Quotes: Showing Off, Credit, and the Construction of Authorship

Do you know that guy who starts one in three sentences with: “Plato (or Seneca, or Kant) said ...”? The guy who seems to have no thoughts of his own. The guy, in other words, who would make for a pretty impressive parrot, but for a conscious being who supposedly has his own unique personality, he is a bit underwhelming. Well, I am that guy. Or at least I used to be. Now I am confused. This article will attempt to explain why.

What makes that guy annoying is that he seems to use quotes to show off; to signal that he has read a lot, to indicate that he knows the whole canon, to convince you that he is cultivated, and educated.1 Perhaps he even wants to establish that he is better than you. Whatever it may be, I know the feeling it brings with it, and it's annoying. For example, while I love Schopenhauer, he kind of abuses quotes. Sure, he knows more than your average Twitter philosopher—primarily because he had actually read the originals—but this practice is still at best distracting and at worst nettlesome. You probably felt it right now; I didn't even quote Schopenhauer but just the fact that I mentioned him, coupled with the fact that he is not “mainstream”, makes it a bit showy. Perhaps you even thought “we get it, you have read Philosophy, now please stop.”

There are many reasons why quotes are detrimental even on societal level, but on the personal, 1-1 level, they are annoying primarily for two reasons. The first, which we just discussed, is that they evoke neediness which comes from showing off. But there is a second one. If someone quotes other people all the time, then we cannot help but think: “look, if I wanted to know what Aristotle said, I would stay home and read him. Do you have anything to say that is yours?” In other words, as a practice it can dehumanize an interaction by making one party feel as if she's discussing with an encyclopedia, not a person. Especially in our day and age, it can make us feel we're discussing with ChatGPT, and not our friend Joe.

Given all the negatives I just listed, is there any way to salvage quotations? Could there be a reasonable justification, a convincing defense?

As I said in the beginning, I have been that spit-a-quote guy. I do not know if any of what follows will convince you, but I have actually not been doing it to show off. Rather, I have been doing it to attribute credit. To explain that, I need move a step back. What is the the real reason I quote? It is because I think an idea is good and relevant to the discussion. But if that's the reason, I could mention the idea without mentioning who said it. For of course it is not the idea itself that is problematic, but the citation. The problem, however, is that just describing an idea I know is not mine without attributing the source feels morally wrong. The obvious issue is that the originator does not get recognized. A subtler issue is that if I do not mention whose idea it is, people will probably be misled into thinking it is mine. Thus, it is not just that the originator does not get the credit she deserves, but now I am taking that credit. It can be seen, then, as a form of stealing.

Interestingly, we can use a hybrid form of quotation in which we do clarify that we will use a quote, but without actually naming the source. See for example this Reddit comment. The author says “Here's a nice reductive bite from a novel” without actually naming the novel or the author. In this way, we resolve the second issue we mentioned above, thereby avoiding stealing. But the first issue—the fact that original source does not get recognized—is still there. One may argue that not mentioning the original source may have its own merit. For example, this particular commenter explained later why they did it: “I actually considered including the source but decided that the source has become a trite enough reference in pop culture that the quote might weigh a bit more without the title being mentioned.” But that does not solve the moral predicament.

One thing that makes all of this worse is that in practice quotes come in handy too often. As I am sure you have figured out for yourself, ideas that are both novel and good are hard to come by and even harder to come up with. George Seferis, a Greek poet who is also a Nobel leaureate, said that “there is no parthenogenesis in art.” You see, even now, I dropped another quote. Interestingly, I did not know who said this! I know the quote just because it is a common Greek proverb, which has pervaded society. I was about to write “In Greece we say”, but I felt I had to go look it up, to give credit to whoever said it. This need is deep-rooted! By the way, I should say that whenever I attribute credit, I secretly feel very proud. This is because, generally speaking, my memory sucks, and that is especially true for things I do not care about. And I do not care about who said what. It's not important to me personally, I don't have any fixation to personalities or authorship. But I feel happy whenever I am able to give credit both because my memory works, and because I can fulfill that moral imperative.

In any case, I agree with Seferis: there is no parthenogensis. But this only touches part of the problem. You see, this phrase means that we don't come up with ideas ex nihilo. It means ideas do not come from nothing, from some absolute zero. What we think, what we compose, what we draw; they are influenced from something else, whether the result is a modification, a reimagination, an expansion, a critical inquiry, etc.

All the above assume that we contribute somehow. However, our day-to-day discussions are usually so trifle that even that is unnecessary. There are ideas that are relevant to our discussions that need no modification at all to be relevant. We can just throw them out as we received them. Much of our discourse, for better or for worse, consists of recounting tried-and-true, well-trod maxims, principles, conclusions, and even experiences. It does not matter if you are a carpenter or a Philosophy professor. This is how it goes. You may be misled by what you see online, but a normal conversation can get you back on track with everyday life.

In fact, usually our everyday discussions have no other reason to exist other than to discuss. In our communication-deprived times, we often communicate not to communicate something, but simply to communicate. Novelty is way too low on the list of priorities. Can you remember the last time you hugged somebody and your mind's primary occupation was to do something novel? It's a rare occurrence. We hug each other because we like hugging each other. Similarly, many of us discuss because we like to discuss. In such cases, a quote is akin to an automotive lubricant: just as the latter's whole purpose is to keep the engine going, so is the use of the former; it just keeps the conversation going. As a combination of these factors, most of the ideas that at least I find helpful to bring into a discussion are not new, and they are not mine. Thus, the moral imperative to cite comes up all the time.

Interlude: Prior Work, Quoting, and Novelty

The more one reads, the more ideas she comes across.2 This has two consequences. First, the more ideas she has heard of, the higher the probability that one of them will be relevant in any given discussion. As a result, the more one reads, the more she feels the need (or utility) to quote, irrelevant of whether she wants to show off.

The other consequence is subtler. One line of argument claims that the more one has read, the harder it is to innovate in the space of ideas. However, it is important to account for the personal perspective. To understand that, consider someone who has not read a lot. It is easy for him to come up with new ideas, or so the argument goes, simply because he has not come across many of them. For example, in a discussion about democracy, he may come up with the idea: “what if, instead of electing magistracies, we assigned offices by sortition; that is, randomly?” Well, if this particular person has not read about Classical Athens, this idea he just came up with will be new. Alas, it will be new to him, not to the history of ideas, not to the whole of humanity. I am not going to get into the weeds of whether this idea is an invention or a discovery, because in either case, the idea has existed to people's minds for thousands of years. It's just that this particular person has not heard of it. Thus, novelty may indeed be easier if you have not read a lot, but only with regards to your knowledge.

But what about “true” novelty? “True” here means that one comes up with a novel idea that is globally novel, meaning, that it has never existed. Of course, it is impossible to know what everyone has ever thought, and not just on the individual level. Not even the society as a whole can know that. Thus, “true” novelty means that something is novel for a large number of people (and it is hard to draw the line). In that sense, the opposite of what we discussed is probably true: the more one has read, the easier it is to come up with something novel, for the simple reason that they are better equipped to judge if it's “truly” novel (i.e., their individual judgement that something is novel has a high probability to become a universal judgement). This argument has been confirmed empirically as most of the brilliant minds in the history of humanity—that is, the people who innovated the most—had read quite a bit (whether that is Karikó Katalin or Aristotle).

However, there is a trap, known to most PhD students: one should resist the temptation to read prior work—i.e., to judge whether their idea is novel—until they have formulated their idea more or less fully. This is because prior work can lead someone to existing paths (e.g., (mis)interpretations), thereby canceling any novelty.

In short, the justification for quoting—or more precisely, for mentioning who said the quote—rests on credit. But the very notion of credit cannot exist without the notion of authorship. For credit is nothing more than the recognition of authorship. Besides, if there is no distinct author (whether that is a single person, an array of people, a legal person, or even a whole organization), who would we credit and how could that make any sense?

Naturally, then, the question we should ask ourselves is the following: why is authorship important? Note that I take it as a given that authorship is important today. There is endless evidence for that. For instance, authorship quarrels (who will be the first, second, ... author in a paper) have been the source of much sorrow in scientific labs, and not unjustifiably: authorship literally determines careers. If you go into the academic job market, the first question you need to answer is: what have you done? But it is not just the academic world. In the industry too, authorship determines promotions, bonuses, who climbs the ladder, etc. These decisions often come down to who came up with a product idea, a proposal, a slogan, etc. The authorship's importance is further confirmed by the fact that it can have negative effects too. After all, why didn't George Elliot use her original name?

Clearly, then, authorship is important. But should it be, and has it always been? Now these questions are truly important because in school, in college, in your job; pretty much, everywhere in the modern world, the importance of authorship is taken as some kind of axiom. I remember that when I started my PhD, another PhD student who was also just starting his PhD gave a talk at an internal seminar. At some point he used someone else's image without attributing the source. I should mention that for academics an image is usually much less important than, say, a paper. Yet, a professor became pissed (to say the least). He then lectured us about giving recognizing authorship (i.e., giving credit).

We should note two things here. First, there are legal reasons to recognize authorship. In many cases that matter, not giving credit can have legal consequences. So, a lecture on crediting others could be based on the fact that if you don't, things can suddenly go south for you. But this was not the basis of the professor's lecture at all. Second, nobody questioned whether recognizing authorship should be important. Neither the student, nor the professor. More specifically, the professor's lecture offered no argument on why you should recognize authorship. To him, and to everyone in the room, it was obvious you should do it. You probably have felt something similar, for example, if you have lied to someone and they found out. What may have happened then is that they lectured you on the fact that your lying was wrong. Well you knew that already, thank you very much, but this is how reprimands go sometimes.

But the point is that, similar to lying, asking why authorship recognition is important seemed like a preposterous question (and this is probably why the professor did not even bother defend it). If he asked it, people would take him as either an idiot, or an asshole, or perhaps they would think he has Tourette's.

I'm not going to answer whether authorship should be important, and how much, because I don't have an answer for myself yet. My goal is to reach for wisdom. To that end, I will answer the other question: has it always been important? I hope to convince you that asking the question is not so stupid. Here is why: no, in fact authorship has not always been (so) important. This revelation was presented to me by the book The Construction of Authorship. The book begins with a killer essay that gives general arguments and evidence that authorship is a recent construction. Then, most of the other essays talk about specific instances throughout history where authorship was not relevant. But there are even more fundamental questions this book tries to answer which we usually take as a given.

More fundamental of all: what is authorship? It turns out this is not as simple as it seems. For example, to say that the author of some work is the creator of this work does not capture the real weight of authorship. For example, say I draw an exact replica of Mona Lisa. I am in fact the creator of that painting—the replica—but I am not the author of Mona Lisa. Authorship hinges on something far deeper than just an artifact, material or immaterial. Rather, it refers to the essence of any work. The author, in other words, of a work is the originator of the essence of that work, and that essence is always a notion, a concept. The essence of Mona Lisa is not the particular material painting, just as the essence of Acropolis is not the concrete marble. Their essence is far deeper and usually unexplainable. We can now take a look at how the book traces a definition of authorship (p. 16):

The notion that the writer is a special participant in the production process—the only one worthy of attention—is of recent provenience. It is a by-product of the Romantic notion that significant writers break altogether with tradition to create something utterly new, unique—in a word, “original.” First sketched out in Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), this new way of thinking about writing was elaborated by an emerging profession of writers from Herder and Goethe to Coleridge and Wordsworth, who postulated in his Essay, Supplementary to the Preface:

Of genius the only proof is, the act of doing well what is worthy to be done, and what was never done before: Of genius in the fine arts, the only infallible sign is the widening the sphere of human sensibility, for the delight, honor, and benefit of human nature. Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe: or, if that be not allowed, it is the application of powers to objects on which they had not before been exercised, or the employment of them in such a manner as to produce effects hitherto unknown.

What I call the essence Wordsworth called “a new element into the intellectual universe.” But it is the same thing. Now that we at least know what authorship is, we can move to its appearence in history. The previous quote claims that our contemporary notion of authorship is recent. Most of the chapter, and most of the book, is filled with evidence that backs up this claim. I will quote only one which I find particularly neat (p. 17):3

From the Middle Ages right down through the Renaissance new writing derived its value and authority from its affiliation with the texts that preceded it, its derivation rather than its deviation from prior texts. For St. Bonaventura, writing in the thirteenth century, there were four ways of making a book, and none of them involved the kind of solitary origination which Edward Young sought to promote:

A man might write the works of others, adding and changing nothing, in which case he is simply called a ‘scribe’ (scriptor). Another writes the work of others with additions which are not his own; and he is called a ‘compiler’ (compilator). Another writes both others’ work and his own, but with others’ work in principal place, adding his own for purposes of explanation; and he is called a ‘commentator’ (commentator). . . . Another writes both his own work and others’ but with his own work in principal place adding others’ for purposes of confirmation; and such a man should be called an ‘author’ (auctor).

I will offer another piece of evidence that does not appear in this book: folk music. To the best of my knowledge, what follows holds for most folk music from around the world, but I have studied Greek folk music. In Greek folk or traditional music, authorship has historically been unknown, or more precisely, non-existent. The distinction is important and notable sources on the subject do not make it. For example, Ronald D. Cohen, on p.1, point (2) in his book Folk Music: The Basics, defines folk music partly by the very fact that its authorship is unknown, without making the distinction between unknown and non-existent. Nonetheless, to say that authorship is unknown implies, first that the concept existed at the time of creation, and second that a recognized author was identified at the time, but then somewhow got lost. But actually, at least for Greek folk music, the notion of authorship did not exist; there was no dedicated author. The notion of authorship was as foreign to these folks as the notion of capitalism to Ancient Greeks.

In fact, so public has been that kind of creation that such songs are still called δημοτικά, which comes from δῆμος (demos). The very word tells us that these are songs that belong to and originate from the public. This is how Greece has enjoyed music for centuries. What is perhaps more interesting is that, as far as we know,4 these songs did have an originator, in the sense that it was primarily one person who wrote most of the lyrics and music. Then, others took them and modified them to suit current needs, current issues of the community, etc. Still, nobody thought that this original author should get any special recognition, and that included the author himself.

As we reach the end, I would like to point out that perhaps the idea of authorship is interwined with the idea of private property. I do not think authorship would exist if the notion of “this is mine and only mine, and this is yours and only yours” did not exist. Perhaps this is where our need to recognize authorship originates from: we want to recognize what others own because we want others to recognize what we and only we own. In fact, this origin may be true even if contemporary manifestations of authorship do not imply strict ownership. For example, let's say that we release something to the public domain. In that sense, then, we do not own it. Nevertheless, we may still like it when people recognize that it was us who created it.