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Multiple Reference and the Reconstruction of Co-Experience: A Generative Relational Account of Recommendation Procedure

Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Institutions that select people by reference almost always ask for more than one. This paper takes that requirement seriously and asks what it is for. On the account developed here, the shared experience between a candidate and a referee is not an object that either party holds and one of them writes down. It is generated within their relation, and each account of it is a projection taken from one relational position. Asking for several references is therefore an attempt to reconstruct an object from its presentations, in the way that what identies an attractor is what remains invariant across trajectories. The institution is doing something structurally correct and doing it badly. Four consequences follow for the design of the procedure. What matters among sources is independence of relational position rather than the number of letters. What carries information is what survives across projections rather than their average or their maximum. Symbolic authority accrues to those whose time is scarce, so an eminent referee supplies a thin projection, and weighting by authority is accordingly the least suitable weighting for a reconstruction. And the calibration of individual referees, which no institution maintains, is a precondition for correcting the distortion each introduces. Two failures of procedure are then identied: evaluators collapse onto the single most authoritative account, which discards the reconstruction and returns the decision to one projection; and the candidate, who is one of the two producers of the experience, contributes no account at all. The paper proposes that the candidate's structured account be collected as a required source at the time references are requested. It closes with the injustice that survives every correction it proposes, including a paradox in which contesting an account may destroy the relation that generated the standing to contest it. The paper's central empirical premise, that divergence among sources carries information, is contested in the literature it draws on, and the paper argues for it rather than assuming it.
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.7359559
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204438920
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