| Sep. 12th, 2005 @ 10:46 am Cognitive authority |
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This week in Human Information Behavior the subject was cognitive authority and Prof. Pavlovsky had us read:
1.1 Wilson, P. (1983). Second hand knowledge; Cognitive authority. In P. Wilson, Second-hand knowledge: An inquiry into cognitive authority (p.vii-viii, 13-37, 107-112, 120) Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
1.2 Meltzoff, J. (1998). Critical Reading (Chapter 1) In J. Meltzoff Critical thinking about Research p. 3-12. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association
Our assignment was to write critical journals of each article, but including them here would lack the context of having read the article. Instead, a reflection about my grand father, teaching history, and composing authority.
My grandfather – 90-some years old and going strong – is convinced that history is being re-written. What he hears historians saying today does not jibe with what he learned in the 19-teens, and the clever right-wing operatives at Fox TV “news” (and yes, I dare to question the cognitive authority of an entire network) have convinced him that liberals are involved in a world-wide plot to obfuscate the truth. So is all adds up: (1) what is being taught in the 20-oughts differs from what I learned in the 19-teens, + (2) the liberal media/Hollywood/academic elite are plotting to hide the truth, = (3) historians are re-writing history.
In history courses we teach that the teaching of history is not static. Over time subtle changes creep into the way our history is understood; new sources are uncovered and modes of analysis come in and out of fashion. And many people think that history is taught as a means of understanding ourselves; as our society changes so do those needs. The history of the study of history is called historiography, and understanding the evolution of historical trends plays a big role in the intellectual development of historians. The vast majority of history dissertations begin with a review of the historiography of the subject under study, and suggestions of how the current work improves upon that which has preceded it.
When I teach history courses I usually include a class or two on historiography in the 100- 200-level courses, and an entire unit in the 300- and 400-levels. Take the history of the American Civil War (ACW) -- understanding the great war between the states has evolved tremendously over time, and people unfamiliar with the subject might not even recognize that the same subject is being covered in the histories written in the 1880s and those written in the 1980s.
The original historical analyses of the ACW were written by people who live through the war. Their writing represents attempts to explain and justify actions, positions, and emotions taken during the war. It has not been very long since the Persian Gulf war, and already we have a shelf full of volumes written by people who participated in that event. And of course they all have different biases, because of different perspectives and different objectives.
That is, one's memory of the event is going to have a certain slant if one is planning to, say, run for President. And that is the way it was for those who wrote just after the Civil War -- winners or losers, each had the incentive to explain and justify their actions.
A second school of historiography include those who advocated what has been called the "irrepressible conflict" mode of thought, did not have the need to justify their participation because, of course, they took no part. Their interpretation of the war had more to do with using the new social sciences, a recent development, to understand events in the turn-of-the-century America. A great deal had taken place between the Civil War and the "Progressive" period, and practitioners of the new social sciences, or political economy, felt under some obligation to explain the roots of that change. And they were apt to locate it in unpreventable, unstoppable "natural" forces; thus, an irrepressible conflict.
If we look hard you can see how these historians drew upon 19th century tendencies to contrast the moral influences of history v. the material influences; that is, you should be able to see how these historians mimicked the "quarrel between Hegel and Marx over the primacy of ideas or material resources as dialectical dynamics in human history." Or: Did the moral objections to slavery outweigh the primacy of economic influences?
Historians in the third group were called "revisionists" at the time they wrote, but now may be said to represent the "repressible conflict" mode of thinking. These were people who had lived through the First World War, called the Great War in Europe, and their primary, if unstated, concern was to reinterpret the Civil War in the attempt to better understand the horrors of WWI. The brunt of this argument had it that no difference was irreconcilable enough to have led the North and the South to War. Everything could have been prevented, and responsibility for the war should be laid at the doorstep of blundering politicians or fanatical agitators.
At this time many people in the US were busy reinterpreting out participation in WWI to read that America had unnecessarily gotten itself embroiled in an affair which was none oft its business -- the many American deaths were preventable, as was the economic chaos. In the attempt to reinterpret the US involvement in Europe, then, historians reinterpreted the ACW to fit a model.
Finally, the last group are members of the historical trend known as the "New Social History." This group chooses not to concentrate analyses on the institutional bodies of history, the leaders and the governments, but to try and analyze the lives of real people. Not the GW Bushes, but the blankety-blank you and mes. Not surprisingly, members of this group tend to root the war in the clashing of social systems -- differences in the needs and the lives of real people were not reconciled, and war resulted.
Granddad Pellerin doesn't give a hoot for this or that. Why should he? He worked hard all his life and is part of the generation that invented the middle class as we know it today. When he learned history the predominant mode of thought suggested that the war was the result of an irrepressible conflict, and no matter what has happened in the world of academics that is how he is going to understand the Civil War, period-end-of-story. Several schools of thought have passed him by and the suggestion that history should be considered from the ground up, from the point of view of the common man and woman, is simply not viable. So with the help of a conservative mind-set and Fox "news" propaganda he sees modern ways of thinking as not only wrong, but as being part of a vast left-wing plot to re-write history.
The cognitive authority he recognizes was established 80-some years ago and is reinforced by a slick right-wing propaganda unit masking as a news agency. Does that make him wrong? No. His Weltanschauung suggests and interpretation of history that is not only real for him, but is correct. When he approaches a reference librarian with a request that librarian needs to conduct the reference interview with an understanding of the roots of his biases and should conduct the interview with a compassion for and an appreciation of that background. In a nutshell, that is what what both Meltzoff and Wilson imply with their suggestions that we pay special attention to the depth and variety of cognitive authority. |
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