Reaction to AUTHORITY HEURISTICS

Professor G raises a big question in his article Authority Heuristics, which he discuss the heuristics distance may cause distortion when we seek to know a kind of foreign law, because our prior knowledge would effect the result what we want to explore. In Prof. G’s words, “This knowledge-shaping (or “cognitive”) role is of fundamental important, because it conditions all knowledge of foreign law.”

This is a big problem, for I understand the cognizing method of human being is no more than comparing and contrasting, except new born babies. All of the knowledge acquiring, all understanding must be based on prior knowledge. People compare or contrast their prior knowledge and experiences with the new one, and then shape and form the new experiences and the new knowledge. It is something like that every body has a piece of color paper, when they apply new color on it, it will show different result, due to their foundation color is different. The basic color is the prior knowledge; the resulting color is the knowledge what the people get. It is obvious that the result is neither the prior one nor the new knowledge, everyone has a unique idea, for everyone has a different mind structure with different knowledge back ground. So, Prof. G’s observation is really sharp, unveiling a truth.

But, how could we solve this impossible settling problem? How to narrow the distortion cause by the heuristics distance in Authority Documents? This is what the article interested me. Prof. G is like a God flying in the sky, but most important for him is to land steadily and safely on the ground, providing a solution for the fact he has unveiled. As a jurisconsult, Prof. G should be realistic.

I reach Prof.G’s solution of the problem after following his statements and discussions and describing about the problem in the main part of the essay, in a smaller part at the end of the article, Prof. G suggests a solution is to pay more attention to the user of a kind of foreign law in its legal systems. This answer could not really satisfy me. I could see Pro.G lands down on the ground with its tip toe from the God’s sky. And, I am worrying about! The user of the foreign law, how to identify or evaluate the user, this is another cognitive process, and it is unavoidable to be effected by prior experience and knowledge and results another heuristics distance. What can we do with it?

After reading this article, I finally find it is lucky that there are still a lot of items in this world, such as music, painting, art works, and anybody could communicate and reach to a same destination through the same work piece without language. I believed that there are some thing in human being’s world could forward their information directly without language. But law would never be this story!