Class Dismissed
I belatedly added a couple of blogs to the select few in Links yesterday: The Panda’s Thumb and Pharyngula. I’ve been meaning to add both for awhile, and finally got around to it yesterday. I’m very picky about blogs in Links, partly because my colleague doesn’t like blogs to begin with, and much more because I think the longer such lists are the less useful they are. There are lots of interesting, entertaining, well-written etc blogs out there, as well as lots of the other kind, but they’re on subjects that are not all that relevant to B&W, so I don’t include them. Thus you can assume that if a blog is in Links, it is [clears throat grandly] On Topic. Now I’m going to add another, also belatedly – in fact I should have added this one months ago, but kept forgetting. But having just found two excellent stories linked on Black Triangle I realized the time had come. If you don’t know about Black Triangle, check it out; the guy does terrific work. Same goes for Pharyngula and Panda’s Thumb.
The article by Max Steuer is on a subject we’ve seen a fair bit of. Pretend science, nonsense masquerading as science, claims that knowledge is old hat and now we have discourse instead.
a growing proportion of social science departments are not doing social science at all. Many are actively opposed to science in any form, especially when it comes to studying social matters. Instead, they engage in what they think of as literary or philosophical activity, but it is practised at a level so pitifully low that it would not be tolerated in any serious department of philosophy or literature…Science in all its forms is just another discourse, so they maintain. Being unwilling to undertake the demanding work that is science, they assert that one opinion is as good as another.
That last bit doesn’t get pointed out often enough, I think. It is a hell of a lot easier to learn to call everything a discourse and leave it at that than it is to learn actual physics or biology. That’s why I don’t know any physics or biology myself! I’m as lazy as the next swine if not more so, but I try not to pretend my laziness is either a virtue or a new and improved kind of insight.
A university education should involve learning how to think more effectively. It should involve the ability to sift sense from nonsense. It should encourage the ability to question, and to know when one understands something, and when not. A certain humility and the willingness to recognise one might be wrong does not go amiss. Education can be sheer pleasure. It also should include an appreciation of the need for sustained effort. Those social science departments afflicted with the modern disease encourage exactly the opposite of what an education should provide. Students learn to be dismissive. The ability to discriminate is weakened, along with the ability to follow an argument. Fancy style is what matters.
Learning to be dismissive – just so. There are more valuable and far more interesting things to learn.
The Max Steuer article looks interesting. It seems to overlap nicely with my article in the brand new issue (May/June, ’04) of Skeptical Inquirer, called “Nurturing Suspicion.” That article looks at the way sociology of science classes not only fail to nurture an understand of science, but also nurture a deep sucpicion toward all truth claims. It also examines the reasons why this problem is so pervasive at colleges across the country, and what we might try in order to work against it.
Phil
Oh, that sounds good, Phil – is it online? Or will it be later?
Ophelia:
They may put it online at their site, but I never know in advance.
Eventually, you’ll be able to find it for free using the Find Article database, although the formatting will be mangled to bits. So, I hope they’ll put it online.
Phil
Thanks, Phil. Yes, hope so – Find Article certainly does introduce a lot of typos.
“there is no such thing as knowledge, and that all opinions are equally valid….You may have your discourse; someone else will have another. Science in all its forms is just another discourse.”
Yeah, right. So let’s have a proponent of this theory drive his/her car to the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge and then claim that the science that allowed that bridge to be constructed and not come crashing down is just an “arbitrary discourse.” Better yet, instead of heading to a hospital to receive invasive heart surgery, how about we just let Judith Butler perform some rhetorical surgery on us?
For one to think science is merely a discourse, one has to willfully ignore the world around them.
Though Steuer stating that this wouldn’t be tolerated in a “serious literature department” gave me a chuckle. Serious literature department? Where can I find one of those? :)
Well I think they still have some in the UK!
Just so, about the scientific discourse. One can so easily think of so many contexts in which that bit of wisdom is suspended. 30,000 feet up – whenever a student of discourse sits down in front of a computer – at dinner time – after dinner when it’s time to clean up – when it’s cold – when it’s raining – when a student of discourse has just had a wisdom tooth pulled – when a student of discourse has a tooth that needs fixing –
Oh it’s too cruel. I mustn’t go on.
I agree with Mr. Steuer’s concern, but I would like to make a stylistic quibble. Though the idea that we can teach “the ability to sift sense from nonsense” always sounds appealing, I was under the impression that there is no method for identifying sense as opposed to nonsense.
I do think we can teach ways to identify some types of obvious nonsense—e.g, logical fallacies, hidden data—and to my mind this is better captured in, for example, “sifting out some of the nonsense”. What remains will contain less nonsense, but it is still a mixture of sense and nonsense whose further refinement wd require less obvious and more difficult methods.
And, of course, in many subjects this process of refinement has not yet reached its end.
(also posted to Black Triangle)
Really? That’s worrying! B&W is committed to sifting sense from nonsense – as far as possible at any rate. That naturally doesn’t imply that we think we’re infallible at it (well, I don’t think I am, anyway; I daresay Jerry S thinks he is) but that it is our goal. Isn’t Steuer just using another phrase for good old critical thinking? Or am I confused.
More likely, I was too terse.
First, I took Mr. Steuer’s remarks as referring to the responses desirable in a well-educated person upon encountering information or claims with which one is unfamiliar. In such a context “the ability to question, and to know when one understands something, and when not. A certain humility and the willingness to recognise one might be wrong” are appropriate, but the ability to recognize which claims are sensible will often require more than even a university education can provide.
Second, I suppose that I smuggled in an assumption that the sifting wd totally separate the sense and the nonsense. (If that were possible, scientists wd have a method superior to mere experimentation—they wd be more akin to the theologians we have seen so much of lately.) Mr. Steuer likely had no such total separation in mind.
“Isn’t Steuer just using another phrase for good old critical thinking?”
Yes, and I did say that it was a STYLISTIC quibble. This phrasing pushes one of my buttons and I probably shd have resisted the temptation to comment.
John, I’ve just realized who it is you remind me of! Mary Bennet! You’re Mary Bennet to the life. Are you doing it on purpose? Brilliant, if so. Very amusing indeed.
Who the hell is Mary Bennet? I just googled the name and found a microbiologist, an engineering professor and a mathematician. Is it that woman who garbled the criticism of your sacred cow Dawkins early on? Is that the best you can do, name-calling? Have you even bothered to consider Pierce’s account of science? You do know that a traditional empiricist inductivist accout won’t do, don’t you?
I once read a quite good collection of essays called “The Foundations Of Economics”, with many interesting contributions. Then there was a short essay by Sir John Hicks, not a minor figure in the field, by any means, Bank of Sweden Prize and all. He began by offering the crudest inductivist account imaginable for the status of economic theory, when anyone whose ever read the stuff can see that its largely a deductive enterprise, and then concluded by determining that economic theory was itself a kind of technology, a sheer instrumentalist reduction of the business. So, you see, a person can be a more than competent practitioner within a professional discourse and a complete idiot when he steps out of it. Perhaps that’s the case with your boy Dawkins.
wmr,
“This phrasing pushes one of my buttons and I probably shd have resisted the temptation to comment.”
No no! My comment was only a joke. Including the insulting joke about my colleague. One joke after another today.
OB:
Well, I guess this is just my day for being a wet blanket–but I did figure out that you were joking about Jerry.
I also googled MB and I came up with a candidate john doesn’t mention, possibly because she’s fictional.
I put “mary bennet” and “verbose” in google and came up with only one hit. (The second search term was just a wild stab in the dark ;-)). Apparently she is a character from Pride and Prejudice who “is frequently verbose and periphrastic”. Could this be the MB OB means?
I hadn’t spotted the Mary Bennett resemblance, but I have found that by the time I’d read two lines of a response I’d be thinking ‘Aha, this is John’ so he obviously has his own style. I think it’s the in-yer-face seriousness, length and name-dropping that typify it. Peirce (spell it right if you’re going to quote it John), Aristotle and Wittgenstein – well alright, but Sir John Hicks? But he’s not a minor figure in the field so my education was clearly a total wasteland…
“Who the hell is Mary Bennet? I just googled the name and found a microbiologist, an engineering professor and a mathematician. “
Yes, its very irritating when someone continually name drops isn’t it. I can see why that would annoy you. I just hope OB shows more consideration in the future. In fact I beleive Pierre Obscuro said something on just that very subject. And Hugo Neverheardovim’s theory on the matter is of course well known in all educated circles.
Yup, you guys all got it, that’s the Mary Bennet I meant. It’s the in-yer-face seriousness and length but it’s also the pointing out the obvious. There was just a patch of earnest belabouring of the obvious in one of John’s posts that suddenly shouted ‘Mary Bennet!’ at me.
Sorry, John – but really, you do ask for it. And you’re not always particularly polite yourself.
Elizabeth Bennet’s sister? It’s been ages since I read that book and I don’t remember the character. I only remember the father and the mother. But it’s the wrong novel and character. I’m actually Rev. Hightower. Still, score one for OB.
Was I belaboring the obvious? I took OB to be making one of those “Isn’t the sociology of science awful, invading the sacred groves of science with pernicious relativism” type comments. So it was just a comment about difficient tertiary education? And to think of all the money that is wasted on it! And OB realizes that a correspondence theory of truth is impossible and a causal theory of meaning is hopeless. Good. That should raise the level of discussion.
John Hicks, as a young man, wrote “Value and Capital”, an early attempt to work-out and apply Keynes’ “General Theory” in a neo-classical framework, featuring the IS-LM chart, which you find in any intro economics textbook, which is Hicks and not Keynes. Also the Hicks neo-Pareto criterion. I remember now from that little essay of his that he complained that the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, the “lines of research” guy, wanted to reduce science to the status of literature. Snort! How is science like literature? They are both species of formal-rational discourses. How is an elephant like a flea? They are both species of animals.
I apologize to old Charlie for misspelling his proper name.