Academic Reputation, or Voluntary Epistemic Servitude

This chapter presents case studies of the way reputations are built at the university. If there is an institution that feeds on reputation, it is the academy. Prestige, notoriety, standing, and reputation reign supreme within its halls. Professors and scholars are not only more motivated by symbolic rewards than by economic interest. They also spend a great deal of time designing institutions whose primary purpose is the creation, maintenance, and evaluation of each other's reputation and eminence. Such rankings are sometimes even treated as if they were the most dependable hallmarks of the truth itself. The chapter shows how the very idea of an academic reputation changed radically after new systems for calibrating reputations came into their own.

Assessing Uncertainty

This chapter introduces a set of tools from the social sciences, including social capital theory, the theory of networks, and the sociology of hierarchies. It explains how the mechanisms designed to evaluate reputations function and what makes them reliable. It also focuses on the assessment and reliability of reputations. People emit signals meant to convince others of the genuineness of their reputations. Similarly, all things, objects, ideas, and indeed everything that points beyond appearances to hidden qualities, emit signals that inform people more or less credibly that certain qualities really exist. The chapter also explains that reputation is the result not only of strategic positioning but also of the way in which such positioning is perceived by others.

Is Reputation a Means or an End?

This chapter is devoted to the theoretical approaches to reputation developed in the different branches of social science that adopt the theory of rational choice. It answers the principal questions of whether reputation can be seen as a rational strategy or as a means to other ends or an end in itself. The chapter explores the various ways in which cultivating one's reputation, given the costs it imposes and the benefits it confers, can be a rational strategy. It examines how several most prominent social scientists approach the questions on reputation. It also treats explanations that synthesize evolutionary theory with rational-choice theory only as “theoretical models” useful for illuminating the conditions for the possibility of the emergence of a social trait, such as reputation.

How I See Myself Seen

This chapter introduces the idea of reputation as a social ego, a second self that guides actions sometimes even against interests. It analyzes the functioning of the management of social self as a fundamental social and cognitive competence. All people have two egos, two selves. These parallel and distinguishable identities make up who people are and profoundly affect how they behave. One is subjectivity, consisting of proprioceptive experiences, the physical sensations registered in the body. The other is reputation, a reflection of people's selves that constitutes social identity and makes how they see themselves seen integral to self-awareness. At the beginning of the twentieth century, American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley called the second ego the “looking-glass self.” This second ego is woven over time from multiple strands, incorporating how people think others around them perceive and judge them.

Experts and Connoisseurs

This chapter includes case studies of the way reputations are built in the wine market. It explains that wine provides a paradigm for the role played by reputation in introducing novices to a new domain of taste. It observes adult novices in encountering for the first time a new cultural sphere that requires them to make value judgments. By restricting the discussion of newcomers to adults, the chapter avoids the kind of biases associated with deference to intellectual authority in the education of children. Adults being schooled for the first time in the world of wines find themselves facing a cultural domain strongly structured by landmarks about which they initially know nothing.

Information and Reputation

This chapter contains case studies of the epistemology of reputation and its implications through the Web. It talks about how people use the reputation of both humans and things to extract information from the world around them. This chapter provides a “cognitive” approach to reputation, focusing on how it is used to understand surroundings. It explores the epistemological role of reputation in three pivotal areas of cognitive life: the circulation of information, the training of taste, and the construction of knowledge. When people first come into contact with a new domain of learning, their access to facts is inevitably determined by the opinions, values, and preferences of others.

Homo Comparativus

This chapter proposes the replacement of the idea of homo economicus as the ontologically fundamental unit of social science with the idea of homo comparativus. It explains the claim that reality can be perceived only through evaluative comparisons, eroding the traditional distinction between description and evaluation. The chapter also discusses and criticizes other philosophical approaches that put symbolic values similar to reputation at the center of the analysis of human action, including the economy of esteem defended by Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit and Anthony Appiah's theory of honor. Honoring others is always a double-edged sword. Acts of deference signal something about both those who defer and those to whom deference is paid. This chapter talks about the measure of social consensus on the practices and norms of according esteem if people are to strike a proper balance between the need to satisfy personal preferences when granting respect to others and the demands of social conformity that drives people to recognize others in order to make themselves more “acceptable” to the peer group to which they belong.

“Somebody Told Me,” or How Reputations Spread

This chapter deals with the communicative aspect of reputation. It talks about how reputation circulates and through which social and linguistic mechanisms it can be stabilized. 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. The chapter examines the essentially communicative dimension of reputation, such as its existence not only in the eyes of others but within the cascade of communicated words and speeches that others share among themselves. Reputations can occasionally be consciously and successfully manipulated. But this does little to reduce the general anxiety and uncertainty stemming from an ungovernable transmission and propagation of reputations, the risks of defamation, and the difficulty of restoring a reputation once it has been blackened by rumors and gossip.

Reputation in Democracies

This chapter contains an attempt to understand the implications of reputation for epistemic life and public decisions. It explains the way people think about themselves and their role as informed citizens must adapt to a certain transformation. People need to develop new tools to govern their actions and the circulation of their opinions. The chapter connects the theme of the movie “Birdman” with reputation, which implies that what people say about others and about everything that exists provides the only available window through which we people come to know themselves and recognize the world. Most political and institutional decisions today are made in an irresponsible manner because based on the uncritical acceptance of potentially spurious indicators announcing that the reputation of a certain person or organization, for instance, is merited, even when no one has bothered to examine how such a conclusion was reached. The chapter ends by examining the impact of specific reputational signals and their power of seduction.

The Paradox of the “Top Specialist” and the Heuristics of Reputation

This chapter contains a critical analysis of people's faith in experts. It presents many biases that influence and distort people's perception of the reputation of others. It also examines the heuristics that influence people's perceptions and lead them to classify accurately or inaccurately a person or object within a social network. Reputation can never be taken for granted and always creates uncertainty and anxiety. This is because social position is always precarious and can never be objectively determined. The chapter also distinguishes the “good” from the “bad” uses of reputation in order to develop a proper epistemology of reputation. The objective is to identify a set of normative and descriptive instruments that can be used to classify the heuristics and establish some sort of criteria, along the lines of the classical epistemological tradition in order to distinguish between the rules of inference that place too much or too little trust in the reputations of others.