Standards

Numerous standards surround us: whether they are the legal standards for road safety, the DIN norms for paper sizes, or the implicit standards of professionalism in the workplace. This project aims to clarify three core questions to help us better understand these standards: (1) What are standards? (2) How do standards emerge, and how do they disappear or change? And (3) what determines the societal benefit (or harm) of standards?

Edward Craig's genealogical method can help in answering these questions. We can ask how standards might have arisen by first imagining a world without them. In such a situation, agreements between two or more parties, aiming for a form of consistency or uniformity, would likely be the first to emerge. These agreements establish reliability and trust and therefore prevail, with more people participating. In this sense, standards can be seen as tools for coordinating towards consistency.

The project considers a broad range of examples. These examples show that sanctions are sometimes necessary to enforce standards—a prominent case being emission standards for cars. They also show that standards can sometimes be used for the one-sided benefit of certain groups or can even become tools of authoritarianism—although, on the other hand, democracy also requires standards.

One focus of this project are epistemic standards, i.e., those standards that relate to how we handle information. We expect things like honesty and sincerity from one another, and sometimes transparency. For example, we expect that we only share things that we actually know—the concept of knowledge itself can be seen as a socially constructed standard in this respect. In light of "post-truth" developments, one can also ask to what extent epistemic standards are threatened by decay.

Literature:

E. Fischer und T. Lossau (forthcoming). Flexible or Rigid? A Functionalist Approach to Epistemic Standards. Social Epistemology.

Lossau, T. (2024). Knowledge as a Social Kind. Acta Analytica 39 (2): 223-242.

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