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CLAIM-425: A perspective governs itself with respect to social judgement to the extent that it keeps access to others' judgements of it while making their authority over its conduct depend on their grounds, not on their visibility, repetition or attributed plurality; neither absorbing every judgement nor resisting every one meets this, since both let the judgements set the terms of response

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Properties11
StatusProposed
Rolethesis
Warrantinterpretive
Tagsself-governance, self, social-science
Linedistributed-agency
Worksself-without-a-sovereign
Rests onCLAIM-415 — A person can be organized by a judgement they attribute to a collective that does not hold it: the audience in a self-model can be a false unity, and a judgement can shape a person who rejects it, because resisting it makes it consequential, CLAIM-349 — An organization's access to a signal, the signal's authority over action, and action on it are separable, and adaptive regulation keeps the first while making the second conditional on evidence; overcontrol, which buys freedom from harmful acts by cutting access or making inhibition unconditional, is a maladaptive regime and not more control, so flexibility is a context-sensitive property of maintained influence relations, not of how much is inhibited
GroundsCASE-142 — The label confirmed by resistance: a critic calls someone hostile, the person answers the characterization angrily, and the critic cites the anger as proof, so the judgement is confirmed by the response of someone who rejects it
Objected byCLAIM-426 — Where a judgement's circulation helps bring about what it says, its visibility, repetition and attributed plurality are evidence about what it will bring about, so the rule that a judgement's authority should come from its grounds and not its visibility holds for judgements of what already is, and not without qualification for judgements of what someone or something will become
ComplementsCLAIM-424 — Reflexive governance of an organization's perspectival arrangements, making the conditions that govern its own interpretation, evaluation and action available for effective examination and revision, is a capacity some organizations of perspective have and others lack, not what makes something a perspective; and the capacity to revise those standards is not the capacity to revise them well
UsesTERM-075 — attributed self, and which sense: held, imagined, imagined audience or appropriated

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The claim

A39 ended its examination of the phrase with a fourth reading: “I can recognize the judgment, investigate its grounds, and refuse to let its apparent popularity substitute for its actual credibility.” And its thesis: “The capacity to distinguish social visibility from justified authority is therefore central to perspectival self-governance.”

The claim has three parts.

  1. Keep access, condition authority. CLAIM-349 separates access to a signal, the signal’s authority over action, and action on it, and calls adaptive the regulation that keeps the first while making the second conditional on evidence. Here the signal is a judgement of oneself. A39, in its section “Who gets to tell me who I am?”: “When someone tells me who I am, I can understand their judgment without endorsing it. I can acknowledge that it contains evidence about how I affect others without accepting their complete characterization.”
  2. Visibility, repetition and attributed plurality are not grounds. These are what CLAIM-415’s false audience trades on: a judgement seen often, heard repeatedly, or taken to speak for everyone. The record draws the same line for itself, where repetition is kept apart from independent corroboration (ADR-044). A39: “Repeated visibility, numerical prevalence, and independent corroboration are different things.”
  3. Neither absorbing nor resisting meets it. A39: “someone who deliberately resists every social judgment may be no less governed by the judgments than someone who obeys every one. In both cases, the external judgments can set the terms of their response.” CASE-142 is the resistance route; CASE-141, where the label works through others’ treatment, is a reminder that the capacity governs one’s own response, not what others do with the label.

It complements CLAIM-424, reflexive governance of an organization’s perspectival arrangements. That claim is about governing the arrangements that decide which signals count; this one is the same achievement for the judgements others hold of a person.

What it does not say

  • Not immunity. A39: “A person incapable of being affected by others’ perspectives wouldn’t necessarily be autonomous. They might simply be unresponsive to relevant information.” The claim requires access.
  • Not that the capacity is common or easy. It names what self-governance would need here; how often people have it is empirical.
  • Not that judgements carry no evidence. A characterization can be true, and an apparently popular one can be popular because it is true. The claim is that popularity is not the reason to grant it authority.
  • Not that the capacity is enough. Which descriptions become consequential “depends on relationships of trust, social power, history, context, and the person’s own practical organization” (A39). Others’ attributions act through their treatment of the person whatever the person’s response (TERM-075, sense 1).

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