The Department of Philosophy presents the Graham Kennedy Memorial Lecture

Christopher Ba Thi Nguyen (The University of Utah)

"Scoring Systems and Mechanized Values"

Thursday, September 19, 2024 at 4:00 pm

Dunning Hall, Room 11

Scoring systems set targets, and serve as the basis for evaluations. We find mechanical scoring systems aplenty in both games and institutional life – in all the rankings and metrics which surround us. Such systems have a typical function: to encourage convergence on a singular evaluation. What is gained, and what is lost, when we make our evaluation procedures more mechanical? I offer an account of “mechanical” procedures, drawing on the philosophy of law and Science and Technology studies. Mechanical procedures offers us gains in transparency, accessibility, and consistency. But, at the same time, mechanical procedures deprive us of certain forms of discretion and sensitivity in judgment. When we adopt such mechanical procedures into our evaluation procedures, we bring those same trade-offs into our valuing process. Mechanical scoring systems enable greater fungibility of evaluators and auditors, but to do so, they need to re-format the evaluation procedure into mechanically repeatable terms. They encourage us to value what is easiest to count, using scalable institutional techniques. This suggests that there is a price to the demand for public reason, a price that is perhaps clearest in our experience of the insensitivity of metrics.