To appreciate where I am coming from, or to better understand what I am trying to convey to you - I'm not interested in solving the Single-Sign-On (SSO) problem, or building another SAML or Federated Identity solution - as most vendors are doing a great job of this already. I am trying to understand, what are the necessary concepts required to build a new social institution that is built upon an alternative identity.
'A new social instituition?! An alternative theory of identity?!', you ask. 'That's pretty crazy!!'.
Well so be it! To paraphrase a tired cliche, to better understand the box you're in, figure out what it looks like on the outside and understand the table it sits on.
I came upon this thinking, when one of my public sector colleagues made the very intriguing statement several months back that 'we have an implicit identity management scheme throughout our systems of government'. In Canada, we have formalized privacy as an 'institution' by means of legislation and the creation of an Agent of Parliament, namely the Privacy Commissioner. So the question came to mind - what if we formally institutionalized identity - what would it look like? Would we have an Identity Commissioner? What principles would this institution have? And, what powers? You have to think about all this stuff, even before you start designing systems that support the institution.
As I've been thinking about this question, I've found that Kripke's writings are shedding a different light on the identity management problem and providing useful avenues of thought.
I haven't yet tackled, Kripke's original work, Naming and Necessity (I have to buy it from Amazon or check it out of University Library, once I find my alumni card). But I have found several derivative works on the web that have helped me immensely, in particular this essay by John Burgess from Princeton. Burgess does a particulary good job of describing the shortcomings of the Descriptive Theory of Reference and its band-aid, the Cluster Theory. These two theories fall down when taking into account the problems of error and ignorance. In a nutshell, if I knew George Bush, but thought he was the 41st President of the United States (his dad), or didn't know that he was the 43rd Prez, does this diminish the reference that I have of him? The fundamental shortcoming of the descriptive theory, is that no matter how well or completely I describe someone, these descriptions still falls short of the absolute reference I desire.
Kripke offers an alternative view - one based upon the historical chain - the causal event chain, that begins with 1) baptism - an act of ostension (picking out) and bestowing a name (the baptiser being the first user of this name) and, 2) transmission, the subsequent use of this name by later users to pick out the same thing that was baptized. This posting is getting long - I'll elaborate historical chain concept in a subsequent posting
So, in building my alternative theory (enough to develop a new social institution, that is) this is the concept inventory so far:
- Social Actions, and Social Relations, courtesy Max Weber,
- Absolute Reference and Identity, courtesy my own musings
- Historical Chain, consisting of baptism and transmission, courtesy Kripke.
And, to act out this theory, we have our IDM Dramatis Personae, consisting of Alice, Bob, their friends, enemies, etc.
'til next time
Any comments on this blog or welcome or mailto: - tim.bouma @ sympatico.ca (only human-generated mail is welcome)
Tim Bouma
3 comments:
I've read through Burgess' paper and still need to digest it a bit, but here are some initial thoughts:
- the problem of homonyms
- the problem of aliases
- the problem of atmoistic naming
I'll try to return here and re-post some explication on these issues as soon as I get a chance, but there is one other idea to put down here too.
In recent work on building the digital identity, I've read through some narrative theory--that is: if the digital subject is a written subject, should we not be considering the role of the narrative in the contruction of self?
I've gone through a good text on this called Narratology by Mieke Bal [2nd. edition, UofT Press, Toronto. 1997. ISBN 0-8020-7806-0]. Bal talks about how we write ourselves and works with Actors, Text, Narrative text, and the fabula. "A story is a fabula that is presented in a certain manner. A fabula is a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors...(p.5).
More later.
S.B.
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