McLelland

I'm not sure if others have noticed a fascinating, related stream of articles by Dennis Howlett, titled Wisdom or Idiocy?, The Evidence Gap, and When Worlds Collide.   At a certain level the articles all deal with both communication (or more properly rhetoric, the "technique of persuasion ... through the use of language") and epistemology.  In the first article Dennis discusses the Light and Dark Sides of (apparent) consensus developed through blog interactions.  In the second he discusses how the rhetoric of management consultants has been supported too seldom by actual evidence.  In the last he takes up, in effect, the question of how accountants and software developers actually develop knowledge of their clients needs.

Dennis' articles get right at a point nagging at me for several years now:  We professionals emit and receive communications of widely varying quality all the time.  Yet, as far as I can tell, we're often remarkably casual in how we evaluate such communication quality.  For example, my litigation consulting services experience suggests reputation of an "expert witness" often has much more to do with the evidentiary weight given his opinions than the actual factual evidence underlying the opinion warrants.  Succinctly put, it's not the apparent truth of the expert witness' statements, his reputation simply precedes him with heavy feet and obscures his largely unreliable testimony!  So, in a very real sense, "expert witness" often means "someone who's an expert at being a witness", sadly, rather than "somebody who has substantial expertise in some technical domain, who happens to be a witness".  I sense from Dennis' articles this sorry state of affairs exists in blogspace and other professional-spaces too.

Classical rhetoric roughly tells us all communication consists of three components:

• ethos -- the speaker-reputation content of the communication
• pathos -- the emotional content of the communication
• logos -- the logical content of the communication

My personal belief is that most professional communication relies much too heavily on ethos and pathos, and much too little on logos (and this means too little well-reasoned theory and supporting evidence) ... which is roughly similar to Dennis' view, I think.  To henceforth avoid this sorry state of affairs in blogspace and similar spaces, I propose an eminently reasonable solution:

Writers should clearly and separately state the ethos, pathos, and logos
intended to be conveyed in the communication.

For example, in this article I might have written something similar to ...

Ethos: I'm an unlicensed CPA who  presently teaches a lot and has studied philosophy of science quite a bit.

Pathos: I'm sick of people who have longer, more impressive CVs than I forcing their unsupported opinions down the throats of unsuspecting people who aren't thinking carefully enough about epistemology.

Logos: If professional matters are a subset of economic science, and scientific methods (i.e., methods of systematic rational study) are more useful in developing knowledge than other methods such as casual discourse (e.g., web log interactions), then we should focus substantially more on ...

well reasoned theory supported by actual evidence

... in our professional communications than on our respective reputations, emotional states, and unsupported opinions.  This Will Improve the World.

As I look it over, I think I just wrote a clearer, more concise, more convincing (?) article using my proposed solution ... but the reader must ultimately be the judge.