I’m straining to remember my phil. professors, but one sticks out in my mind. I had posed a question that perplexed him in class. Class ends and I head to the restroom. He follows me in and stands right next to me at the porcelain. I go to wash my hands and there he is beside me again, washing too. I turn to walk out and he shoots a balled up paper towel across my bow into the trash then cuts me off and exits the room first.

Well, it’s a conversation-starter if you have an answer, and a conversation-stopper if you don’t.

This is a perfect meta-example of the type of behavior that Holbo is trying to analyze! rich wins the thread…

Daniel Davies: “Help” appears to be a verb in the “superman conditional” tense here; as in, to simply have “help the people of Iran overthrow their corrupt regime” on your “to do” list would make a lot of sense if you were Superman, or God Almighty, but anyone else probably ought to make it a bit more specific than that. Care to make any slightly more concrete suggestions?

Is Daniel Davies’s reply a conversation-stopper or a conversation-starter?

I took it to be a conversation starter because it made me laugh. But I think the authorial persona that is Daniel Davies in this thread might well claim that it is just undersocialized rudeness…

Holbo offers a good post whose central premise is not so much flawed as it is entirely incorrect, and ultimately Holbo’s willingness to deploy what amounts to a rationalization undermines any productive ends he hopes to accomplish.

To engage one’s peers in a willfully disingenuous and decidedly lazy manner is not “normal,” it is common. That it is common hardly makes it appropriate or acceptable. Such an approach is also quite commonly intellectually barren of any insight into the impact of linguistic functioning, or the social rules that dominate in other disciplines or in the world in general. Few people abide someone who starts with the assumption that you must be wrong; most people have great respect for open-minded folks. Folks who convey that they know they are dealing with peers and equals and behave accordingly.

Folks who start by trying to understand what you are saying, engage respectfully based on the facts at hand, and assume that you might be right until proven otherwise. And proving otherwise—in healthy conversations—is not the point: arriving at a mutually held and superior understanding is the goal. To reduce ‘being right’, to possessing—-to owning the Truth at the expense of those around you is a defeat, not moral or interpersonal one, but an intellectual defeat. This is verified by the fact that this issue remains in contention. To the extent philosphers express contempt for, well, anyone else, rather than doing the easy work of treating others with respect and rather than doing the hard work of understanding the concept and issue at hand before presuming to knock it down—- to that same extent they will be challenged or ignored or critiqued.

For that reason, philosophers have found themselves increasingly alone. The discipline’s lack of insight or discpline regarding the behavior of its practitioners has hurt the profession.

Philosophy has become it’s own disciplinary solipsism.

The only arguments it can win are those that it holds with itself.

Here’s the thing: Holbo identifies ‘rules’ or a disciplinary ‘culture’ in which cutting down various arguments (as opposed to engaging with them in good faith) is ‘ok’, because it is “normal.” Holbo’s premise is false: it is—-it may be common, but it is not normal. (Note: I’ll give due and detailed attention to Holbo’s nuances … either a) soon, or b) when he extends the same intellectual agility to those who may disagree with him.)

Standard linguistic scholarship points out that groups, cultures, various social situations—- and academic disciplines—- all have their own social and linguistic rules that hold sway within the group or unit.

So obviously in any inter-disciplinary discussion, the social rules of philosophy do not prevail. Operant behavior is going to be governed by common courtesy generally, prevailing academic rules of engagement, or some negotiated set of social rules either generated on the fly by capable human beings or set down formally by the less socially ept. Establishing a sort of a philoso-botanical understanding of what constitutes valid evidence, legal ‘moves’ in the game, and standards of respect for one’s peers.

The degree of dissatisfaction among philosophers may stem from the inability of philosphy assert itself as arbiter of those very rules. The degree to which philosophy has tried to deploy its own rules in these discussions accounts, I think, for the loss of respect among other disciplines.

The central issue though is not respect, nor anyone’s hurt feelings; it is the reliance on a refusal to adequately understand what the other person is saying, before presuming to be in a position to knock down their premise or argument or conclusion. The open disrespect and attack standard violates the rules of engagement in the social realm, in any other academic discpline, in the social realm generally—-and in philosophy departments where any non-dysfuctional rules, at least, prevail. And it really displays a lack of integrity.

There is a big difference between being a jerk and being a philosopher; the obvious distinction being jerks can tell the difference between the two, and philosphers cannot.

Now, make no mistake: when Holbo states that To be knocked around in this way is par for the course, so if you give a talk and you really get your premise kicked out from under you, it isn’t much worse that getting clobbered in some game. It’s not fun… he mistakes the dynamic in play in both philosophical and interdisciplinary settings. (Papering over power relationships, willfully disingenuous ‘moves’, and overt hostility, among others…) Here’s the key: I enjoy getting clobbered in tackle football and I enjoy a rough-&-tumble intellectual argument/debate. What is objectionable is setting one set of rules and then operating by a different set of rules. Setting up a framework and then objecting to students taking issue with that framework of analysis. Or asserting that it is ‘normal’ to attack one’s peers premise/conclusion in wholly dishonest terms.

The assertion that this is ‘normal’ is not a defense. Further, Holbo displaces on whom the onus lies in saying that “[a]nd– most important – because it’s normal, there isn’t any extra psychic baggage of a ‘why the hell is this perfect stranger trying to deprive me of every last vestige of my intellectual dignity?’ sort.” The psychic baggage belongs to the philosopher: some students are psychologically predisposed to play by those rules, others adapt or are indoctrinated into the culture. But within the discipline, widespread behavior does not in and of itself qualify as evidence of healthy, respectful or even valid interaction.

Most important, Holbo’s surreally self-serving idea that anyone unfamiliar or uncomfortable with philosophy’s self-defeating debating style must somehow carry “extra psychic baggage” is plainly, openly false. What IS true is that any normal person confronted with someone who clearly IS “trying to deprive me of every last vestige of my intellectual dignity?”—-Holbo’s words, not mine—-is obviously naturally going to react with signs of dissastifaction ranging from open irritation to verbalized objection regarding content and behavior to walking away from the conversation and from philosophy as a discipline. —-

Holbo is half right/half wrong in noting that “Philosophers asking each other these sorts of apparently mock-innocent ‘but isn’t your position just obviously false?’ questions actually are innocent.” Three points go to the core here: a) other disciplines question the positions of their peers all the time without using loaded language or highly personalized constructions or such an arrogant demeanor (so no points there); b) “just obviously”? Really? No basis is offered for the “but,” the “obviously” or for the “false.” Had the interlocutor or Holbo’s sentence started off with the question, the alternative interpretation, or even offered added data, it would be another thing entirely. But here, we have a flat assertion in which wielding power relations comes before any valid contribution to the discussion. One that not only assumes truth not in evidence yet, but does so first at the expense of one’s colleague, and only secondarily bulldozes the proposition at hand (rather than engaging it with integrity, I might add). Granted it was a mere example—-but it is one of Holbo’s choosing.

And abstracting a proposition from real-world data/cases/interactions is step one in avoiding the obligation to grapple with actual situations in the actual real world. Which is another reason some philosophers-cum-’environmental ethicists’ have so much trouble with the course material: divorcing discussion from the real world renders philosophers less able to handle interdisciplinary debate or achieve understandings or insights that contribute meaninfully to authentic debates relevant to our lives.

So when Holbo says, “Philosophers asking each other … . questions actually are innocent,” it is not so innocent. It’s a way of policing the discipline, for starters, rather than thinking with clarity or doing the hard work of extending one’s intellect and rules framework in the service of a more constructive and respectful discussion.

Granted, Holbo appears to get the discipline-specific culture: “Now this isn’t a rude thing to say, in philosophy. Because it is actually not perceived as an attempt to force the speaker to prove that he is not a complete idiot.” But does Holbo get the obvious conclusion? That outside of philosophy, “attempt[s] to force the speaker to prove that he is not a complete idiot” will be perceived, accurately and rightly, as the hostile work of a total a$$hole. I deploy the technical term here to make a point. The onus is on the questioner, not the speaker.

And Holbo’s construction reveals the slip in the rules governing the circumstance that is at issue in this whole debate: initially we have two colleagues discussing a topic distinct from the two discussants. Closer inspection indicates that the goal of the challenger is not to understand his/her colleague, but rather to shoe that “the speaker [cannot] prove that he is not a complete idiot.” There is a dual agenda at work here; that it is common practice and viewed much as a fish views water is of no relevance to whether it has utility or integrity or whether it displays minimal respect for students, peers or colleages. Or anyone else.

Holbo has explained what philosphers do to each other—-and says it is not disrespectful.

That lends considerable cover for teachers/philosophers who are quite willing to behave in a hostile manner. It provides a wide-ranging excuse for philosopher who dont’ want to alter their behavior when they know they’re in a different social/disciplinary situation—-and thus consciously display a hostile or arrogant demeanor towards perfectly valid and perfectly clear statements and propositions.

Just as there are plenty of folks who don’t know the difference between normal and hostile debate—- plenty do. Many notice philosophers’ pattern—- accurately identify it as hostile—- and turn away. We aren’t the folks with baggage.

My flawed effort would be something like the following. Philosophical questions tend to have the following features, which set them apart from questions in other academic fields.
(1) they are—to borrow Donald Rumsfeld’s celebrated phrasing—‘unknown unknowns’: until you attend carefully to the question you don’t realise that you didn’t know the answer
(2) they have a fundamental place in your system of beliefs (or an important bit of it) and worrying about them can threaten your confidence in other things you know (or knew), possibly things you know in a professional capacity
(3) the difficulty in answering them can present itself as a difficulty in knowing how to go about answering them.

The natural upshot of 1 and 2 is that many people find philosophy extremely annoying. The upshot of 3 is that many people conclude that there is no right or wrong way of doing it, and so anyone’s opinion on these things must be as good as anyone else’s. Somebody who suggests, contrariwise, that mine might not actually hold up every bit as well as hers must be out to insult me and is obviously a first-order jerk.

I think that analytic philosophy is much more open than it was in, say, the 60s. That said, it almost has to be less open than, say, history. History has a relatively accessible subject matter. If I, a non-historian, want to read through a whole lot of medieval chronicles, town records, etc., I can; and if I then want to start thinking them through and wondering about particular aspects of them, I can do that too. It is, of course, especially useful if I have training in some different but related discipline, like philology, which I can bring to bear.

In analytic philosophy, by contrast, the subject-matter is sometimes right in front of your nose—questions like ‘how do I know anything?’—but one needs to somehow see this philosophically, which not everyone does off the top of his or her head; and sometimes it’s something much more recondite, like Quine’s indeterminacy of translation, which is very hard even to see, let alone to understand, without a bunch of training. It’s much less accessible, I would think.

This is compounded by the fact that a lot of people have ideas about what philosophy is that do not describe philosophy as presently practiced in philosophy departments, which leads them, sometimes, either to think that we do things that we don’t, and at other times to neglect the possibility that we might have done something that we did. It makes for a lot of miscommunication.

(I work with a number of scientists. When I encounter new ones, they often assume that philosophy, as one of the humanities, is just a lot of emoting, expressing “my point of view” without arguments, etc.; and they often assume that ‘interdisciplinary work’ will consist in them teaching us stuff, because, of course, we don’t have any stuff to teach them. I work on moral responsibility, a topic that scientists routinely say dumb things about. I’m sure I say lots of dumb things about science, but I normally know that there’s something out there that I don’t know. That they often do not make the corresponding assumption about philosophy sometimes leads to miscommunication.)

Or is it more the relevance of the issues themselves? The ‘puzzle-and-problem’ surely defines the issue pretty well, and if that is accepted, the way it’s framed/defined would seem to make the analytical approach entirely appropriate. Maybe this is just a question of what counts as the ‘issue’ – I think (here as elsewhere) an example that could be agreed on (by all concerned) as a central case would probably be very helpful. Say – this: David Miller: Overcoming the Justificationist Addiction (picked arbitrarily from links in wikipedia and not one I’m familiar with).

So in this case (or another), what is the issue, what is the problem/puzzle that’s potentially a poor way to approach the issue, what are the alternative ways the issue might (according to the humanist panel members) have been approached?

Salient @100:
[re: if you have the bad luck to be proposing something to a row of people who are inclined to find your whole intellectual style to be one big presupposition of confusion, you are going to have to work extra hard to get through to them]

the extra work you are going to have to do is some form of conscientious indoctrination:“This is how you should think about this.’

But following on from above, if it’s not so a much a problem of the style/method as the overall relevance or interestingness, so our imaginary generic humanists think ‘so what’? rather than ‘analytic philosophy is not the way to approach this admittedly interesting problem’, the task may be effectively to recommend what is basically a piece of pure research with no clear application (outside the discipline/domain/research prorgamme). It’s possible that our imaginary panel just tend to think, of basically any philosophical issue you care to raise, however general and however well the analytical approach to it is advocated, that it just isn’t worth doing. That would be awkward.

In either case, might it be an idea for philosophers to compile a portfolio of cases in which a philosophical advance or insight has actually led to some particular identifiable but initially unobvious ‘downstream’ theoretical benefit? And (gulp) how feasible would that be? If it could be done, should/could a suitably analogous example be chosen to go into the intro of each research proposal? Sounds a bit ridiculous really, but…

Or is some more general campaign of ‘education’ or publicity needed? Or do analytic philosophers just have to hunker down and hope for a change in trends/attitudes in the humanities? And is there anything in the possibility that at least in some cases, humanists are not the best (or most sympathetic anyway) people to judge a philosophical proposal? Do (other) humanities have less use for/acceptance of ‘pure’ research?

[And why do my ref. numbers to other posts keep going wrong? I can only suppose previous posts are passing moderation and being inserted into the list. They should really be assigned a number when they reserve a place in the posting order. An occasional gap in the numbers wouldn’t matter. Tut.]

In that sense, historians are very open to outside influence. There have been a lot of influential works on history written by philosophers, anthropologists, literary scholars, scientists etc, and after some ritual trashing of their historical failings, we normally accept at least that even if their answers are wrong, they have raised some very important questions. On the other hand, in some more technically based disciplines (such as philology), it might be perfectly reasonable to say that outsiders cannot contribute very much if at all.

If philosophers are in a field that can contribute to other humanitiess, but not usefully receive much from them, then perhaps it’s not surprising that they might unconsciously find themself talking but not listening to people in other humainities disciplines.

As for the view that Cambridge philosophers being petulant suggests something about philosophers, there is the alternative view that it suggests something about Cambridge academics.

I don’t know about JEvsPh but I generally find John Emerson vs. Economics pretty interesting and occasionally insightful (which isn’t the same thing as correct). Per Chris’ point in the next post, though, it’s true that Emerson is a stubborn curmudgeon who doesn’t adjust his views even when stuff is explained to him. But then again, neither does Daniel. Much.

The argument I was trying to make is:

“You claim that philosophers don’t generally take statements of the form X to be jerky (where statements of the form X are generally regarded as jerky by the non-philosopher population). But here are a few cases when philosophers definitely seem to have taken statements of the form X to be jerky. So I continue to believe that philosophers resemble the genuine population in this respect, and to prefer the alternative hypothesis that they are just more inclined to accept jerky behaviour”

#101: I certainly do believe that both philosophers and scientists do adopt roughly the same intellectual standards, but I’m working off John’s sociological statement about the behaviour of philosophers. If John is right that philosophers work off a different standard of intellectual inquiry from Latour’s picture of natural scientists, then there’s a reason for them behaving in a way which is commonly seen as impolite and “jerky” (cf, by the way, your#91, which was simply a series of unprovoked jabs; please don’t). If, on the other hand, I’m right that the two groups behave according to the same standards, then it’s at elast sociologically interesting that one group and not the other appears to be able to get along without being jerks about it.

Yes, I should have, and did. It’s clear that these are dual-use technologies: they are tools of analysis and also work as a pair of modestly sharp elbows, in social settings.