Observing the Effects of Authority

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To observe the effects of differences in authority, we asked Janet and Roger to work on the same academic task in the domain of philosophical ethics: Given a set of eight scholarly articles on paternalism by five different authors, they were to write a paper for an educated general audience “discussing the current state of thinking on paternalism.” Each writer worked on the task at his or her own pace over the course of a semester, turning on a tape recorder and “thinking aloud” whenever they worked. They met with a member of the research team after each work session to discuss their goals, plans, progress and problems. Our profiles of these writers are based on our reading of their writing session protocols, interview transcripts, written notes and drafts.

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We found Roger’s reading and writing behaviors to be consistent with views of knowledge as constructed. Roger seems to operate with an awareness that texts and knowledge claims are authored and negotiable. Janet’s approach was consistent with a more traditional information-transfer model in which texts are definitive and unassailable. The specific differences we noticed led us to articulate four epistemological premises which seem part of Roger’s worldview but not Janet’s:

We organize our observations around these premises in the following sections. In brief, we found that Janet and Roger focused on different issues when reading, set different goals for writing, used evidence for different purposes, and developed quite different understandings of the subject matter they worked with. We will argue that these process differences are in large part a function of Janet and Roger’s contrasting views of their own authority in this domain and of the role of human agents in the construction of knowledge generally.