of argument with baseless assertion and authority". I have seen this problem in philosophy-related articles too many times not to wish to address it myself. However, a desire to "create ways to give power to experts" seems to me itself necessarily to evidence an acceptance of the relative infallibility of the "experts" to whom "power" ought to be given: I don't see this as a solution to the problem at hand, since a better-educated or less-fallible "expert" must necessarily be judged to be so by the inexpert-- or, worse, by "fellow experts"-- and since thereby the same hierarchy of authorities is established which we ought to eliminate: in philosophy, an argument from authority is never logically-valid, even if it seems helpful or conducive to logical philosophical discussion or writing. As daunting as it is, I think the task of the Wikipedian who discovers error in articles in philosophy is to painstakingly correct them, and to support his or her corrections via "careful, precise and ideally clear disscusion with controversial claims backed by evidence", him- or herself. A hierarchy of philosophy-article-editing "expertise" is not only authoritarian in tendency but symptomatic of the general tendency toward argument from authority that can be found in Wikipedia in general, and which, to me, is the bigger problem here. Tastyummy 06:58, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

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