Example: The Cognitive Authority of Professional Historians
About 1880 history was established as an academic discipline and as a profession based on that discipline in both Europe and the USA. The cognitive authority of history was closely related to the application of scientific methods and source criticism. A clear division was established between amateur historians and professional, scientific historians. From the dominant "paradigm" in the historical profession of that time is was clear what to consider "cognitive authority".
However, inside history, the "paradigm" shifted to "the present period of confusion, polarization, and uncertainty, in which the idea of historical objectivity has become more problematic than ever before".
For some has the development turned around and amateurs have the same cogintive authority as professional historians: "t is not the purportedly objective investigations of the historian into a real subject matter which lead to knowledge about history but rather the knowledge at which the historian arrives is conditioned by the linguistic mode in which she/he operates. Professional historiography for White generates no more objective knowledge of the past than does speculative philosophy of history or the historical novel."
What is considered "cognitive authority" in a given field of knowledge is thus relative and depending on the "paradigm" of the information seeker. An argument about what should be regarded "cognitive authority" is in the end an epistemological argument.
Read more about this topic: Cognitive Authority
Famous quotes containing the words cognitive, authority, professional and/or historians:
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“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.”
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