In his carefully articulated demarcation between two kinds of epistemological frameworks, Erhan Şimşek (2024) suggests that to understand plagiarism, perhaps even accept it, one must not confuse them. Here is the demarcation line, which in turn undergirds an academic practice: Propositional epistemology is a dialogical practice: scholars exchange ideas on various topics as agents, and conversations are ideally made explicit in the process of academic communication. Encyclopedic epistemology, on the other hand, tends to present knowledge monologically, leaving the halo of discussions around the topic out. More monolithic than the former, it underscores the topic at stake, disregarding the perspectives that elucidate that very topic. … [please read below the rest of the article].

Image credit: Forbes Johnston via Flickr / Creative Commons

These epistemologies—implicit but decisive in building students’ notions of knowledge—engender incompatible conceptions of ownership, authorship and agency (2). While “encyclopedic epistemology” is primarily exercised in high schools, “propositional epistemology” is the coin of the realm of post-secondary institutions (colleges and universities).

I: Scope

My aim here is neither to quibble about the labels nor to contest the Hegelian universalizing modality of the essay. It makes perfect sense that ill-prepared students who move from one set of institutional conventions to another may not appreciate different expectations when exposed to scholarly works that should be mastered and written about (hopefully, with an interpretive flair), or that these students “are more prone to post-truth [epistemic] relativism” (9). These issues, however important, remain less pressing in my mind than a more thorough discussion of the social context of epistemology as such.

For example, what is the status of an epistemological discourse whose provenance transcends (and here is Hegel again) an individual scholar or clearly named scholars? Is the (scientific) textbook standard of attributing “discoveries” to individual “geniuses” warranted on the one hand and debilitating on the other? And in this sense, then, one wonders if it is true that “Most importantly, propositional epistemology democratizes: it is a philosophical asset that enfeebles patronization and infantilization” (8). Is it indeed a “democratizing” practice or rather a dictatorial imposition on the novice scholar that they must account for a whole genealogy of an idea before they can be taken seriously by the academic establishment when “proposing” anything?

Tackling this quandary is not limited to finding the source of an essay or an idea, which at times is a monumental effort (especially when historical documents are lost or archival materials intentionally or inadvertently corrupted or, in contemporary setting, when links to websites lead to empty webpages), or to reaching a clear dialogic exchange whereby the source (text, manuscript, recording, and the like) is critically interrogated. It also includes legal constraints and guidelines, such as the allowable percentage of “remixing”—quotes, appropriations of images and musical notations, and ideas—which have occupied the attention of legal scholars and courts of law (e.g., Lessig 2008), especially in the age of digital culture, when keyboard-generated “cut and paste” is by now second nature to any academic practitioner. Moreover, in the context set up by Şimşek, I’m wondering what are the cultural assumptions and conventions regarding the protection (as a Constitutional right in the US) of an idea or thought, no matter the modality of its expression, once it is publicly disseminated? Here time and space—history and geography—offer competing and incommensurable frameworks within which epistemological investigations and pronouncements are cast as individual contributions. I wish to explore this particular question first and then question the extent to which Artificial Intelligence may upend whatever provenance one may claim for an idea, let alone a text or artistic production.

II: Dividualizing Epistemology

As anyone familiar with the history of social epistemology probably knows, the US Constitution already dealt with what we call today intellectual property. Concerned with the property of their own kin, propertied, white, slave-owners, the so-called founding fathers extended a certain privilege not only to physical property (including the scandalous “three-fifth compromise”) but also to ideas and inventions so as: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” (Article I, Section 8: Enumerated Powers, Clause 8: Intellectual Property; US Constitution).

This patent and copyright provision created a uniform legal framework that was supposed to protect the rights of “authors” and “inventors” under a utilitarian principle of “progress” with two presumptions: first, that such protection, even if only for “limited Times,” would in fact incentivize authors and inventors to write and invent, and second, that their “exclusive rights” would yield personal benefits befitting their hard work and genius in the form of pecuniary compensation. That the “progress of Science and useful Arts” depends on new ideas and inventions seems reasonable; but does it follow that without such protection no ideas or inventions will come forth?

Likewise, is it possible to identify the multitude of “authors” and “inventors” as having exclusive provenance over said ideas and inventions? If either or both questions are answered in the negative, the constitutional clause expresses nothing but a Eurocentric Enlightenment prejudice about the centrality of individualism in conceptualizing and organizing political systems based on legal frameworks. Moreover, as centuries of legal disputes have revealed, what counts as “Writings and Discoveries,” warranting attribution of rights and protection from infringement, remains problematic, perhaps more so in the digital age.

I have argued elsewhere about abolishing intellectual property rights as unjustified epistemologically and as impractical financially (Sassower 2013, Ch. 4). The presumption that authors will only write or that inventors will produce new gadgets and useful instruments only if their (intellectual) labor is legally protected and potentially compensated for by an eager consuming public is misguided (and empirically falsified in various economic sectors; see Raustiala and Sprigman 2012). More fundamental is the mistaken view that authors and inventors work in isolation, producing ideas out of thin air, and relying on no one except their own ingenuity. It is not minimizing the genius of writers and inventors to remind them and us that we all stand, so to speak, on the shoulders or others (if not on those of giants, as Newton has been said to have quipped; see Merton 1991). The point is obvious to social epistemologists: we study with mentors and other like-minded students, we learn from each other, and we rely on knowledge that has been accumulated and contested for generations before we enter the stage on which we perform.

No matter our ingenuity and creativity, we are always already informed by and indebted to an immense reservoir of knowledge. This means, in the present context of both propositional and encyclopedic knowledge, that our exposure is bound to lead to unavoidable levels or degrees of plagiarism. Our educational institutions, from K-12 to post-secondary and graduate work ought to help us recognize our predecessors and appropriately credit their contributions to our own thinking. This shift in orientation would necessarily follow a postmodern dictum that we are hardly in a position to willy-nilly invent new games even when we make imaginative and inventive moves in existing ones (e.g., Lyotard 1984, 10). Bruno Latour’s “Actor Network Theory” (2005), for example, taps into this frame of reference that grounds the perception of individual agency within a wider web of social interactions.

Anthropological studies of the “dividual” in contradistinction to the Eurocentric Enlightenment-informed “individual” elaborate on familial, tribal, and traditional relations that contextualize the identity and agency of human beings, in the sense that parts of them, so to speak, are inherently dependent on others insofar as their ontological status is epistemologically contingent on others, forebearers and relatives alike (e.g., Appadurai 2016). I bring this up in this context for the sake of encouraging a deeper appreciation of the mutual and relational positionality of so-called individuals which undermines the standard Cartesian-Kantian framing of the subject position as being rational, autonomous, and imbued with personal rights.

Once the individual actor is reframed also as a dividual who is contingent on others and their space-time locality, the very notions of personal rights and protections—individually-assigned patent and copyright attributions and an identifiable intellectual property right—must dissipate: such thinking falls apart as irrational, impractical, and morally dishonest. How can one claim for themselves the right to use a technical manipulation of gene splicing, for example, and then charge licensing fees to anyone else for using this technique when the slicing of genes has been done before, even if unsuccessfully, and when one had the benefit of learning from others (what to do, what to avoid, how to improve on an existing technique; see Cyboner 2022/2019).

One need not be a collectivist or card-carrying socialist to appreciate group effort and the benefits of sharing knowledge. There is ample evidence that team-work, with all its drawbacks (e.g., the “free rider problem” of benefitting disproportionately more from a project than contributing to it), yields great rewards (see high-tech companies and the publicly available “open source” platform). In this sense, then, the very idea that anyone “owns” knowledge or has exclusive right to their knowledge claims, hypotheses, or experimental results seems anachronistic and plainly misguided.

We don’t need to revert back to Robert Merton’s “The Normative Structure of Science” of 1942 to fully appreciate the “ethos of science” and its four principles of universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism (1973), an ethos that should guide any epistemological investigation and discourse. The production, dissemination, and consumption of epistemology in general and their various specialized variants should remain communal, where the designation of ideas, principles, hypothesis, and theories in terms of individual scientists is more honorific than constitutive.

III: The Challenges of AI

Though Şimşek mentions AI briefly in his concluding remarks, saying that “Further research is necessary to clarify the role of generative AI in imbuing notions of ownership and agency, hence unintentional plagiarism” (13), it may turn out to be the tail that wags the dog: students are confusingly encouraged to use ChatGPT to write papers (or at least outlines and drafts of papers) by some, while others scoff at the very idea that a university paper by an undergraduate student will not be composed by them. Does it matter who authors the paper? Is a “paper” meant to stand for a student’s comprehension, hard work, or integration of the readings with an assignment?

While much of the paper under discussion here focuses on students’ work and the allegations of plagiarism, much of the “blame,” if there is any to be detected, might be placed squarely on the kind of assignments teachers, instructors, and professor dole out as the weekly chore of undergraduate education. The “mastery” of the material seems paramount and as such requires more memorization than critical engagement; what if one’s ability to analyze critically were at the core of assignments? What if students were exposed to different critical modalities (external, immanent, genealogical, etc.) and were asked, regardless of the readings, to deploy them skillfully and with some nuance rather than compile reviews and summaries of research reports?

My speculation is that the worry about “generative AI” would recede into the background as irrelevant source of “content,” however scraped from enormous data bases. Moreover, given the prevalence of “googling” by students and professors alike, finding content is less difficult compared to finding relevant, useful, and pertinent content: it’s as much about the criteria by which we select epistemological bits of data and our facility with discerning what is significant and what is fluff. Selection criteria would matter more under this kind of engagement with ChatGPT and Generative AI and those criteria, in turn, would have to be prioritized and fully explained before one could assess the value of the content of one’s paper. This would mean that the work of both students and professors becomes more challenging, having to think critically about what they are encountering and explicitly explaining their own thinking process.

The legal quagmire that has recently been laid out in public about the provenance of data bases and the information they contain includes but is not limited to these questions: who owns the content? Must digital engines pay for skimming and collecting some data point from large data bases (as lawsuits abound)? If ChatGPT scans all the available data, including those that are owned by news media, for example, must they ask permission first? Must they pay royalties or licensing fees to review them and perhaps “quote” from them. As the law firm of Holland & Knight explains in their “alert” to clients: “In a 7-2 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith held that pop artist Andy Warhol’s use of a photograph of late music legend Prince without photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s permission did not constitute fair use under the first factor of the fair use defense, relying largely on the fact that Warhol’s use was not only for a similar purpose as the original, but was for a commercial purpose” (Labate et al 2023). At stake is the definition of “fair use” and the latitude the courts give authors and inventors (and artists) to use someone else’s work as part of their own work without either asking permission or remunerating the “original” creator in any manner, whether in digital form or not. All this to say that in my opinion questions of plagiarism fall into at least two categories: simple and nuanced.

The simple kind should be eradicated, as it is simple enough to reference the source of one’s quotes and thereby give credit to the genealogy of ideas from which one draws (yes, name the giants on whose shoulders one stands). The nuanced one includes cases where one only glimpses an insight or reformulates something to turn it into an insight: was the encountered tidbit “something” clear and precise enough to be cited? Was that “something”—sentence, word, image, note, idea—so definitively associated with one person (or a group) rather than being widely known by the public? I find it difficult to answer these questions and usually use the term “in the Marxian sense” or “in the Weberian sense” without direct textual reference. Moreover, gesturing to a “source” can be of the name-dropping kind which attempts to bolster a weak argument or position or an acknowledgement that someone somewhere has been on this track before even though they never fully ascended to its intellectual peak.

Genuine gesturing, if I may be allowed to invoke this blurred distinction, might be sacrosanct for professional academics whose daily fare is archival meandering and searching for clues to solving their own mysteries, but less so for amateurs. This raises the question: are our student professional academics in the making or visitors with library privileges? The answer may depends on their position: undergraduates, graduates, research assistants, postgraduates, etc. Yet, if we are willing to think communally, then all participants in our intellectual endeavors should be granted the benefit of the doubt that they are fellow-travelers with intellectual curiosity if not aspiration. And if that is the case, why not cite and give credit to others in your community? Why not recognize that we are all in this together, even if some of us earn a living doing this, while others pay tuition for a while?

IV: Outlook

As much as I appreciate Şimşek’s concern with the passage of students from high-school to university/college level education and the confusion of moving from what he calls “encyclopedic epistemology” to “propositional epistemology” as they contribute to unintentional plagiarism, I tried briefly to redirect the conversation to the very nature of what we associate with epistemology in general and epistemic claims in particular. It seems to me that the afterlife of the Cold War is still with us so that individual genius is presumed to lead the way for scientific discoveries, artistic breakthroughs, and intellectual achievements in a variety of areas of research and scholarship.

Any sense of the community of scholars or scientists or artists working collaboratively to further research and scholarship is ideologically denounced and denigrated as communist (even Merton changed his “communism” with “communalism” to appease detractors), while paradoxically heralding the success of “think tanks” generally and team-work in high-tech companies in particular. The celebrity culture in which we have been living for some decades now, with its consumerist overtones, has contributed as well to the resuscitation of the Eurocentric fixation of the individual. If students at every level were to be treated as members of a learning and teaching communities, if they were socialized to see themselves as participants in the production and dissemination rather than recipients of information and ideas, perhaps there would be less resistance to the communist nature of epistemological practices and therefore to casting the net of citation and credit as widely as possible. This is not to say, following Alfred North Whitehead, that “all Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato,” but rather to appreciate the wide shoulders of our predecessors and contemporaries on which we are inevitably perched.

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 2016. “The Wealth of Dividuals.” In Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance, 101–124. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Cynober, Timothé, 2022/2019. “CRISPR: One Patent to Rule Them All,” Labiotech. https://www.labiotech.eu/in-depth/crispr-patent-dispute-licensing/. Accessed: 27 February 2024.

Labate, Robert J., Tanisha Pinkins, and Cynthia A. Gierhart. 2023. “U. S. Supreme Court Holds That First Factor [purpose and character] of Fair Use Test Favors Photographer.” Holland & Knight, June 15, 2023. https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2023/06/us-supreme-court-holds-that-first-factor-of-fair-use. Accessed: 27 February 2024.

Latour, Bruno. 2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1984/1979. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Merton, Robert. 1991. On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press

Merton, Robert. 1973. “The Normative Structure of Science.” In The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, 267–278. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Raustiala, Kal and Christopher Sprigman. 2012. The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Sassower, Raphael. 2013, Digital Exposure: Postmodern Postcapitalism. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Şimşek, Erhan. 2024. “Propositional Versus Encyclopedic Epistemology and Unintentional Plagiarism.” Social Epistemology 1–15. doi: 10.1080/02691728.2023.2300807.

Categories: Critical Replies

Tags: AI, ChatGPT, collective knowledge, encyclopedic epistemology, epistemology, Erhan Şimşek, plagiarism, propositional epistemology, Raphael Sassower, SERRC 3/13/2024, social epistemology