[discuss] [bestbits] Representative Multistakeholder model validity (was: Re: Selection RE: 1Net, Brazil and other RE: BR meeting site launched)

Sat Jan 18 19:58:58 UTC 2014

[cc:s trimmed]

On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 09:56:31AM -0800, michael gurstein wrote:
> 
> prove positives i.e. as for example the “validity” of this or that,
> but rather by demonstrating the “invalidity” (falsifiability*) of
> this or that…

Ah, yes, Karl Popper, the only philosophy of science that anyone can
understand in under 10 minutes.  The only problem is that the
falsifiability story falls down whenever one looks at the actual
historical details of significant cases of scientific progress.  So
that we don't drag this completely off-topic, I urge people who are
remotely interested in this to read Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific
Revolutions_, Feyerabend's _Against Method_, Davidson's "On the Very
Idea of a Conceptual Scheme", almost anything Ian Hacking wrote after
(say) 1975, and anything Donna Harraway ever wrote about science.
Popper's a nice story, but it is rather a long way from the final word
on this.  So, to drag this back onto the topic at hand,

> So in this instance the burden of proof surely falls not on those
> who are demonstrating that the “multistakeholder model” doesn’t
> provide an appropriate approach to governance but rather on those
> who are attempting to assert that it does…

this is poppycock.  If we're going to invoke philosophy of science,
then I state my belief that a scientific theory is true only if it
works.  More importantly for this current discussion, I think a
political structure is good at least partly to the extent that it
works.  And despite my very deep reservations about the way
representation can work in represtentative multistakeholder systems,
some kind of multistakeholder approach has been working in many
different forms for the Internet so far.  Therefore, I say the burden
of proof most certainly lies with those who want to replace it in
favour of something else.  An argument that the current system is not
perfect is by no means an argument that it must be replaced wholesale,
any more than troubling inconsistencies at the edges of theory were
trouble for Newtonian mechanics in the absence of a much better
alternative.

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com