Origgi - Reputation: what it is and why it matters

REPUTATION

Reputation

What It Is and Why It Matters

Gloria Origgi

Translated by Stephen Holmes and Noga Arikha

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2018 by Princeton University Press

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Originally published as La rputation, qui dit quoi de qui

copyright Presses Universitaires de France

Excerpt from Choruses from The Rock from Collected Poems, 19091962 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright renewed 1964 by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and Faber and Faber Ltd.

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ISBN 978-0-691-17535-5

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CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

Reputation, reputation, reputation! Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.

OTHELLO, ACT 2, SCENE 3

Dismayed at having lost Othellos favor, Cassio repeats the word reputation three times. Reputations spread uncontrollably, are echoed back and forth, and reproduce themselves in the voices of others. This is why the immortal part of ourselves is also the most fragile and elusive. Iago, who secretly manipulates Cassios reputation in order to destroy him, answers cynically that we should not worry about our reputations because they do not depend on us. Although we are constantly seeking to assure ourselves of the favorable opinion of others, our personal merit often has nothing to do with why we gain or lose our coveted good name.

Reputation is shrouded in mystery. The reasons it waxes or wanes and the criteria that define it as good or bad often appear fortuitous and arbitrary. Yet reputation is also ubiquitous. On the one hand, we care intensely about the opinion of others, sometimes to the point of committing irrational acts in a bootless effort to determine how others see us. On the other hand, we rely on reputation to guide our choice of doctors, newspapers, websites, and even ideas. It seems to insinuate itself into the most intimate recesses of our existence.

This book tries to explain why reputation is so important, personally and socially, as well as how it circulates, how it is transformed and distorted, and how it affects what others say about us. The book raises two fundamental philosophical questions about reputation. First: Can reputation be considered a rational motivation for action? What drives us to defend or improve or repair our reputation? And second: Can reputation be considered a rational justification in the acquisition of information? When, on the basis of reputation, we choose a doctor or a bottle of wine or adopt a point of view are we acting in a rational way?

In searching for answers to these theoretical questions, I have immersed myself in a variety of heterogeneous literatures, spanning virtually all the social sciences. The result is a distinctly kaleidoscopic, not to say eclectic, approach to the topic. By piecing together the fragmentary and partial treatments of reputation that I have discovered in various social science disciplines (sociology, economics, anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and so forth), I have tried to give shape and substance to a highly elusive concept. The result is not a full-scale theory of reputation of the sort philosophers might ideally aspire to produce. It is something more modest, namely a theoretical analysis of the concept of reputation that I have anatomized and reconstructed with an eye on the various mechanisms that govern its functioning. In this sense, the book remains eminently philosophical. I have endeavored to make the conceptual analysis it contains somewhat less sterile by incorporating the findings of social science, as is proper in my own philosophical subdiscipline, social epistemology. Nor have I hesitated to make my theoretical arguments more vivid and comprehensible by the frequent resort to concrete examples drawn from imaginative literature and everyday life.

Admittedly, the methodological eclecticism of the following pages may try the patience of readers who feel more comfortable with theorizing that keeps within well-demarcated disciplinary boundaries. Moving from Proust to economic sociology or from Jane Austen to signaling theory may seem like an unnecessary form of mental gymnastics. It makes your head spin, but does it really take you anywhere?

Readers will judge. But I am convinced that the interdisciplinary approach taken in this book is an effective way of making philosophy into a fruitful discipline, in touch with the burning issues of our times and capable of contributing to the understanding and interpretation of the present by using all the conceptual tools that other sciences (as well as art and literature) make available.

This freedom to roam freely among various fields of knowledge, it should probably be said, is to some extent the result of my personal trajectory. An Italian who immigrated to France where I became immersed in Anglo-Saxon philosophy, I have spent my life straying across intellectual and disciplinary boundaries, often erected and defended by local prejudice and snobbery. My interest in reputation is also a side effect of this passion for trespassing.

It is also worth mentioning that the book before you is replete with quotes from a heterogeneous array of disciplinary cultures and countries. This deliberate pluralism of cited sources reflects my conviction that there is no one objective ranking of intellectual quality. It is only by accepting the cognitive diversity and cultural complexity of our world that we can come to see old problems with new eyes.

fundamental social and cognitive competence whose functioning I analyze and attempt to explain.

is devoted to the theoretical approaches to reputation developed in the different branches of social science that adopt the theory of rational choice. The principal questions addressed are: Can reputation be seen as a rational strategy? And is it a means to other ends or an end in itself?

deals with the communicative aspect of reputation, that is, how it circulates and through which social and linguistic mechanisms it can be stabilized. This is an important question because sometimes a reputation can be ephemeral while at other times it seems set in stone. Gossip, rumors, and informational cascades contribute to the background noise that characterizes the universal human discussion of who did what to whom.

introduces a set of tools from the social sciences, including social capital theory, the theory of networks, and the sociology of hierarchies, to understand how the mechanisms designed to evaluate reputations function and what makes them reliable.

contains a critical analysis of our faith in experts and a presentation of the many biases that influence and distort our perception of the reputation of others.

the economy of esteem defended by Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit and Anthony Appiahs theory of honor.