So here’s a quick post to say Happy Birthday to Understanding Society, the blog of Prof. Daniel Little. The blog has been online for four years now.
Dr. Little is a diligent researcher in the philosophy of social science, committed to actively engaging with the disciplines and not just armchair philosophy. So it’s no surprise that his homestead is an incredible resource for anyone working in the field (and right at the top of the list of sites I visit every day). Just be warned, Dan is prolific. You really have to keep on top of your readings!
I think it’s reasonable to expect we can improve our understanding of tightly defined sociological systems, as we can understand better neurological systems or economic systems. But we may struggle with the understanding of more global terms/systems as “society”, as we may struggle with the term “mind” or “markets”. This is not so much a problem of category error as it is with incompleteness,i.e., the concept of “knowing” or “understanding” is a sub-function of the mind, market or society – to define it is essentially to limit it to the limits of its own powers of reduction.
Absolutely right, Martin! As we develop more sophisticated models, we can observe interesting patterns that we’d otherwise have a hard time grasping.
Yet, strangely, the idea of ‘society’ remains relatively obscure. This remains the case even while there is some agreement about the meaning of other terms like ‘culture’, ‘mind’, or ‘market’. It appears to me as though there is something uniquely normative to the idea of ‘society’ which is getting in the way of analysis. That is to say, people define ‘society’ according to their purposes, and there’s no single set of purposes that everyone shares.
e.g., In the UK right now, the notion of a “big society” appears to be in vogue, possibly in connection with the comical ambition to homogenize Europe into a single political entity. That’s a far cry from the Thatcher years, when there evidently was “no such thing” as Society. Say anything about Society and you’ll say something partially true.
Maybe, in this limited sense, Rupert Read is right. Maybe there is no such thing as a genuinely social science after all. It’s all social studies, applied ethics.
Or maybe not. I don’t know what to think at the moment.
Lady Thatcher’s much-quoted and usually misunderstood oir misrepresented remarks are best given their context. There are some slight variants around, but there is little in the way of substantial difference, and this account seems to give the gist of what I always took her to mean:
“They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation.” .
As for the current Prime Minister’s pet project of the “big society”, this certainly has nothing to do with the present tory leader having any wish to see Europe ‘homogenize into a single political entity’ (not with us in it at any rate). Rather it is, seems, a matter of encouraging individuals, charities and communities to take on more responsibility and not aimply look to the State for the solution to all our problems.
All slightly ‘ask not’ JFKesque, except in both of the above instances, these were things said in times of signficant financial difficulty.. I never voted for either, still I think I should exercise my duties as one who has listened to them and thought they were both at least sincere abut what they were trying to say.
I know nothing whatsoever of Canadian politics of course. But I hope your country has not and is not reduced to embracing such (necessary?) evils as the ones we have elected over here.
Jim, I hope you excuse my ignorance of the European political context. One day I’ll learn to educate myself through a quick Google search instead of speculating lazily.
Anyway. I don’t see that your re-interpretation of Thatcher’s remarks are inconsistent with my use of them. It may be that her remarks are constantly misappropriated. No doubt about it; misappropriating Margaret Thatcher is both easy and fun. But my point was to suggest that the very notion of society may just be a thoroughly normative concept, a way of speaking about a certain picture of the rights and responsibilities of citizens. And that seems to have been her intent.
So at the very least, here you have an interesting case study in how completely different rhetoric can be used to achieve the same end-goal. The end-goal is for citizens to take responsibility instead of government. So first, you have a faux-libertarian sort of rhetoric, the rhetoric of ‘only families and people exist’. Then, the total reverse: we’re a wider society, and you people have responsibilities, but they’re not governmental responsibilities. And if society is a merely rhetorical concept, then it’s not a surprise that the concept has been hard to pin down in a science.
But at the most, it may turn out that the concept of ‘society’ is not *just* a rhetorical device. Rather, ‘society’ really is an articulation of the set of responsibilities and rights and claims and commitments that people really do make upon each other out there in the world. And if so, then it would explain why the notion of ‘society’ has been relatively harder to pin down, when contrasted with markets or neural networks. But it does so in a way that at least has a coherent research programme that involves some kind of scientific investigation.
About Canada. Mixed reports, I’m afraid.
Because Canada has a tradition of relatively social-democratic leaning people — sane professionals who take proper regulation seriously — we were protected to some extent from the financial meltdown. That is, our safeguards weren’t eaten alive by the creative re-engineering of the kind of short-sighted little devils that unweaved the American empire. (Even the Economist thinks we’re in a sweet spot, as if that matters.) Also, there are new counter-movements, like Occupy and Avaaz, which are fighting in the public square against misguided conservative populists — and even winning sometimes. So that’s nice. Also, for the first time in our history, a strong social democratic party has won official opposition status, effectively shattering the two-party system.
Unfortunately, our politics always seems to be an echo of whatever happened in America a decade ago, meaning that there’s some movement towards Liberal/Conservative deregulation. At the federal level, we just elected a Tory majority parliament headed by PM Stephen Harper, who is, e.g., delighted to export asbestos for the benefit of Canadians and the death of those poor fools who trust Canadians. At the level of provinces, we like to refer to privatization as the creation of ‘public-private partnerships’, which is an Orwellian term that makes the ugly process sound less like system-gutting and more like a wacky wedding. And there are some worries that our major banks have a low tangible common equity ratio, a measure which predicted the Italian insolvency. So hooray for a rotten world.
Benjamin,
There is no ignorance on your part to excuse. It seems to me you are much better informed about global politics than I am (and more admirably passionate, optimisrtic and active regarding them).
Though I may have been a little playful with the language, I didn’t mean to imply you that you were misrepresnting our dearly beloved Lady Thatcher, I just meant to put her words back in the context they are often removed from (and to give you the gist of our current leader’s commitments)..I wouldn’t wish to dwell too much on Thatcher’s comments, but I think her point is that ‘society’ is not some further bearer of moral duies over and above the indivduals.who make up the populace. ‘There is no such a thing a society’ can be read as an objection to the (alleged) reification of ‘society’, as an objection to those who (allegedly) commit the pathetic fallacy. We can talk of selfish and cruel societies, such talk is perfectly intelligible, but it is not best understood too literally. Cameron, perhaps, can be seen as trying to ‘coach’ ‘team spirit’ without having the illusion that there is any ‘thing’ over and above ‘the players’ (besides the manager). Still, just because there is no such ‘thing’ as the mind does not mean that psychology is not a science (naive notions of ‘therapy’ do nothing to make that claim either).
We may be unable to uncontroversially pin down what ‘society’ means but I don’t know that we need to. Society is perhaps best understood as covering a number of inter-related systems – economic, political, cultural and so on – all of which are indivdually susceptible to proper scientific investigation (defining ‘science’ restrictively to make this claim false seems unfruitful). We know what findings pertain to the analysis of a given society and what studies fall in the category of ‘social science’.We can also, to great extent, agree what measures suggest a society is ‘unhealthy’ – stats on political participation, health, crime, education, social mobility, poverty and psychological well-being seem perinent scientific findings upon which to make such a claim. We may argue about diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. But, we can argue fruitfully without talking past each other. And I do not think that study of ‘society’ ceases to be a science (or, better, a body of sciences) just because of differing ideas about its ‘clinical’ application.
Ben:
I know little about economics, but I notice that Paul Krugman, my economic guru, today says that Canada’s economy is doing relatively well and that anyway the problems of Italy have little to do with debt and much more to do with the problems of a single currency zone.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/opinion/legends-of-the-fail.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
Jim, there seems to be a conceptual tension there with Thatcher. On the one hand, she says there is no thing up and above people (and families, etc.) And on the other hand, she tells us that we have responsibilities to each other. Yet part of having a responsibility is the feeling of external push, the idea that your responsibilities and rights are not entirely up to you.
So if she had a substantial point, it is remains unclear to me what she wants to talk about or what she’s saying. In Thatcher’s mind, what does it mean to have a Society? What would the world be like if there were one?
It’s true that there are social systems, and we can talk about those things in a rough way. But social systems aren’t quite societies. Social systems are continuous, occurring in a whole network; while societies are (supposedly) discrete, relatively closed systems.
S.Wally, that’s the consensus, yes. But economists / public intellectuals are immaculate trust-dealers. Even if I like or respect Paul Krugman as a person and as an economist, I don’t think we can risk trusting any individual. No single economist has the right to be deferred to; they have all earned a healthy degree of skepticism.
So my concerns are not buoyed by that article. I have zero interest in Romney’s half-baked partisan economics, and hence a merely academic interest in Krugman debunking it. I’d be more interested in hearing a debate between two or more sincere economists who trade in facts and have honest disagreements. So, in particular, I want to know if Zero Hedge has got a point. e.g., at the present historical moment, would it be generally better if Canadian banks had greater amounts of common stock as opposed to preferred stock? I don’t know.
“there seems to be a conceptual tension there with Thatcher. On the one hand, she says there is no thing up and above people (and families, etc.) And on the other hand, she tells us that we have responsibilities to each other. Yet part of having a responsibility is the feeling of external push, the idea that your responsibilities and rights are not entirely up to you.”
I fail to see the tension Ben.
We have responsibilities to our family and our ‘neighbour’ (our fellow man) and these are not all chosen by us – we don’t need to think there is any further ‘thing’ that is a bearer of moral-duties over and above us and our fellow man to to have that conception.
‘What would it be like if there were such a ‘thing’ as Society?’ seems the question, and the question in return might be: What would it be like if Justice were really a blind-folded person with scales?
The problem is the confused idea that there is some further moral duty-holder over and above indivduals and discernible entities like governments and companies. Her point, it seems is (partly) to dispel an illusion (even of it is not one that fools many philosophers).
If societies are conceived of as discrete, relatively closed systems then that conception seems to be a barrier to understanding them. In the absence of small homogenous ‘island’ states with closed borders I don’t know that is a good model to have. Societies don’t seem easy to count.
So there are two competing notions of society there. One is the idea of a Zeitgeist, a kind of uberbeast that is the conglomeration of all our wills into a single Will. Obviously that doesn’t exist, since we are not the Borg.
But there is a sense in which the force of a norm is independent of any particular mind. Moreover, there is a sense in which that normative force occurs between relative strangers, and is not confined to one’s families or best friends. We have responsibilities to each other, regardless of how I feel at any particular moment about the fact I have responsibilities.
In both cases, something gets reified. In the first, it’s the Society, an alien machine. In the second, it’s our institutions, made up of felt rights and responsibilities.
So here’s tension that I’m putting my finger on. Ideologically, Thatcher wants to deny both these claims. However, as a matter of fact, it is only plausible for her to deny the first claim. The second claim doesn’t follow from the first, nor the first from the second. And, indeed, the second claim is perfectly plausible, even while the first is completely implausible.
Thatcher, for all her sins, does not want to deny that “the force of a norm is independent of any particular mind” or that “normative force occurs between relative strangers, and is not confined to one’s families or best friends” or that “we have responsibilities to each other, regardless of how [we] feel at any particular moment.”
We don’t need a a God, or a state or a duty-holder called ‘society’ to take there to be objective morality (as she does).
I think that’s part of the problem. In the remarks you quoted, she makes three general claims that are relevant:
a) There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.
b) No government can do anything except through people.
c) People must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour.
d) People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation.
The main question is, what does she mean by (a)? If she means to debunk the myth of Society as a force larger than persons (like your “Lady Justice” analogy), then she has not succeeded. For, if she means to deny that Society is a super-entity, then by the same logic, there should not be any such thing as the Family, either. Family, Society, Zeitgeist, and Lady Justice are all made-up stuff. There are only individuals.
The only other literal reading of (a) would tell us that she doesn’t believe in Institutions. But that’s clearly not right. For she recognizes the existence of entitlements towards one’s neighbor (c), presumably in the form of public institutions. (I think we have reason to believe that she didn’t really believe in these, either, but I’m willing to put that point aside for present purposes.)
So we should stop reading her literally. If she means to momentarily ‘raise our consciousness’ by use of jarring rhetoric as a lede, then that’s fine, but we might just ignore (a) and focus instead on (b-d). Then her message seems coherent enough. Still, the tension should be clear, which is the important point.
Do you see what I mean?
I think she means to debunk the idea that Society is like some further person, one with duties & resources we have claims to.
A family is not some further person over and above the members of it either. But a family is not only composed of duty-holding men and women, it includes children and other rights-holders with no (or limited) duties. I don’t think she slips into inconsistency when she says there are families. We know what a family is and that there are special duties within it (these include taking responsibility for the actions of our children).
The problem with that interpretation of Thatcher’s meaning is that, in that case, I don’t know what she thinks she’s debunking, or where the idea of this larger spooky Society comes from. I mean, it’s obvious that both ‘Family’ and ‘Society’ are reified constructs. But that does not entail that there are family-particles out there in the universe for us to detect, any more than it entails that there is a big floating super-organism we call Society. I mean, who did she think she was arguing against? Hegel?
I think it’s right to note that the boundaries of the society are amorphous and seemingly arbitrary. That’s a point in her favor. But then again, the boundaries of one’s family are remarkably arbitrary as well. As a result, people struggle with these questions all the time. (They ask: is my absentee biological father a ‘father’? Should I care at all about my estranged in-laws? Does same-sex marriage count as a marriage? And so on.) It’s not just that these terms are
ambiguousvague, it’s the fact that ‘family’ and ‘society’ arevagueambiguous. [Edit: I got these two in reverse order. Whoops.]Here is one thing that seems clear to me. For any two people, if neither of them have any entitlements or responsibilities towards each other, they do not exist in the same society. And, sure enough, if nobody has any entitlements or responsibilities apart from our familial ones, then there’s no such thing as Society. But Thatcher claims that she doesn’t think that — she says we have obligations to our neighbours. Hence, she must think that Society is spooky; but then, that’s a strawperson argument.
So overall, it seems to me that the best reading of her claim is that it’s a claim of exasperation, better translated as, “I have no idea what people are talking about when they talk about Society.” If she were exposed to the rights-and-duties model of society, her meaning would be better expressed as: “There is such a thing as Society, but family is more important.”
We might disagree, and the disagreement might not amount to anything interesting, but I hope the reasons for my interpretation are clearly grounded and motivated.
Hi Ben,
My condition is such that I simply am not capable of the levels of congitive function I have enjoyed in the past. (I think this rather shows itself when I do try to write these days). So there may well be things you have said that I would have ‘got’ in the past and you might well be finding it hard to grasp why I’m not picking things up the way I used to (I think I was reasonably good at thinking and writing at one point).
I don’t imagine Lady Thatcher was using an interview with the ‘Woman’s Weekly’ as an opportunity to argue against Hegel no. Her ‘there’s no such thng’ comments are made in the context of talking about people “casting their problems on society” or thinking “if children have a problem it is society that is at fault”. And there does seem to be times when ‘ordinary’ people talk of society as if it were a duty-bearer, as if it were a thing that bears moral responsibility. Sometimes we can talk like that as shorthand. But I think she did indeed think people were taking this way of speaking too ‘literally’ (and failing to put responsibility where it lay). Thatcher does admit talk of society elsewhere eg. “I came to office with one deliberate intent: to change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society — from a give-it-to-me, to a do-it-yourself nation.” So she’s not an eliminativist when it comes to talk of ‘society’ -I don’t imagine anybody is – and she does seem to think there is ‘something’ ‘society’ refers to that politicians can help change.
‘Here is one thing that seems clear to me. For any two people, if neither of them have any entitlements or responsibilities towards each other, they do not exist in the same society’.
This ‘rights-and-duties’ model of society might be normatively framed (objective moral responsibilities?) or it might be descriptive (felt responsibilities). I think I would be inclined to understand society as the type of thing a sociologist might describe (anthropology but ‘bigger’). He would describe the cultural and moral norms, the customs and conventions, the mechanism by which these thngs are transmitted and the functional role they play In some societies perhaps there could be groups of indivduals who mutually feel they have no rights/obligations between them, I don’t know, perhaps it is better to say in such a case that there are two co-exisitng societies?
From sociological results, historical experience etc etc we can look normatively at the particular traditions and customs etc of a society or indeed judge the society as a whole. We may look at a society and say it is ‘unhealthy’ and we could try to instill ideas and encourage chnage within it. I don’t know that society is a normative concept but I think we cannot help but have normative views about societies. I don’t believe there is any ideal one but it seems apparent some are worse than others for their members (and indeed their neighbbours).
“congitive” dear lord… i didnt need a spellchecker until I lost it
Ah. So she’s not an eliminativist at all. In that case, surely you’d agree that she was just using a piece of rhetoric, as far as that sentence goes. “There is no such thing as society”… except in the sense in which there is such thing as society.
You’re right to observe that the rights-and-duties approach is ambiguous between morality and descriptive sociology. I mean it in the descriptive sense. People have a felt sense of social duties, even if those duties are amoral. e.g., the Italian fascists had an amoral sense of duty to each other, by virtue of their common relation to the society understood as a corporate whole. But there’s a sense in which that relationship is normative, in that it involves acts that have the force to compel. Even an Italian anarchist caught by Franco’s militia may be said to have amoral duties to cooperate with the fascists, even when all moral duties demand non-cooperation (indeed, subversion).
As you say, it’s true that just because two people aren’t in the same society, that doesn’t mean that they’re not in two different societies. Though clearly not everyone is in a society; American survivalists living in the Appalachian mountains, or hermits of the Heraclitean variety, might not be in any society at all. They don’t even have negative responsibilities to others.
What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for thinghood?
To be a thing is, roughly: to exist, and able to be represented logically as the value of a variable. e.g.,
1. There is a society.
1′. ∃x (Sx)
To say there is no such thing as society is simply to deny that:
2. ~∃x (Sx)
So you’d want to say that properties, relations and events are things?
sorry there’s a “not” missing
… you’d want to say that properties, relations and events are NOT things?
I do believe that properties and relations exist. So no.
But I don’t think that the use of predicate logic entails the elimination or reduction of properties or relations. These things still exist, they’re just defined extensionally. Of course, the use of a predicate logic does remove a lot of the abstract intensional content from properties and relations. But hey, that’s the price you pay for talking about existence.
I don’t really know the logical form of an event. Haven’t thought about it.
I’d be inclined to think that events, relations and properties aren’t things.
Calculus isn’t my ‘thing’, I’m afraid
But I’m thinking of thinghood as akin to subjects rather than predicates (or ‘concepts’ is that right?) – maybe the idea of ‘substance’
Just pondering…
No doubt, there are people who would agree with you (certain kinds of reductionists, eliminativists). But I think there’s no harm in regarding certain sets of things as being superordinate things themselves.
We don’t have to talk in terms of any annoying propositional calculus. Subject-predicate pairs will do. If you translate what I said above into normalspeak, it roughly means that something is a thing just in case it exists, and it can be represented as a grammatically proper subject in a subject-predicate pairing. e.g., consider the sentence:
Here, the definite description (‘the mean kinetic energy’) is being treated as if it were a thing, in the sense that it’s the subject of the sentence. But what’s that mean, really? As a matter of fact, when we look closely at what is in common between all propositions that contain that definite description, we find that all these propositions are about gobs of particles that have oodles of relations to one another. That is, ‘the mean kinetic energy in this room is so-and-so’ is about the aggregate of relations between things (under a mathematical function). Yet in everyday language, we don’t believe that the sentence (3) is ungrammatical just because it passes off a particular set of relations as a subject of a sentence. That’s why I conclude that there are such things as relations.
(And if you want to get really extreme about it, arguably, *everything* is just a set of relations. I just recently saw a talk by Graham Priest where he argues exactly that. It’s not exactly the most parsimonious view of the world, but I admit the view has some charm.)
Predicates can be empty, or they can refer to properties. Objects, properties, and relations (if they exist) are real things in the world, while we tend to express properties and relations as predicates. Eliminativists or reductionists might claim that (3) is an ontological disaster because it doesn’t line up relations with predicates.
But then there are two problems with such views. First, as a matter of fact, it doesn’t seem like there are any real atoms in the universe, no irreducible objects. As far as we can tell, at base there is nothing out there apart from fields of force. Second, even if we decided by fiat that everything reduced to a corpuscularian model — by ignoring all of quantum physics, essentially — the translation of (3) would have to be an indefinitely long and inelegant sentence, like, “Particle n is in relation R with particle n+1…z, Particle n+1 is in relation R’ with particle n…z…”, etc. Overnight we’d all be transformed into sweaty professors. So there are metaphysical and pragmatic reasons for wanting to treat relations as things, or subjects.
Jim:
If your cognitive functions have declined, you must have been a super-genius once, because you do very well now.
You do seem to have a simple proof-reading problem, which is solved by proof-reading at least three times whatever one writes.
When I worked in a publication, every article was proof-read by three people, the writer, the editor and the proof-reader, because we all tend to overlook small errors.
That was before the days of spell-checkers, but they are not perfect either and of course, at times when one spells one word wrong, one may be spelling another word right and no spell-checker “understands” that.
Amos,
Thats kind of you to say.
I should be making use of online spellcheckers whilst I await the return of my laptop (its a very old computer I’m working from). I’m rather used to not needing them but its become the case that I obviously do (my proof-reading is now rather awful – I seem to read what I mean not what I’ve written). The medications I am currently on make thinking and writing much more difficult, so I do find myself unable to engage with the philosophy here to the same extent, or with the same clarity of thought or expression, as I used to. I do get rather confused, and it can be rather frustrating. But we must muddle on through. Speaking generally, beyond my immediate situation, it has in fact been a source of enormous relief to have my brain ‘slow down’ from the way it functioned back in my 20s.
I recall a Dartmouth Professor being frustrated with me when I was studying in the States and criticising my home imstitution (Edinburgh) for rewarding me for being ‘clever’ (I stopped myself from saying ‘as opposed to being stupid?”). I was always more clever than wise. This remains true though I am now far less clever than I used to be.
Ben,
Thank you for your thoughts. I shall have to try and think about them. I don’t feel its reductionism or elimantivism that motivates my intuitions. With regards to the latter I think I had a non-standard view as to what should motivate eliminativism but its been a long time since I thought about it. Anyway, I think its more I have doubts about whether accepting that, say, numbers, propositions or relations enjoy existence forces me to concede they are also ‘things’. I’d be inclined to ascribe thinghood in a more restricted way. But again its been a long time since I thought about why…
As for Thatcher, I imagine she was taking rhetoric and I was talking rubbish. Induction would suggest that at any rate…
No worries Jim. I appreciate being prompted by the quote. I hadn’t previously had the occasion to look at it straight-on.
Also, I enjoy your anecdote re: Dartmouth. What was the context? I suppose I was taught a similar thing in my studies as an undergraduate. Learning the first-order predicate calculus involves learning how to apply a bunch of intellectually unsatisfying rules in a completely mechanical way. In a sense, it feels as though you are training yourself to be dumber. (But of course that’s only how it feels.)
Jim:
None of us start out insightful or wise.
Your mind is rather speedy. Do you have trouble reading your own handwriting?
I’d suggest taking a break after writing something before proof-reading. Let what you write sit for fifteen minutes and then go back to it to proof-read.
Passing introductory Logic was a requirement when I was an undergraduate too. Possibly the only exam in the university with more available points on the paper than you could actually be awarded. There were some essay questions in the paper about truth etc, some syllogisms and some propositional calculus no-brainers. I recognised that it was perfectly possible to pass without actually doing any predicate calculus if you did all the other stuff and did it very well.. And so I never did try to learn predicate calculus.
I was never a rigorous student. Things that interested me would get great attention – things that didn’t got none. Sometimes my work was well recieved. Certainly I did well enough to win a scholarship to go to Dartmouth for a semester (and this costs a pretty penny).
From the ‘get-go’ my first intuiton was always to question the assumptions behind an essay or exam question. And sometimes I felt the best or the more interesting case to make was that the question was wrong-headed. Edinburgh seemed to take the view that they had offered up a philosophical question and that this was a perfectly legitimate way to respond to it as long as you could make it fly.
This particular Dartmouth professor didn’t like me pointing out that her questions were badly formed or throroughly wrong-headed (and they genuinely were and she never tried to argue otherwise). But she was keen to assert that the only point of her questions was allow me to demonstrate that I had read the coursework and understood her (erroneous) interpretations of it. She made it clear that I’d only get passes from her if I continued to point out her mistakes and question her assumptions. And so I only ever did get passes.
Ahh, yes, I’ve had similar experience. But I’m of two minds about it.
Essentially, when you’re an undergraduate and Master’s student, you are learning how to be an expert sophist. You learn the structure of the dialectic for various fields of philosophy — you learn how to live in the narrow range of debate.
This setup is both good and bad. Good, because you can’t know what’s wrong with sophistry until you’ve lived with it and felt the strictures of bad arguments. Bad, because of the ‘use it or lose it’ principle: if in the process of learning the discipline, you become satisfied just by being part of the ongoing conversation, and numb to the wider spirit of inquiry, then all you’re going to get out of your diploma is the ability to be a convincing authoritarian tool.
It helps to recognize which contexts are appropriately narrow, and which are appropriate for widening. e.g., I think it’s appropriate to behave like a bit of a sophist when you’re at conferences. The fact is, it’s just not very good form to radically question a speaker’s latent presuppositions when you’re in that setting. For instance, if I’m talking about animal rights, and you come in declaring nihilism about all things that exist, the only thing that’s going to be accomplished is our mutual embarrassment. It’s not that nihilism is a non-sequitur; presumably, nothing has any rights if nothing exists. It’s just that you’d be unreasonable to stray too far from the main point. So to avoid the prospect of having a conversation massively derailed, professional philosophical societies have developed the norm is charity/relevance: to pretend to agree with all the presuppositions for the sake of argument, and then try to rebut the main conclusion (or one of the major premises). That way, everyone at least gets to seem like they’re clever, even if in fact they’re just tweaking some dotty ideas they inherited from their graduate supervisor.
When taken out of context, those conference-rules sound ridiculously anti-philosophical. If so, it’s a forgivable sin. After all, so long as these formal restrictions are restricted to particular contexts, then they’re entirely welcome. For instance, so long as you’re still able to do research and publish independently, you get to question any presuppositions you like.
But once that scholarly independence is compromised — e.g., if everyone gets a little too comfortable with the narrow conception of charity and relevance in every aspect of their professional lives — the whole system turns into a game of chattering fools. In cases of that kind, the thing that passes for ‘professional philosophy’ is rightly ignored by everyone who doesn’t already have a vested career interest. So there have to be contexts where narrow sophistry is positively shunned, where you really do get to follow the argument wherever it leads. For instance, on blogs!
Yup,
As I say, more clever than wise.
If something interested me I’d do it, and I could put a lot into it, if I didn’t I wouldn’t do it or I’d meet the absolutely minimal requirements. It was a pattern from pre-school onwards. I remember being in primary school. You used to get given a list of say 5 words and you were sent to make sentences that included each of them but you could combine two or more words in one sentence if you could. I remember writing a,,b,c,d and e are all words found in the dictionary.
Part of the trick about questioning assumptions is you can reply to (instead of answering) an exam question, say, without doing the reading or indeed all that much thinking.
A lazy smart-arse, I always was.
Jim:
School is fairly stupid.
I recall that for the first few years in school, I got low grades because I did not realize that I was supposed to compete with the other children to get a grade from a teacher whom I saw as an idiot.
When I realized that, I began to take every short-cut, except outright cheating, to beat the system.
With a few exceptions, I never recognized my teachers as legitimate authorities or as worthy of listening to.
In the university, I studied literature and I saw it all as an empty game, which I was good at, but made no sense to me.
I finally just dropped out.
It took me until fairly late in life, say, between age 30 and 40, to find some ethical purpose in life, and I’m still finding it.
You seem to be torn between the feeling that much of academic philosophy is a game in which one outwits the other and some serious ethical/philosophical concerns, which guide most of your writing.
That ambivalence, that tension, could be a source of great creativity, actually.