My fellow academics, have you ever noticed that when our science students have problems with writing, we send them off to get tutorials from the people who know better, over in the English department? Our campus has a writing room where students can get advice from experts before they hand in their work to the science nerds. Unfortunately, there is no reciprocal arrangement: when English majors write about science, almost any claptrap can pass muster, we science nerds don’t provide remedial science education, and they don’t send their students to us to get their assertions vetted. This leads to distressing situations, like this account of a student who wrote a paper on evolution for a history class. The history TA marked up her paper with painfully stupid comments about the science of evolution. What can be done about this sort of thing?
Well, my first thought was that the next time I get a set of term papers (next week! Oh, no!) I’m going to grade them by insisting that “it’s” always gets an apostrophe, verb tenses are irrelevant and changing them frequently spices up a paper, and that anything written before the date of the author’s birth is old timey history and doesn’t need a citation, since they make it all up anyway. Sentences optional are. Speeeling ireluhvent. We is always at war with humanities and social sciences.
But no! Let’s acknowledge that both sides of the campus divide have essential contributions to make to one another! This is a case where Science ought to put on its best lab coat and stomp on over to History and set them straight, while recognizing that it would be a good thing for History (and Philosophy and English and Art usw) have grounds to tromp over and assail us over our philistine ways. Silence is the worst approach we could take.
Which actually makes this a nice segue into my announcement for the Café Scientifique, which represents an attempt to bridge the two cultures. It’s our last Café of the year, and we’ve got a couple of people from those buildings on the other side of the campus mall to join us in talking about how to communicate science. I’m really looking forward to this one; it’s not too late for the rest of you to book a flight and rent a car and make the trip on out to Morris for a splendid evening.
Consuming information: Translating science for the rest of us
Barbara Burke (Speech) and Tisha Turk (English)
“Consuming information: Translating science for the rest of us” describes and explains the journalistic practices that occur when research about science topics gets translated into headlines and news stories. By examining recent news stories about the dangers of coffee consumption, we illustrate the progress of information from an article in the American Journal of Ob/Gyn to a ten-second spot TV or a two-inch news story in a daily paper. Drink up while we discuss coffee research findings!
So, for that history TA who is ignorant of evolution, I’d say that one response ought to be that the science disciplines at that university make a routine effort to offer introductory lectures and discussions on core topics in the field, aimed at a general audience. I’d also like to see more explanations for us geeks on basics in other disciplines — if someone offered an evening “Idiot’s Guide to Post-modernism”, or similar grossly misunderstood topic, I’d go.
As always, the answer is more speech. Talk and share ideas.
That reminds me of the classic Bob the Angry Flower comic:
Bob’s Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots
http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif
I have a problem with other people using first person pronouns for me.
For instance, I don’t trust anything with “my” in its name, from the “My Documents” folder, through MySpace and even Myanmar (though if the last weren’t run by such bastards, I might give them some slack for having a non-English root to the name.)
So that “for the rest of us” … Who’s the “us,” in this case? Burke and Turk? You? Me?
I am reminded of a creationist I encountered a few years ago on a discussion board who claimed that because his older brother got an A on an english paper ‘debunking’ evolution, and the teacher was an atheist, his brother must have written the truth and evolution must be wrong.
Any chance that the Cafe Scientifique will be web cast in the future?
The situation really could be worse,
If science journals only published verse.
(Dual citizen in both cultures, Cuttlefish.)
Interesting…
How would we feel if a student, obviously taking intelligent design seriously, wrote a paper on the history of intelligent design for some sort of “modern issues” class? Would we expect that TA to make a note that intelligent design is in fact a load of crap?
Thinking about it, it seems to me that we wouldn’t. Critiquing the thesis in this way (as opposed to critiquing the argument) is inappropriate, no matter what the thesis is.
We have a math center at my school, but are students ever sent their to check their papers? I have a friend who went for that purpose, and they sent her away when they discovered she wasn’t there for a math class!
It’s a framework-vs-content issue, I think. Bad English is seen as bad framework, and universal; but bad Science is viewed as bad content, and limited by course boundaries.
I wrote a paper debunking Astrology, specifically the arguments in the book Sun Signs by Linda Goodman, (way back in the Typewriter Days…). I didn’t realize my English professor was one of those Tarot, Crystals, New-Age types…
I got an ‘A’ on the paper, and in the class, but… Well, she seems to think I actually thought it was true based on the comment next to the grade.
That puzzeled me, so I read the paper again and, no, I found Astrology to be wishful thinking. I even said it was wishful thinking and explained how we came to the wishful thinking. I went on about the anthropic principle, narcissism, religious training, etc., that makes us think we’re the center of the damn universe, but we are not, and how we invent mythologies to make ourselves feel special via an external forces.
She missed it by a mile.
I may still have that paper, old and yellowing, in a box.
One obvious answer is not to write about things you don’t understand. True, that’s about as profound as saying “don’t drive on the wrong side of the road,” but with Stein making the most stupid comments and articles on science, it’s painfully evident that it still needs to be said to some wildly ignorant types.
This doesn’t help much with the TA, who still has to grade the paper. But if the TA doesn’t know the subject, said TA should grade for grammar, punctuation, and literacy, and make a note that grading the science is not within the capability of that TA.
Yes, the basics of science ought to be taught. A few lectures covering the basics isn’t going to change much, as most students don’t have much time or incentive to attend them. Plus, it’s often hardest communicating concepts to those who know little, and most professors really couldn’t do a proper “for dummies” lecture.
Actually recognizing what is not understood is sometimes the hardest to do, and some of the humanties sorts will assume they know more that’s really important to science than do the scientists, while scientists will sometimes ignore the fact that philosophers know something. But that’s simply restating the problem (seriously, it’s not just non-scientists who short the knowledge of others, as I tire of scientists thinking they know epistemology when they don’t (though some do)), one that will certainly never go away, but might be lessened somewhat with better core courses.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Chances are the TA couldn’t even have graded for grammar and punctuation, Glen. I’ve edited enough dissertations and scientific manuscripts to know just how bad it can get! lol
The question I have is why a TA was grading the papers when they obviously weren’t capable of handling the content of the class. When I was in that position I attempted to be honest about my capabilities handling advanced courses, for the sake of the students if nothing else.
Don’t overanalyze. “For the rest of us” is a broad reference to all people not intimately involved in the details of a particular subject. Most science papers, for instance, are written in a very specialized style that economically communicates information to those already steeped in the tradition — I know from experience that trying to get a smart freshman college student to read a science paper for the first time is a horrible, difficult, generally unpleasant situation.
“For the rest of us” just means those outside the narrow band of specialists.
I’m a freshman bio major currently enrolled in an introductory philosophy class at DePauw and the only way I can bear to write the papers on a subject I have so little interest in is to insert bits of science and attempt to relate them back to the subject at hand. This is a skill the professor does not have. I’ve started writing down his funny science quotes. He really shouldn’t even try.
I haven’t had much room for biology in papers, but I did manage a couple paragraphs on Schrodinger’s Cat in my last paper on uncertainty in Neurath’s writing. Incidentally, I discovered that Schrodinger actually was in contact with Neurath in the 1930’s. Anyway, we’ll see what kind of grade I get. The prof is considered a difficult grader, but I got an A on my last paper, debunking Descartes’ argument. It included a rather random sentence on the sexual spores of fungus.
Ah, liberal arts schools.
Sounds interesting.
Sloppy journalism is very irritating.
I would be surprised the kind of ignorance you describe persists on both sides given the emphasis put on “well-roundedness” at most American universities today but, well, I’m a student, and therefore I have a firsthand view of how my fellow undergrads spectacularly fail to learn anything in all of the mandatory, so-called “core” courses.
I’ve met many an undergrad who relies solely on Word’s grammarcheck to correct his or her poor English language skills and also many an undergrad who thinks that science should be left to the scientists. It’s a sad state of affairs all around, since basic English proficiency and a working knowledge of the scientific method should already be in place by the time students enter the University.
Aaaaand I’ll get off my soapbox now…
But yes, more communication between the language geeks and the science geeks, please. It’s not a dichotomy in which one must choose one or the other.
I agree. If the content is beyond your capabilities, than you should stick to grading the presentation of said content.
I can offer dumb bunny’s guides for dead Northern European languages; how to use the Library of Congress cataloging system (read: how to find stuff in a university library); opera; quick and dirty history of the Arab-Israeli conflict; basics of women’s, gender and queer studies.
I’ll tell you, there’s something to be said for the old fashioned liberal arts curriculum — you’d get some botany, physiology (or ‘hygiene’ at a women’s school) and math in there with your composition, music, and Latin.
I took a philosophy of biology class my last undergrad semester. Nice meeting place for sciences and humanities, as long as the folks from each side had dabbled a little in the other already. So my poetry-writing biologist house mate and I, the well-rounded reader of books did rather well. But we had this girl. And at my school (women’s college) there was this concept called That Girl. If someone said they had “that girl” in their class, you knew they meant that she took over class discussion, overshared personal information, actually had no idea what she was talking about, and basically wasted everyone’s time, making them all stupider in the process.
Our That Girl was a philosophy major, mostly because she wasn’t smart enough for psychology, so philosophy was psych lite for her. Anyway, she has some mild mental illnesses (not making it up, like I said, overshare, she told us herself), and instead of seeking effective treatment, she used her classes as therapy.
This is all background, because the other problem was that she had no grasp on the scientific concepts we dealt with in class. Not for lack of opportunity, as she’d gone to a rather good high school (again, the overshare), and would occasionally argue against facts that someone else would pul out of a reading we’d done for class.
My point is that there’s probably lots of humanities people who are not good with the science, not because there’s no conversation between disciplines, but because they are either (a) dumb, or (b) full of themselves, or (c) both.
If all scientists were like Cuttlefish,
Then journals in verse would be what I’d wish.
(I’m not a poet, and I don’t play one on TV, but my daughter is an accomplished, though nascent, poet; I assert confidently that it must be in my genes somewhere!)
From the article:
Personal opinions should be left off of graded papers.
I had this happen twice to me when I was an undergrad in the late ’80’s. The first time was in english 101. I later learned that that english prof. was a graduate of Robert Jones u. The second time was in a public speaking class-by then I was better prepared and managed to hold my own against some of the students in the class and the instructor. It would be a good idea for science departments around the country to provide some backup for students in these situations, as I am sure they are quite common, unfortunately.
Postmodernism for Science Nerds: Should This Made-Up Term Have a Hyphen?
No.
Hey, hey, HEY! I am an English professor, and you can be sure my students don’t get away with passing off stupid shit for science, especially if they are writing a paper concerning evolution.
Don’t tar us all with the same brush.
Posted by: zer0 | April 28, 2008 11:01 AM
As an English major, my objection to this TA’s action is essentially the same as above, except I would replace the word capabilities with responsibilities. He reached outside his field of expertise in his comments, and thus perverted his responsibility to that student by not seeking out the knowledge needed for a correct evaluation.
I only wish I lived close enough to attend this Cafe Scientique – I hope it is a practice that is emulated in universities across the country, because such cooperation will directly lead to a better public understanding of the two fields, and hopefully undercut the IDeologists and creationists in their future attempts to control the course and progress of science.
‘An idiot’s guide to post-modernism.’ Classic!! Ranks next to ‘An idiot’s guide to bioinformatics’ as a must read while hitchhiking by boat to the Olympics.
@6 Any ‘history of x’ depends on past developments or discoveries leading to x. If I (completely unqualified) wrote a history of philosophy, there would be names, dates and a framework showing the evolution of ideas. I could not help but show the subject for what it is (if I had no political agenda and was not incompetent:)). Ditto American history. In science, because it is all about ideas which are refined into a testable form- hypotheses, which, if confirmed become theories, then, with the same stipulations (competence and honesty)any history must accurately portray the subject. I admit I am skating close to a ‘True Scotsman’ fallacy here. A history of Genetics published by Lysenko would of necessity be inaccurate, a history of Astro-physics by Shirlley McLain would be laughable, and a documentary about evolutionary theory in Western Society by Ben stein is both.
At my university, all ‘disquisitions’ (theses/ dissertations) are proof-read by a ‘deaconess’ from the English Department, occasionally with ‘comments’ on the science which of course falls under the perview of a student’s committee. Go figure.
If for no other reason, Science and History need to join forces to battle back the dark forces of Creationism and Intelligent Design. If sciences like Geology and Evolutionary Biology fall to the barbarian horde, history will quickly go next because it is far less able, thanks to beliefs like post- modernism and the lack of objective, measurable evidence to stand firm against the darkness.
On the other hand, if creationism vanquishes Darwin, getting my PHD will infinitely easier. No more trudging to the library and reading fat, thick books with lots of words. Instead, my thesis will say – GODDIDIT. My dissertation will say GODDIDITINSIXDAYS and the LORDSWAYSAREMYSTERIOUS and I’ll be DR. Matt in no time.
Anyway, a professor at my university called me a “biological reductionist” and that was “seduced” by evolutionary theory. Also the judges at the conference I presented at had some criticisms about my application of kin selection theory to a terrorist group cohesiveness, is that enough to get a documentary featuring Ben Stein made about my plight?
I’m a history student at NC State University, and one of my higher-level classes in the fall is “Darwinism in Science and Society”, taught by a professor who specializes in the history of Darwin and knows tons about all the surrounding issues. The class will focus on reading “The Origin” and will also include sections of Darwin’s notes, letters, lectures, etc. A very cool thing is that half the students will be honors-level history upperclassmen reading to understand the history of what was going on, and the other half of the class is zoology and biology students reading to understand the basic/underlying science for their majors. It’s a solid balance and will allow sharing of correct ideas across disciplines that normally don’t have any interaction.
(.)(.)
but, but, but… PZ, you’re singluar posesive’s all way’s has a apostrofe at there end’s!
rowmyboat,
I don’t know what you meant to imply here, or how things worked at your school, but on average, philosophers are substantially smarter than psychologists.
If you look at GRE scores of people applying to philosophy programs, psych applicants score around the 60th percentile, and philosophy applicants score in the 90s somewhere—ahead of engineering applicants and most science applicants except for physicists. Well ahead of biologists and psychologists, on average.
There are a lot of psych majors who just aren’t the brightest. (Especially clinical psych, as opposed to experimental.)
Of course the top people in all of those areas are really really smart, and I don’t think it’s productive to make invidious comparisons.
On the other hand, the common idea among scientists that philosophers are generally not smart enough to be scientists is just wrong.
One problem is that the minority of kooky philosophers tend to make claims that get a lot of press.
Another problem is that a lot of the postmodernist “philosophy” that scientists hear about isn’t done by philosophers at all. It’s done by philosopher wannabes in English departments, who would get laughed out of a good philosophy program.
This idea of ‘two cultures’ really annoys me. The idea that if you ‘do science’ (and by extension anything sciency like engineering) then you can’t possibly do arts is a total crock of crap. The popular term seems to have started from that C.P.Snow book where he complained about an apparent gulf appearing between art and science communities; the irony is that although he was a scientist and a novelist the term seems to have been adopted by the artyfarts as a way of excusing their lack of science knowledge!
There are so many things wrong with this idea. Let’s see if I can cover a few of them before my brain melts over the annoyance I feel on this:
a) in ‘the old days’ a good artist had to be fairly knowledgeable about science in order to be able to make art. Or at least, the technology end of science, for making paper and inks and paints etc.
b) rather a lot of scientists (using the term broadly to cover people with primarily science/technology jobs) seem to produce literary works as well as research papers etc. How many artists produce anything even faintly scientific these days?
c) the term seems to be primarily used by art types as a reason why they don’t need to understand nor care about that sciency stuffy math thingy.
d) I’d have to agree with Snow’s observation “I remember G. H. Hardy once remarking to me in mild puzzlement, some time in the 1930s, Have you noticed how the word “intellectual” is used nowadays? There seems to be a new definition which certainly doesn’t include Rutherford or Eddington or Dirac or Adrian or me? It does seem rather odd, don’t y’know.” as being worrying and perhaps more current than ever.
e) I have several engineering degrees and an art masters. Possibly this explains part of my annoyance at the artificial balkanization.
f) there is something of an attitude of wilful ignorance in the standard advice to writers – “write what you know”. Sure, writing about what you know about is a good way to achieve an authentic flavour in your writing. Sadly there seems to be a subtext that you can only write about what you know already; what about actually learning something new so you can write bout it? Actually I would contend that this a symptom of a wider problem, where a reasonable bit of advice is given a pithy phrase and that then becomes somehow the sum total of the field and limits what people will think about.
I’ll stop now before my blood pressure becomes dangerous.
djlactin wrote:
Whose singular possessives? His singular possessives? My singular possessives? Your singular possessives?
I am not University educated and I am not a scientist, I was raised a disparing English teacher (have you seen my spelling?) however I have a College certificate in Gemmology.
Gemmology stadles the gap of science and history generally using a fair amount of tradition and a little bit of accident. I gotta tell you it doesn’t get much better in the middle. Example: Sapphire and Ruby are the same stone but Ruby is red and Sapphire is any other colour, including pink and purple. Have you ever sat through a heated debate of people grabbing at semi-sceintific straws trying to define the difference between pink and red while refusing to break down and just call it Corundum? Don’t.
As for bridging the gap in a meaningful and useful way, I think it helps that most libral arts types are suckers for a good story and you can get a fair amount of basic sceince into the history of it… I’m rather fond of Bill Bryson’s A Brief History of Nearly Everything. Learning the order of discovery I think really helps some types of minds understand why so many debates are as dead as they are.
I’m just nattering I’ll stop now.
All of you who complain about not having enough science in your history or philosophy classes… Why not just take a history of science or philosophy of science class?
Another English professor weighing in. Part and parcel of instruction in writing is instruction in critical reading and thinking. The writer has to have something sensible to say. If not, no matter how good the spelling, grammar, or punctuation, the writing will not pass muster. We are an eclectic bunch here, and in the main we are scientifically literate because (a) we know that writing has to have content and so we strive to be well-read in any number of fields, from philosophy to psychology, from art to anthropology, and (b) like everyone else, we live in the world and are concerned about its state. The instructors who teach Appalachian literature, for example, have become local experts on mountaintop removal and its effect on the culture, the economy, and the environment. That said, I am afraid that current trends at this university may drive a wedge between disciplines because students may be encouraged to be dismissive of courses not in their majors. (For starters, the number of General Education hours will drop from 50 to 42.) Countering that, the administration is at least paying lip service to the idea of reviving a Writing Across the Curriculum program. One of the hallmarks of that program was that it created venues for collaboration between faculty in the “Arts” and faculty in the “Sciences.”
#11,
How could you possibly write a paper on uncertainty in Neurath’s writing and not mention Schrodinger’s Cat?
Recently I’ve been listening to these lectures from The Teaching Company. They’re a fairly interesting melding of history and science (into what the lecturer, rather amusingly to my mind, calls Big History). It presents human history in a larger context. The lecture series starts with the Big Bang and gradually zooms in, going from formation of stars to our solar system to the earth to the origin of life to evolution to the eventual rise of humans to the emergence of civilisation to present day. It gives an interesting perspective.
Paul W.:
A little further on, I mentioned that going to class for That Girl was a poor substitute for going to therapy. Really, she wasn’t smart enough for either, but science-y things were beyond her in particular, especially if she couldn’t reduce it to her feelings or it had to do with facts. Every department has it’s crosses to carry around, and she was the philosophy department’s — they couldn’t wait for her to graduate and go away, so she’d stop disrupting their classes.
As a humanities postgrad: oh the shame. Doesn’t anyone remember the Sokal hoax and its humiliating revelation of scientific illiteracy within arts departments? The reflexive contrarian attitude displayed by the TA is a sorry shadow of the sort of genuine critical thinking which a training in hermeneutics ought to encourage.
I know of a tutor who once offered “Economics for Poets” as an optional undergrad module. Maybe “Very Rudimentary Scientific Method for Poets” should be posited in the universities, although apparently it would need to be a compulsory module for every member of the humanities faculties from the dean on down…
At the post-secondary level, papers should be graded on form and content with an emphasis on content. If a TA finds himself that far out of his depth in marking a paper, he shouldn’t mark it at all. This TA had recourse to a number of more professional options:
1. independent fact-checking;
2. asking a colleague who is more familiar with the material for help; and
3. asking the instructor to mark the paper instead.
Quite aside from these points, TAs should not foist their values and beliefs on the students — especially in written comments on a formal assignment.
Lynnai in #29: I think it helps that most libral arts types are suckers for a good story …
Yes yes yes. And there are so many good stories.
Joe and I were talking the other day about how it would be only reasonable to include Darwin and Wallace in any Victorian literature course. (Speaking of artificial archipelagoes, there’s the fiction/nonfiction divide, which gets applied in all the wrong ways.) They’re better reading than, say, Tolstoy.
There are plenty of terrific writers right now who are writing natural history, and frankly that scene is a lot less airless than most of current fiction. My bias, admittedly, is that one learns more about oneself by looking at the rest of the world than by looking at one’s navel. Perhaps I’m reinforced in this bias by how much more difficult the latter has become as I age.
As long as the result isn’t more pages in my favorite sci-fi digests devoted to poetry, I’m okay with it.
I’m one of these arts types — Hons. BA in English Literature, MA in Language and Professional Writing, but I also took astronomy and formal logic as an undergraduate (along with my approximately half a million language courses and a really cool philosophy course called the Metaphysics and Epistemology of Witchcraft).
I do think there is a bit of a culture divide, in that especially with English people, we’re remarkably content-agnostic (downright content-atheist in some cases, hur hur), but exceedingly process-driven. Science cares a lot more about content than the average English major does; we just want to see a good argument and some nice belletristics. Where we English folks can take it to the next level is by insisting on rigour in content as well.
the term seems to be primarily used by art types as a reason why they don’t need to understand nor care about that sciency stuffy math thingy.
No, it’s generally used by arts types to refer to the fact that the vast majority of sciencey types can’t write for shit, and if, as I said, you’re of the process mindset where belletristics counts for more than content, you’re liable to notice a lack of writing ability right off the bat.
Please note that by saying this, I’m not actually making a value judgement. If there is such a thing as a valid NOMA argument, it probably has to do with paradigms used in the arts, sciences, and social sciences. (On the other hand, I’ve got a heavy arts background, make my living as a technical writer and a software tester, and am publishing a book on history pretty soon. So it’s entirely possible that I’m biased.)
Ron @37: Darwin (and Marx) are on the syllabuses of many literature departments. Gillian Beer is one academic critic who does an excellent job of approaching both the scientific and the literary beauties of Darwin, as well as assessing the cultural importance of the theory of evolution on the nineteenth century.
I’d modify this to say that critiquing the thesis is appropriate only to the extent that the thesis is material to the course objectives:
In a class on persuasive writing, the only standard should be the persuasive competence of the paper (independent of the grader’s a priori opinion on the topic).
In a class on expository writing, the accuracy with which ID was described would be fair game, but without any judgment on the grader’s part regarding the truth (well, falsity, actually) of ID.
In a “Modern Issues” class, I would grade a student down who presented ID uncritically as true, because it’s the “controversy” that makes ID an “issue,” and any essay that doesn’t recognize ID as an alternative belief system isn’t characterizing the “modern issue” correctly (note that this is so regardless of the grader’s personal position on ID).
In a science class, of course, there should be no issue with grading the paper down (or, preferably, giving it no credit at all), because ID ISN’T science!… but even there, the rationale is not that “ID is a load of crap” (however true that may be), but that the topic is inappropriate to the subject matter of the course. Actually, I’d hope that in most cases students would be counseled away choosing such a topic, long before it came to giving them Fs.
Re TAs not going outside their responsibilities/competencies, it really shouldn’t be an issue: IMHO no graduate student should ever be assigned to TA a class in which his/her knowledge of the subject is likely to be eclipsed by even the brightest undergraduate in the class. In my own case, as an English/Creative Writing grad student whose transcript was heavy on writing and (relatively) light on literature, I was assigned to work in the University Writing Center and, later, to teach Intro to Creative Writing. Assigning me to TA an upper-division seminar in Middle English poetry would’ve been inappropriate… and the good folks at SUNY-Binghamton (now Binghamton University) were perspicacious enough not to give me such an assignment.
BTW, I try never to rag on people for online writing errors (FSM knows even so-called “pros” like me make their share!), but sometimes the irony is just too amusing to ignore:
8^)
Oh dear….
As a current college student (biology major; 3rd year), I could go on and on about this subject. Unfortunately, though, the coursework I have due at 6 pm today suggests against such a course of action :.
I will say this, though: even though my school (University of Chicago) requires core biology courses for all students as part of its “core” (everyone has to take calculus, biology, an introductory physical science course, a civilization [ie, history] course, art/art history, writing seminar, and a hybrid sociology/philosophy course), “core bio” is often regarded as a joke.
Being a bio major, I never had to take this course, so I can’t entirely vouch for the accuracy of this opinion, but given the general state of science education in this country, I really wouldn’t be surprised. For some reason, even though everyone has to take the same level of humanities courses, the sciences are regarded as something that not everyone can “get”. So you have “bio for dummies” and “rocks for jocks” and what not. This just reinforces the “science is scary” or, worse, “scientists are elitists” notion that a lot of people seem to have.
Sometimes someone will tell me (or I will hear on the news — eg, in the statements of Obama, McCain, and Clinton) that they “believe in evolution.” I always have a minor hissy fit at this, because evolutionary theory isn’t something that people should think they have to “believe in”. It’s supported by a lot of objectively observable, testable evidence. But I can’t really fault people for saying this, because I think much of the wider public really does simply “believe in” evolutionary theory on the authority of science teachers and what not. In their K-12 & college educations, it’s likely that they got a cursory overview of what evolutionary theory claims, and *maybe* a few over-simplified examples of what constitutes evidence for it. Unless they independently took a real biology course in college, or went over to talk origins, or read a book, this is likely all they have to go on. And as proved by the clear explanations at sites like talk origins, and by PZ’s own great “how does chromosome number change” explanation posted here a few days back, this doesn’t have to be the case. The basics of evolutionary theory, and why it is accepted as good science, CAN be taught to the lay person. And popular science doesn’t have to be dumbed down science.
Then there’s the issue of taking things in authority in general. We all do it, even scientists. When one of my particle physics friends tells me about an exciting new discovery in the field, I usually take it on the authority of those scientists. I rarely try to read the paper, and usually when I do, I really don’t understand it fully at all. But because I’ve been educated to understand how the scientific method works, I know that something published in a respectable peer-reviewed journal has scientific merit because it’s been tested and retested, interpreted and re-interpreted, and subject to the harsh editorial process of peer-review. I also know that there is a chance that it will be disproven, and that I cannot accept it as indisputable fact — and that, what’s more, scientists in the field won’t. They’ll continue testing and retesting it, and either confirming the findings of the initial researchers or finding issues with it and revising the theory. That’s how science works. (Disclaimer: and no, it’s not perfect. There’s politics in science, just like everything else, and I’m not trying to paint a picture of science as a lovely unbesmirched ivory tower institution…but for all its flaws, it does have great merits in sorting out good ideas from nonsense.)
But because of the utterly abysmal state of science education, which generally consists of vague descriptions of some scientific theories and “experiments” in which nifty phenomena are observed but never explained to the student, most people don’t realize this about the scientific method. So when they “believe” a scientific theory on authority, they’re not believing it because they know the scientific rigor that’s gone into testing and establishing it; they’re just believing it because some professor told them so. And in this case, it’s no wonder the public is so succeptable to “free speech” claims from ID pseudoscience. They don’t know what science is — only that it’s something a stuffy teacher told them on authority, many years ago.
(I do have to give credit where credit’s due, though — for the last few years, one of the compulsory core bio essays has been, “Why Intelligent Design ‘Theory’ is not Science.”)
And now, with that rant over, back to the coursework….
I’d just like to say that I knew Steve Notley when he lived in Edmonton.
And I remember a former friend of mine–an English major–who claimed that English students were de facto polymaths because in their course of study, they read a little bit of everything.
Such a smart girl, yet still so dumb.
There most certainly are two cultures and rarely the twain meet. It is very true that the average liberal arts student is woefully deficient in science. I have had Yale drama graduates ask me whether a chicken is a bird, for example.
That said, the level of ignorance among the few scientists of my acquaintance – I’m a musician- is equally shocking. Often, not only no knowledge of literature beyond sci-fi or Tom Clancy but no sense of literature – ie, how to read for anything other than the most obvious levels of meaning. And don’t get me started on musical ignorance.
To some extent this mirrors American society’s ignorance, but I would hope that scientists, being as a group pretty smart, would have more curiosity about the arts than they do. Saying that in no way minimizes “our” – ie, we arts folks – shameful lack of knowledge and curiosity, of course. That’s what’s meant by “two cultures” – we both have little idea of what the other is. And that is to both cultures’ detriment.
Old axiom: divide et impera….Ceasar’s words which religion has used on areas of knowledge to (cynically?) keep students from knowing too much.
For example, witness these founding events from one of our oldest sources of higher education, William and Mary: http://www.wm.edu/vitalfacts/index.php
If you click on the links to the left, one will see the church’s influence on education and knowledge in general. Ergo, I believe, like many of you, that it’s time to begin the re-evolution of education…without religion’s influence.
Etha,
Etha, I think you’ve got this exactly backwards. “Believe” is a perfectly fine English word with a very useful everyday meaning.
For example, suppose if I say
(1) “My mechanic said I need a new transmission, but I don’t believe it,” or
(2) “Scientists no longer believe in the luminiferous aether”, or
(3) “I don’t believe in Sasquatch.”
These are perfectly fine statements where “believe” is used the right way, in its original, central sense.
The problem is with the peculiar religious sense of “believe,” where you “believe in” something without the usual need for good evidence. Often you “believe” in something you don’t even grasp, like the holy trinity, and/or refuse acknowledge the entailments of, like the three-omni monotheistic God being an impossibility.
That’s what’s fucked up. Religious folks have taken a perfectly good, absolutely necessary word for a perfectly good epistemic relationship, and made it into something screwily corrosive of sensible talk about knowledge. It’s the world’s oldest Orwellian term.
I wish we could make religious people put air-quotes around the word “believe” when they use it in that way. In any case, it’s not a word we can afford to abandon just because they abuse it.
(I feel the same way about the word “truth.” Science is about truth, even if absolute certainty is not obtainable. The ordinary everyday sense of “truth” should not be sacrificed just because some people claim to trump it with some mythical absolutely certain revealed “truth.”)
You think this is bad. You should hear about cases where students in a biology courses on evolution start giving the teaching assistant heck just because they feel their religion requires them to hold on to Dark Age pseudoscience.
I’ve heard about an instructor who was teaching a seminar course on evolution which required critical evaluation of research papers. It turns out that one of the students was a creationist, and would raise absurd objections in the required assignments and would continually go off on tangents with junk probably influenced by Ken Ham et al. So when this student gets a bad grade, she and her husband start claiming that she is being discriminated against based on her religion. Go figure.
As a Fine Arts Major in the ’80’s ,we had a few profs who would come accross the street to see student and faculty concerts, theater productions and art shows. One in particular was a physics prof who always seemed to be in the audience. Great guy, I’ll never forget him or his “Far Side” lined office windows. Several musicians were actually rabid math and physics geeks who changed majors once they considered how they would make a living post graduation.
It’s very easy for those in the Humanities to ignore the sciences, and vice versa. I really admired the profs who showed support to the arts beyond their academic discipline. (You seem to be well rounded, PZ) I’m sure a little more reciprocity would be appreciated.
It should be remembered that this was not an English but a History TA. Historians, like social scientists, should be trained in the proper collection and use of evidence. This includes not only the appropriate form of citations, but the selection and critical evaluation of primary and secondary sources. So the TA was well within his/her rights to say what (s)he did in the second part of this comment:
“As you may be able to tell, I personally have lots of reservations regarding evolution (even scientifically). But your goal isn’t to agree with me, and I found your referencing excellent and essay concise and to the point. The two complaints I have will be the heavy reliance on people such as Orr, and you are a bit thin on primary sources.”
The rest of the comments are utterly bizarre and have no place on a student’s paper. Especially as it wasn’t really a paper about the science itself, but (it appears) a paper about the historical reception of the theory, which is entirely different. I suppose I’m just bothered to see the line between the “hard” sciences on the one hand and the social sciences and humanities on the other being drawn so sharply. Historians and social scientists spend years in dusty archives, libraries, and field sites doing research; these disciplines have developed methodologies and evidentiary standards. A good history paper is not just a matter of making a good argument, but of providing/citing solid evidence to back it up.
Additionally, “a historical overview of the theory of evolution” is, in my view, too broad a topic for an undergraduate history paper. I ask students for a title and quick overview of their papers several weeks in advance, and this is one important reason – the original topics are often far too broad, and need to be narrowed to something that is researchable within a shorter time frame. That said, from the brief excerpts given this paper sounds pretty good (some of the reasoning appears a bit sloppy, but that’s typical of papers at this level).
This is reflective of the overall state of relative ignorance that the majority of Americans have in regards to science. It’s the “it’s just a theory” canard writ large in popular consciousness. The parallels between the Creationists and the climate change “skeptics” are legion and illustrate that a fundamental American misunderstanding of science itself transcends religion and educational background.
What is needed isn’t a Scientific Literacy 101 course for Liberal Arts students and teachers, but a Scientific Literacy 101 course for the American public that goes beyond simply outlining the Scientific Method- it needs to go into the value and limitations of peer review; the relative rarity of consensus and its significance when it does occur; the differences between lay and scientific use of words like “hypothesis”, “theory”, “uncertainty”, etc.; how funding is secured; acknowledgment of politicization of science where it has and is happening (e.g. EPA, NOAA, etc.) and what can be done to prevent it.
I have heard many people who work or study in the intersection between science and education or policy lament that The Demon-Haunted World isn’t required reading. I would go a step further and suggest that TDHW is overdue for a revisit and update, particularly in this age of ideologically-driven think tank influence on policy. That we had a presidential candidate bluntly admit to total ignorance of evolution, the remaining candidates at least paying lip service to vaccine-Autism nuttery, etc. beggars belief.
With Expelled serving to challenge laws regarding science education and James “climate change is a hoax” Inhofe serving as the Ranking Minority on the Senate Environmental committee, the stakes have never been higher. In order to protect our schools and ensure our economic and environmental future, science must be brought to the forefront of national consciousness, warts and all.
@45
As a W&M alum, the influence of religion on the education one receives is (or at least was as of a short time ago) virtually non-existent. There is a broader issue of “conservative Christian values” influencing administration hiring practices, but in my experience this hadn’t made its way into the classroom.
For the record, postmodernism (and, for the matter, deconstructionism) aren’t “misunderstood” topics.
They’re understood perfectly.
They’re just stupid.
This common fear is a side effect of using windows. It is hoped that for those who cannot stop using windows, there will soon be an Eli-Lilly or Pfzier product to help them overcome this difficult problem.
#41:
In an ideal world, no graduate student would be assigned to TA a class in which his/her knowledge of the subject is likely to be eclipsed by the brightest undergraduate in the class. In the real world, far too many undergrads count themselves lucky if their TAs can speak and read English.
Many TAs are little more than human keyword scanners who grade work into percentile bins based on extremely specific criteria provided by the professors. Actually understanding the material is a bit beyond them.
Just wanted to comment, you’re not only fighting the “cultural” difference between science people and humanities people, you’re also up against basic human nature. People who know very little of a topic are inevitably the ones who are the most certain, and they also tend to be people who are most swayed by certainty. The TA in question didn’t end up doing much harm to the science-literate student, but imagine if those comments had been instead given to a history major who went out on a limb to try and understand evolution?
In a class on persuasive writing, the only standard should be the persuasive competence of the paper (independent of the grader’s a priori opinion on the topic).
Impossible. The reader’s a priori knowledge of the topic is what determines whether she will be convinced.
In a science class, of course, there should be no issue with grading the paper down … because ID ISN’T science!… but even there, the rationale is not that “ID is a load of crap” (however true that may be), but that the topic is inappropriate to the subject matter of the course.
Nope. It’s inappropriate precisely because it’s a load of crap. It’s the fact that it’s claims aren’t true (i.e., supported by evidence, tested, falsifiable) that makes it not science.
“For the record, postmodernism (and, for the matter, deconstructionism) aren’t “misunderstood” topics.
They’re understood perfectly.
They’re just stupid.”
I would add a caveat to that. Post-Modernism is a term that means something in architecture. It essentially is any school of architecture that post-dates Le Corbusier. In any other subject it is meaningless.
This is exactly the kind of thing atheists need to think and talk about more. It fills me with dread bordering on rage against “Big Science” knowing that majors in philosophy, theology, nursing, elementary ed, accounting — whatever — are not universally exposed to even fifteen solid minutes on things like how Copernicus clambered past Ptolemy (with pictures!), continental drift, why is there oil under the ground, radioactive dating, genes & mutations, etc. — all of this at even the pop science, hand-waving, pre-Discovery magazine level.
(And as an aside, relativity and quantum theory ought to be purged from a list of topics “everyone should know” — in practice, they teach people to feel too dumb to ever understand science, and to therefore not bother.)
We all agree that such learning should take place in highschool (and it probably does maybe 10 – 20% of the time), but it so often does not, which is hugely risky for society (i.e., my genes). It looks a lot like (get ready for it) Big Science, does not continually push, shove, elbow, cajole, make enemies and cultivate allies, for substantial progress in this area.
Aww, now comments like this just cheese me off.
I’m no expert on postmodernism, but the contempt scientists and engineers generally show for advanced critical theories in the arts is really annoying. Trust me, folks, string theory and non-Euclidean geometry seem just as esoteric to your colleagues in the humanities… but they’re usually not foolish enough to call your far-out ideas “stupid” just because they’re far-out.
As someone who’s had a foot on either side of the sciences/arts dichotomy (which ought to be a false dichotomy, but in practice, sadly, isn’t), I’ve seen far more cases of scientists and engineers dismissing humanities scholars as clueless eggheads than vice-versa, and it’s really not fair. At the high end of any intellectual pursuit, advanced theory and practice is likely to be incomprehensible to people outside the field; it’s just as bogus to write off postmodernism as “stupid” as it would be to write off quarks as “goofy” just because y’all have given them goofy names. Anybody got change for a Higgs boson?
Actually, I think this is a mirror image of the prejudice against college athletes. We tend to write off athletes (esp. football and basketball players) as “dumb jocks” because they’re singlemindedly devoted to perfecting a physical skill, often at some detriment to other, more intellectual pursuits. OK, fair enough. Now leave the football player on the practice field and wander across campus to the Music Department… where you’ll find a violin major who’s every bit as singlemindedly focus on perfecting a physical skill, likely at just as much risk to “other, more intellectual pursuits.” But… because we afford music an aura of intellectual respectability that we (for whatever reason) deny to athletics, we tend to value these two essentially similar efforts quite differently.
When I say the science/humanities dichotomy is the mirror image of this, what I mean is that we devalue athletics because we perceive it as too concrete and not intellectual enough… and we devalue all that artsy-fartsy lit-crit “BS” because we perceive it as not concrete enough and too intellectual, as opposed to science, which is based on observing and explaining real stuff.
Well, look: The texts that literary criticism responds to are real, and the natural and emotional landscapes that art interprets are real, and people who care about those things are no less deserving than scientists are of an advanced, professional vocabulary and theoretical structure to bring to bear on the subject matter they love. Even when that theoretical structure stretches the bounds of credulity, it’s neither fair nor properly respectful to call it “stupid.” </rant>
<deep breath>
‘Postmodernism’ seems to yank some people’s chains. Without wishing to serve as an advocate for it, I would note that, outwith its philosophical and social-theoretical uses, which may be questionable [and are certainly debateable], it is a firmly-established part of the history of late twentieth-century literature, and indeed all narrative forms – including the cinema which, no doubt, few of the so-scornful commenters above would object to as ‘just stupid’.
Once again, the injunction not to dismiss what you don’t fully understand would seem apposite.
@#46 Paul W —
While I agree in principle, when you see people using “I believe in evolution” and “I believe in God” in the same sentence, it’s hard not to think they mean belief in the co-opted religious sense. Which is, unfortunately, the sense it’s come to have in the minds of the general public as well.
And the trouble with prescriptive linguistics is, as much as we might want to use it to save words from the kind of Orwellian misuse “belief” has gained, it rarely works….
I would add to my comment above (@ #49) the following suggestion to the TA: When looking into the science of evolutionary theory, you should try to take your own advice concerning primary sources. When you seriously consider the evidence they provide, you may see your reservations melt away.
@#51 Bob —
You obviously haven’t heard some of the ways my fellow college students — for the most part fairly intelligent people — use the word “deconstruct”. They think it means something along the lines of “analyze”. Like, “I’m going to deconstruct creationist’s arguments” to mean that they’re going to take apart creationist’s arguments, piece by piece, and demonstrate why they’re wrong. A worthy endeavor, but not deconstructionism…
Yah, I was pretty much intentionally addressing the ideal case (as witness markers such as “IMHO” and “should”)… but…
…I’m not naive about the extent to which the “real world” falls short of ideal cases, in this as in all things.
BTW, a TA’s weak English skills are more or less of a problem depending on both what sort of class it is and what the TA’s role is: A lecturer in the Contemporary American Novel whose English was rudimentary would be a disaster, obviously; a math TA whose role was to check problem sets and average grades, not so much.
If this is really their role, and the professors are disciplined about implementing the process you describe, then understanding the material may be immaterial, as well as beyond the TA. It’s only when the TA is responsible for substantive teaching or independent grading of student writing that subject-area knowledge is important… but then, that was the situation we were talking about (or so it seemed to me). If all the TA is doing is following a strictly defined rubric, probably no subject-area expertise is required.
In addition to the two assigments I mentioned in my previous posting, I also TAed for an Intro to Cinema class, because the Film Studies program at Binghamton didn’t have any graduate students of its own and had to “borrow” them from other disciplines within the humanities. Now, I didn’t know any more about cinema than any of the freshmen in that class… but in that case my responsibilities (and those of the other two TAs — it was a large lecture class) were essentially administrative, so it was fine. (And a great experience, too… it was like taking the class.)
@59 Agreed, completely. With the caveat that postmodern theory drew the ire of the science community on itself with the excesses of some of its sillier advocates. But postmodern refers to a period of time (you know, the bit after the modern period, so beginning around the 1950s-60s and continuing to now-ish), and to a particular aesthetic: playful, self-referential, parodic. Thomas Pynchon and Flann O’Brien seem like good examples – and, incidentally, both of them seem pretty sharp on science. So, if someone says “postmodern” to me, I definitely understand what they’re on about.
And, daft as some of it might have been, in academia the postmodern impulse to open up to other disciplines really is a positive one. At its worst, it means tedious relativism and the sloppy mining of other subjects for concepts to be mishandled; at best, it’s the argument for arts and sciences coming together more often.
A guide on how to write good:
1. Always avoid alliteration.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid clichés like the plague — they’re old hat.
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. Parenthentical words however must be enclosed in commas.
8. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
9. Contractions aren’t necessary.
10. Do not use a foreign word when there is an adequate English quid pro quo.
11. One should never generalize.
12. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
13. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
14. Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
15. It behooves you to avoid archaic expressions.
16. Avoid archaeic spellings too.
17. Understatement is always best.
18. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
19. One word- sentences? Eliminate. Always!
20. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
21. The passive voice should not be used.
22. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
23. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors — even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
24. Who needs rhetorical questions?
25. Don’t use commas, that, are not, necessary.
26. Do not use hyperbole; not one in a million can do it effectively.
27. Never use a big word where a diminutive alternative would suffice.
28. Subject and verb always has to agree.
29. Be more or less specific.
30. Placing a comma between subject and predicate, is not correct.
31. Use youre spell chekker to avoid mispelling and to catch typograhpical errers.
32. Don’t repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.
33. Don’t be redundant.
34. Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.
35. Don’t never use no double negatives.
36. Poofread carefully to see if you any words out.
37. Hopefully, you will use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
38. Eschew obfuscation.
39. No sentence fragments.
40. Don’t indulge in sesquipedalian lexicological constructions.
41. A writer must not shift your point of view.
42. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!!
43. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
44. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
45. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
46. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
47. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
48. Always pick on the correct idiom.
49. The adverb always follows the verb.
50. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.
51. And always be sure to finish what
Sorry, but I disagree: Persuasive writing is a technical skill that a competent teacher should be able to judge independently of his/her opinion of the subject matter… in the same way that a competent music teacher can evaluate the skill of a pianist playing a piece the teacher happens to hate.
In fact, I’d say the ability to separate one’s evaluation of the student’s skill from one’s feelings about the subject matter of the student’s work is one reasonable measure of teaching competence when it comes to teaching skills-oriented classes.
You’re effectively saying “it’s not science because it’s not science.” The key discriminator here is that, inasmuch as it’s just a codeword for creationism, ID is a matter of religious belief. I submit that no science TA has standing to tell a student that his/her belief is false in the universal sense (even though you and I and the TA think it is false), but any such TA does have standing to say “that’s a matter of your belief, but it’s not part of science as defined in this curriculum.”
I don’t think there’s a way around that problem. You have to deal with it, and make it clear you’re talking about regular old believing.
I’m not much of a prescriptivist. Too much linguistics knowledge for that. I just don’t think there are plausible substitute words for utterly basic words like “believe”, “truth”, and “knowledge.” (Or “marriage” or “moral,” for that matter.)
Because theists have sown confusion by co-opting these fine secular words, you have to make it clear that you mean the everyday senses of those words (and that the religious senses are bogus).
That’s no more difficult than the alternative, which is to define all-new words and try to get people to understand them. It’d be kind of like trying to talk about “up” and “down” and “in” and “out” without using those words. It’s not easy. (And it’s giving away the store, so it’s not worth it IMHO.)
Just want to give a hat tip to Bill Dauphin, especially for #59. Like a number of folks on this thread I’ve been in both the sciences and the humanities during my career and I also deplore the contempt that many people on each side have for the other. Incidentally, I was first guided through Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition by a communication professor with a bachelor’s degree in physics, and I can vouch that we both value postmodern thought and that neither of us thinks that it argues that scientists just make stuff up.
Addendum to #68: That’s not to say that people haven’t used postmodernism in this way, just that not everyone does.
I won’t even get into the argument about whether we’re really in what one could describe as a “postmodern” age, but there’s a good discussion about science and modernism in this podcast:
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/index.html#episode5
I highly recommend the series as a whole as well. (Note to evolutionary biologists out there: Richard Lewontin is in the latest episode.) I’m sure everyone here can find something to object to, but it’s a much higher-level discussion of science than we normally get from the mainstream media and for that it’s to be applauded. The first episode is a good introduction to the series.
Bill Dauphin @58: ::applauds:: Thanks. That’s what I meant to say, but you got there first and better.
I’ve never heard someone who knows jack-shit about postmodernism level the usual “it’s nonsense” criticism. If that’s what you’re getting, you need to reread it with your brain firing on all cylinders this time, ’cause you missed the point.
Too much linguistics knowledge for that. I just don’t
think there are plausible substitute words for utterly
basic words like “believe”, “truth”, and “knowledge.”
(Or “marriage” or “moral,” for that matter.)
As someone trained in linguistics, I have no idea how one would make the claim that “words” such as “believe”, “truth”, or “knowledge”–let alone, “marriage” or “moral”–are in any linguistic sense “basic words.” When one goes for Morris Swadesh’s old basic vocabulary list, none of those words can be found. They are simply too “cultural”; too implicated in stocks of knowledge, shared and sharable by degrees.
As for the nonsense about postmodernism being “stupid”, well that speaks to a certain ignorance that one can find more often than one would like (assertions to the contrary).
As for the history TA, I would have marked the paper down if all the student was using was secondary sources in a history paper.
I would have loved something like that back when I was a poor Political Science major. Not that I needed help with the science, pre se, but to meet some hot physics majors.
I think there are more physicists in amature chamber music groups than there are musicians in amature physics labs. On the other hand I know several musicians who make their living doing all kinds of non-musical things, mostly with computers.
I think the general education, biology for music majors, course is the most important one we teach. In many instances this course will be the only exposure the future voter-good citizen will have with biology. I see the goals of the course to be sending the student away convinced that biology is important, interesting, and understandable.
There is a general problem with lack of writing skills. At my university, the teaching of composition is done by TA’s, which reflects the English department’s point of view. We tried the “writing across the curiculum” fad. The idea is that students in class write essays and then edit and critique each other’s essays through several iterations. Some of my colleagues reqarded it as academically unsound. Others as too difficult to oragaize. I did it with several classes, and thought it worked pretty well.
@#27: b) rather a lot of scientists (using the term broadly to cover people with primarily science/technology jobs) seem to produce literary works as well as research papers etc. How many artists produce anything even faintly scientific these days?
Try: Stelarc, Eduardo Kac, Victoria Vesna, Suzanne Anker, Andrea Zittel, Mark Dion, Tim Hawkinson, George Gessert, Orlan, Charles Ray, Rosamond Purcell, Chrissy Conant, Mark Quinn, Storey Sisters, Larry Miller and many more artists–all contemporary and all more than “faintly” scientific.
Yes, of course. I wasn’t referring to that. I also wasn’t referring to the term as it’s used in architecture, although I’d be very interested in learning more about that.
I’m not a scientist or an engineer. Was originally into physics, but now I’m just a plain, old professor in Philosophy (AOS: PhilMind-Lang-Sci).
I wasn’t claiming that postmodernism was stupid because it was far-out. (Philosophy as a discipline can be far-out at times.)
Look, I’ll grant that the (really) early stuff from Derrida on Husserl was okay — but, other than that, no dice.
“I’m going to grade them by insisting that “it’s” always gets an apostrophe”
Ahem… always when it’s a contraction, not when it’s possessive.
As in,
“It’s a shame that so many people are ignorant.”
and
“Look, a bird. Its beak is very large.”
There’s a very good chance that this is what you meant, but I’m making sure. Besides, I have to nitpick this issue; it’s one of my pet peeves. Also my own science instructors don’t have a good track record with these sorts of things.
Dr. Myers,
That is an excellent idea. I’ve been thinking along the same lines for the past few days. I’ve recently been going through a lot of the evolution/ID debates, and was wondering, “How did we get to this point?” Accessible science education for non-science majors would be a great way to spread some basic science education out there. It’s a shame that so much thought that wouldn’t even touch on a basic understanding of science proliferates out there. We emphasize so much on certain “core” subjects that are necessary to function in today’s society–in the modern society is science not a growing necessity?
It’s high time to not stigmatize science to those who are not scientifically inclined, and to spread the knowledge that all our modern society rests on.
Stupid, stupid rule. PZ’s is much better.
There shouldn’t be a reversed rule for the possessive of it. If I say “my car’s radiator” I should be able to say “it’s radiator,” where “it” refers to my car.
“its radiator” is a contraction of “it’s radiator”, where the think contracted out is the apostrophe—the residue of contraction in other contexts.
What an amazingly stupid fucking rule.
No fucking wonder so many people get it “wrong.” The rule is insane.
It makes more sense to leave the apostrophe in, or make it optional at most. Requiring that you don’t put the apostrophe there is effectively having a rule that a particularly weird kind of contraction is obligatory, i.e., you gotta contract it’s (possessive it) to its.
That’s like saying you can’t say cannot, and must say can’t instead.
The people who get this “wrong” are right.
This is a classic example of prescriptive grammar being incredibly stupid.
Anyone disagreeing with me on this should be lined up against a wall and shot.
You know, while we’re on the subject of cross disciplinary takeovers, I’d like to see more eye candy going on in the sciences. Imagine opening up your next issue of Science, Cell or Nature and not seeing a bland graph and some utilitarian photos of viral foci, but a
3-D transformation of said data using transparency and aesthetically appealing colors plus a well executed and tasteful photographic representation of said unhappy cells, replete with disgruntled expressions to reflect their proposed state of existence. I’d also really love it if you guys would stop naming alleles unmemorable things like ‘distalless’, ‘bey’ and ‘gey’ and name them all after colors. Don’t just stop with ‘ochre’ and ‘amber’ (Sorry for the oxymoron there folks!) Plus, if you could, order them all along the genome in the same order they appear in the rainbow and give them RGB, CMYK and Lab color designation. That way I actually could remember what the names of these silly things are and not have to go digging for my old developmental biology textbooks or hitting up Google just so I can translate what all you brilliant people are saying.
Was in science, now in law, can’t write in either.
However like armstrad @ #1 and others, the apostrophe is my personal bugbear. My particular issue- the collective possesive eg Womens’ Institute. For some reason people want to always put the apostrophe before the “s”. I’ve been known to take a thick marking pen to signs in public paces that have it wrong.
well, the title’s a little off from what PZ requested, but i think these oxford university press “very short introductions” might fill the role of the idiot’s guides. and yes, there’s even one on postmodernism. if that doesn’t slake your thirst, you can move on to literary theory!
http://www.amazon.com/Postmodernism-Very-Short-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0192802399
now we just need “evolution for english majors.”
Perhaps we can attribute some of that to the higher incidence of Aspergers and such in the scientific community? I mean I do read literature at times and I recognize that I don’t get a lot of the non-obvious “meaning”. Moby Dick was a overly long story about some guy chasing a whale; the historical autobiography “Two Years Before The Mast” seemed seem to me to say more about the “human condition” of that time period to me. And the thundering allegory in the prose of D. H. Lawrence flew past me unseen. I’ll admit my musical ignorance, but is it inherent or simply a question of exposure to the ideas? I think some of that was tossed at me early, but it didn’t stick. Similarly to poetry: “I just don’t get it”.
This I agree with — as a physicist — I think there’s a bit too much, not just “gee wiz” coolness (that can be kinda’ fun), but an out-and-out attempt to intimidate people with the unintuitiveness of these topics.
:-o :-O :-o :-O :-o
Never again will I need to insinuate that Captain Unelected passed Yale simply because of his surname.
I prefer saying it’s about reality. What if solipsism is true? Then reality is not true…
No, no, no, no. Without quantum physics, people keep making stupid arguments based on the idea, falsified 100 years ago, that every effect has a cause. Also, if people never learn about them, they’ll welcome the denialists with open arms.
That’s a triple one. Perhaps you shouldn’t never have used no negative concord in the first place. :-)
Uh, BoS–that’s because they’re *right*. Cf. Children’s (of Children) Hospital, not “Childrens” (of Childrens, since there’s no such word).
“Women’s” just means “of women”; “of womens”, on the other hand…
oh, hell, that’s exactly what I deserve for playing pedant with someone whose posts I enjoy so much.
make that ‘not “Childrens'”; I left out the final apostrophe after “Children”. What’s that rule again about grammar nazi posts having to contain grammatical errors?
It isn’t a rule in the first place. It’s an exception. :-) (Which probably bolsters your point.)
Orthography, not grammar.
I have always preferred public flogging.
Those names are good, because they indicate (often in a funny way; SUPERMAN, KRYPTONITE, mothers against decapentaplegic…) what happens when the gene is broken. What I hate is when 50 genes have names consisting of a few letters and a number, the letters being an abbreviation of the most general area they are involved in, and the number being assigned in the order of discovery, i. e., completely random from any kind of functional standpoint, and the functions are what you’re supposed to learn. How am I supposed to learn by heart whether SpoIIA2 phosphorylates SpoIIIE or whatever… (and, yes, there was a lecture where I was supposed to learn a lot of the sporulation of Bacillus subtilis by heart; fortunately I knew enough of the rest of the lecture to pass the exam… at the third attempt, I think).
We can’t, because the order is (to varying degrees) different in every species.
I read it when I was less than 10 years old. I found it stupid. Captain Ahab wants, all the way to insanity, to get that whale; fails a whole book long; finally sinks with his ship, curses the passing whale one last time, drowns, and then the book is finished. Boring. So pointless! What was Melville trying to tell us? That we shouldn’t go insane in the first place?
The Bierce-Hartmann-McKean-Skitt Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation states that any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror.
The Meta-Bierce-Hartman-McKean-Skitt Law states that mentioning the name of this law runs a high risk of containing an error. To wit, Mr Hartman has a single N. Grmpf.
Next March, a cultures-spanning event at Hofstra University:
Darwin’s Reach, an interdisciplinary conference
The cafe’, great idea. Count on this retired science teacher being there in spirit, well not exactly, literally. You have my support. Hope it works out well. – Vince
One of the professors I most admired during my undergrad years would quote Shakespeare, and then turn back to the board to write out equations to explain an ecology theory, and then talk about butterflies with absolute passion. He talked to us (students) about our writing skills as well as our thinking skills, and encouraged us to question even basic ideas (evolution, ecology).
I’ve gone the other direction, but I’m a better teacher of Shakespeare (and comp) because I took his classes.
I teach composition classes and have students write a research paper to answer a real question they have; I’ve had to talk students out of writing about “irreducible complexity” and “mercury causes autism” any number of times. (Because they think they already know the answer, so it’s not a real question for the purposes of their paper in the class.)
But it’s hard to let students research their real questions and do enough background reading to keep up in a given semester, with 28 or so students. And I imagine that’s the problem the history TA had. S/he probably hasn’t had much training in teaching writing or responding to papers, and it shows.
@ #83: No, no. Captain Unelected graduated from Yale College. Yale Drama’s a-whole-nother kettle of fish.
– A Yale Drama grad (whose dissertation is, appropriately enough, about the intersection of science and theater)
for those of you English teachers who say you grade based on the competence of the writing, rather than the topic, where were you when I was taking English in college? I ended up dropping my class in frustration when I couldn’t get the instructor to get past her disagreements with my thesis or conclusion…in a class that was about WRITING, not about literature or any other similar subject where the topic matter was relevant.
I got tired of having to argue with her after every assignment (after which argument she would ALWAYS raise my grade from a C+ to an A- without fail). So, since English wasn’t required in my program, I skipped it. Stuck with business communications and public speaking.
CanadianChick-
I teach writing and I consider a well-formulated thesis and a solidly supported conclusion to be part and parcel of a good essay (assuming this is the genre you’re talking about). It’s more than just writing clearly. Rhetoric is epistemic — It creates knowledge rather than just representing it, so I evaluate student writing more heavily on argument than on clarity and adherence to appropriate style. All of these are important, but the argument is paramount.
#74 – OK, fair enough, a list of artists that produce work that is faintly scientific. Not, however, science works as in papers, research articles etc (at least so far as I can tell) which is what I ought to have been a bit clearer about. And of course any generalisation will have interesting exceptions; including this one.
@91:
I had a similar experience with my astronomy professor, who read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to us on the first day of class. It was an encouraging experience, especially for me as a freshman English major at the time, since it emphasized the cross-disciplinary nature of a liberal arts education.
I think part of the problem for me was that my public school education was utter shit when it came to any of the sciences (and, frankly, to any of the humanities). With the exception of a few determined teachers, no one tried to teach us critical thinking skills, and had I not been a curious reader on my own time, I can imagine how easy it might have been for me to end up adopting the dogma of the ultra-conservative town where I grew up. For all the talk here about increased exposure to science (and the arts) at the university level, I worry that without broad, sweeping changes in K-12, it’ll just be too little too late for those most at risk.
The people who keep saying that the TA should not have marked the paper for content without checking the facts or getting someone more competent to help her are missing the whole point!
The TA might very well know to go to outside sources to help her deal with a topic on which she is aware of her ignorance. The problem is that she clearly thought she knew the subject well enough to critique the content knowledgeably.
It’s just bad luck that her exposure to evolution and evolutionary theory seems to have been largely from creationist sources; her “education” on the subject reeks heavily of standard creationist lies, and she has no idea just how badly she has been manipulated.
Even if she gets confronted by the entire biology department over this, she might never believe how egregious those lies were, and might never accept that biologists know their own business better than her pastor (or whoever brainwashed her).
As I have often said, we know what we know, and sometimes we know what we don’t know, but we often don’t know what we don’t know.
And if that’s too confusing, here’s a better way of putting it that Artemus Ward came up with: “It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.”
~David D.G.
“There shouldn’t be a reversed rule for the possessive of it.”
Well, there isn’t, really. “It” follows the same rule as the other pronouns: their genitive forms don’t have apostrophes. His, her, hers, ours, mine, their, theirs–no apostrophes to be found among them.
I guess you could grouse about the “reversed rule” for pronouns, but why single out “it”? It’s not that hard to keep straight, regardless. English grammar is awfully simple now, so let’s just enjoy the few complexities left to it.
Wow. I finally leave a comment at PZ’s blog, and it’s about punctuation. . . .
Bob:
I take you at your word… but I stand by my original point, because there are plenty of lit-crit deniers out there, just as I described, even if you’re not one of them.
But having stipulated that you do, in fact, have a knowledgeable, well-reasoned critique of postmodernism that is based on something more substantive than mere intolerance for the esoteric, I might also humbly suggest that “it’s stupid” is probably not an adequate summary of your thesis.
David:
I imagine a great many truly magnificent works of literature (not to mention other artforms) would strike even the brightest child “less than 10 years old” as stupid, given that young children lack the personal and social context of the adults the art was made for. Pray tell, have you revisited Moby Dick since you started shaving? You might well still not like it, but I doubt an adult of your intelligence would casually dismiss it as “stupid.”
There seems to be a theme here: IMHO, “stupid” is almost never an adequate response to art or ideas. It’s dismissive and disrespectful of serious work, and insufficiently damning for the truly reprehensible.
Oh, by the way (and at the risk of getting my self called “stupid”), about that chicken: I know it looks a lot like a bird to you biologists and zoologists, but if you step outside your taxonomy and look at it with different eyes, you might find that it has a lot more in common with pigs and lambs and cattle (i.e., other barnyard animals raised for food) than with nightingales and finches and seagulls and condors.
I’m jus’ sayin’….
I had a “golden rule” for developing the topic for a paper required by a specific course instructor for a specific course.
When I wrote my papers in my history classes, which included doing book reviews, I always kept my papers within the realm of politcal/military history since that was the main content of the textbooks we used. My history professor in my freshman college year required his approval of our topic for our thesis and the book we intended to review. My book of choice was An Army for Empire: The United States Army in the Spanish-American War. The choice was due to my severe lack of knowledge of this particular war, and my personal boredom with repeatedly studying the more notorious ones.
My papers for computer science dealt directly with problems, ideas, and innovations within the realm of a computer-science-only repertoire (i.e. no social, moral, ethical, philosophical, religious, secular, military, or political repercussions presented within the paper – just “hard-wired” computer technology). I followed this same rule with all my course papers unless the thesis was specifically stated by the instructor to include the influence of one or more of those aspects.
I kept my English papers within the realms of classic literature, doing my final research paper on the comparison of the personal and residual literary influences of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. It would never have crossed my mind to do a “History of Evolution” in a history course. The thesis of all my papers was always derived directly from the overall content of the course material. This blog simply reinforces that idea.
Two words: Chicken of the Sea.
Ok, four.
Man oh man, i failed a philosophy class once. Critical Thinking and Writing, if i recall (undergrad nonsense). we were writing essays on california ballot items that year, and i chose the stem cell research one.
We also had to speechify the papers for the class, 2-3 minute presentation. In the course of my research i found that a lot of the opponents of the bill (Such as JUDY NORSIGIAN) were proponents of bioethics. As i read the essay out loud basically from memory, the professor jumped my ass about my rendition of bioethics, even though i was quoting from the people who wrote the opposing viewpoints of the bill.
Time spent in front of class? 25 minutes. Prof failed the paper, wouldn’t allow a rewrite, i stopped going. I hear she was forced to retire a couple of years back. Oh well.
Redraft the essay with passing references to the objectors like Michael Behe, and find a representative handful of references (a dozen or so shouldn’t be too hard to find) thoroughly and comprehensively refuting their arguments.
There’s an interesting article over at scienceprogress.org that illustrates the need for the arts and sciences to communicate a little better to each other. It focuses on how certain sectors of society use of rhetoric to to manufacture the illusion of scientific controversies.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/04/two_cultures.php#comments
I’d also like to echo the thoughts of a couple of previous posters that a study of the history of science would go a long way on both sides to redressing the balance. History is a central pillar of the arts, and the history of science is one of the best stories it has to tell. It’d be a good start.
By the way,
Student: By 1870, about a decade after its publication, nearly all biologists agreed that life had evolved,, and by around the 1940s most agreed that natural selection was a key driving force.
Footnote: Allen Orr, “Devolution: Why Intelligent Design Isn’t,” The New Yorker, May 30, 2005.
TA: Astonishing statement by Allen Orr
Not to point out the obvious, but if Orr did not actually provide some form of evidence for that claim, then it is an “astonishing statement.” I tend to think that Orr is correct, but just because my impression aligns with Orr’s statement, does not mean that I do not expect a certain degree of evidence for such a claim. And a statement from The New Yorker asserting what “nearly all biologists agreed” is not, for me anyway, a strong citation. An historian would want to tease out what it means for people to “agree” about evolution in the 1880s. Or about “natural selection” in the 1940s. Such a blanket claim, without evidence, is an astonishing claim. No matter how much I may think it likely true; and in fact because I think it likely true I should demand evidence for such a claim. Or are we to take the assertion on “faith” and our “gut”?
In my original statement (and not David’s followup) I called it “an overly long” story and didn’t explicitly dismiss it as “stupid”. But I guess I will be a bit more blunt: It was “stupid”. Certainly I didn’t get any sense of why it should be considered a “truly magnificent work of literature”. And yes, I was shaving at the time — it was ten years ago, and I’ve been 42 for a good handful of years now. I can’t discuss the book in any detail because it didn’t stick with me. Or course I’ve also admitted that I’m one of those uncultured swine who can’t appreciate “Art” for the unstated underlying “meanings”. Reading the wikipedia article on it to remind myself what the big deal is, I guess I still don’t “get it”. But as I said I think “Two Year Before the Mast” is a great (and underappreciated) masterpiece. Partly because it’s true, but also partly because it covers many of the same themes without the “oooh, I’m devolving into insanity, blah, blah, blah” triteness.
But the wiki does bring up a question. It says that the book initially received mixed reviews, but is now considered one of the greatest novels in the English language. As one who “doesn’t get” these things I have to ask: is the later because the initial impressions of the book were wrong or is is because over time the incestuous nature of literary criticism has weeded out those that would disagree? Is it a feedback loop that drives clannish behaviour by expelling those who disagree? It’s not like science where one tests against reality, in literature I don’t think there’s an objective standard of “greatness”. But perhaps you can argue there is?
I don’t know — maybe I’m still bitter about my freshman year Berkeley English prof who though D. H. Lawrence’s “Rainbow” was some great “Art” whereas I thought it all just hackneyed silliness. Getting back to the “two cultures” topic. Let me reiterate a point touched upon earlier. While not completely without examples to the contrary, the trend does seem to be for scientists to at least “dabble” in the arts, for instance this show at Fermilab, while it seems (but perhaps unfairly) that artists in the whole are contemptuous of science. I’m not expecting them to make serious contributions necessarily (just as the scientists I know who sing or play an instrument aren’t going to be professionals) but showing some interest would be nice.
Don’t Panic (@107):
Your preference for Two Years Before the Mast over Moby Dick and your self-described “bitter” rejection of D.H. Lawrence are matters of taste, not objective fact. You are, of course, completely entitled to your opinions… but I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t accept your personal taste as the authoritative measure of “stupidness.”
As I tried to suggest to David, there’s plenty of room for you not to like something, or not to get something, without it being objectively stupid. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but branding something as stupid because you don’t like it strikes me as childish.
And I mean “childish” in the precise sense: It’s the way a child reacts to something s/he doesn’t like or understand. That’s another part of what I was getting at in my response to David. You said…
…but of course, my posting wasn’t aimed at you. It was aimed at David’s comment that he’d read Moby Dick as a child and found it stupid. IMHO, that’s perfectly to be expected: The very elements that make so many adults consider the book great would befuddle and annoy a child under 10, who would have no predicate or context for understanding those elements.
But unlike children, adults usually comprehend the vast range of human experience and emotions, and can appreciate that even things they don’t like or understand may be valuable to others. I myself don’t get opera: It seems to me to combine all the worst elements of musical theater and classical music with precious few of the benefits of either. But I would never be so arrogant as to declare that opera — or even my least favorite example of opera — was “stupid,” because I recognize that a great many smart people love it, and their interaction with that art form is as worthy of respect as my own.
This is, of course, a facile comment: You’re not sincerely criticizing yourself. Instead, by calling it “Art” (i.e., with cap and quotes), and by referring to literary scholars as “incestuous” and “clannish,” you’re expressing a pernicious contempt for people whose only crime is that they value something you don’t.
If you don’t like a particular work of art, or a particular form of art, it’s perfectly legitimate to ignore it, or to say that you personally don’t appreciate it, or even to explain why you don’t like it based on some sort of criteria… but to call it stoooooopid accomplishes nothing other than insulting the people who do appreciate it.
Actually, it’s quite common that the initial reviews of things — not only high art but pop culture as well (and BTW, much of what we think of as high art is just a previous generation’s pop culture that has stood the test of time) — are different, one way or the other, from the eventual consensus judgment. Have you never found value in a movie or book the second time through that you had previously missed? It’s not just the arts, either: The truism that “journalism is the first draft of history” implies that the later drafts (i.e., actual history) are different. Sometimes the sheer “shock of the new” clouds initial reactions: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring caused a riot at its first performance, because both the music and choreography were such radical departures from previous norms… but subsequent generations of critics (and artistic disciples) have evaluated the work in a more balanced way. It’s not necessary to imagine some fraud or duplicity on the part of critics to explain this sort of evolution in critical response.
I think that is unfair. “[A]rtists in the whole” is far too broad a group for me (or you, for that matter) to assert anything about it with confidence, but my admittedly anecdotal experience has not been that artists generally are contemptuous of science. Many of them are relatively ignorant of science, but then that’s equally true of nonscientists from all walks of life. The artists (and humanities professionals) I have known have generally been more sympathetic than the general population to science and technology, because they’re fascinated by new things… and, of course, you’ll find positive allusions to the cutting edge science and technology of the day in great works of literature ranging from the poems of John Donne to… well, to Moby Dick itself.
Look, I’m sorry to be so strident about this, but it really bothers me. Anti-intellectual feelings are rampant enough in our culture as it is; the last thing we is intellectuals from different parts of academia treating each other with contempt.
Once upon a time I had to pass english 101 and technical report writing. The grading in the english class was as follows: A B or NC. Your final grade depended on a paragraph written in class. A single comma-splice would get you an NC grade, regardless of how well you had done up to that point.
I had to take the class twice. I finally passed on the second go-round by keeping my paragraph short and to the point.
Technical report writing was worse. You did not at that time write technical reports using the first person at all.
You wrote: “The Student ” or “The experimenters” — anything but “I” or “We”. Looking back on it now, my technical reports were awful, but when I care to do it I can usually write clearly, if not always with perfect grammar.
For those of you on the Humanities Side of Campus:
Remember, us tech-heads and science geeks made Google and
Imetrex possible.
I didn’t know that I was expressing an authoritative objective statement about Moby Dick’s “stupidness”; I really thought I was just presenting an opinion. Who knew? I don’t think I was claiming that everyone had to find it stupid. The point is that the whole “great literature” shtick is to a great deal a matter of taste and not objective by any real standard. And thus what gets classified as “great” has this dodgy aspect to it — quite distinct from science where we test things against reality. And I question whether the “consensus judgement” is truly a matter of objective comparision. Is it more like species adaption to an environment where, while driven by a selection process, random chance plays a crucial part. Perhaps, for instance, Moby Dick is the vermiform appendix of “great literature”. Why is it there? Why not some alternative?
Bill, it’s one thing to ignore something that one doesn’t personally appreciate. I do it all the time. It’s something different when something is labelled as “great” with the implications that it should resonant with all/most cultured people in a society. And yes, I understand today’s high art is yesterday’s pop (in fact I’ve heard and agree with all those bits, but that last 3 lines, in that paragraph). I’m not claiming fraud nor (explicit) duplicity on the part of critics, but wondering about the objectiveness of the evolution of that critical response. If influential critic A say X is “great” can’t peer pressure and other similar forces drive others to agree to the point of excluding real alternatives? Especially when, I have never seen a good explanation of what makes Moby Dick “great” at least not one that I could at least walk away from with a “I disagree but I could understand why someone would think so”. And this is not to pick on just this whale of a story, but seems true for a lot of “great” things.
Perhaps my tongue wasn’t so firmly planted in my cheek and a bit of truth leaked out: I am defective. Perhaps all but a few of us weirdo’s do “get” the greatness of these things, and that pretentiousness has nothing to do with the, to me, self-perpetuating classification and exhalation. I’m not saying this in simple contempt but as an outsider looking in and trying to understand how “greatness” is bestowed when it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Thalarctos @ #84
My bad, I was being a daft cow when I just threw in that example. I should have used the example of something like the name of the school went to, Brisbane Girls’ Grammar. I did say the collective possesive and I knew what I meant but I gave a shitty example so I didn’t get my point across at all.
I’ll just shut up now. What’s the saying ,- when you’re already in the hole you really should stop digging.
‘s all right, BoS; I’m only a half-assed pedant at best–first, a mistake in my original correction, and then another mistake in my correction to my correction. At that rate, I won’t be putting the “anal” in “analysis” much longer.
Instead, we can just be daft cows together; you’d be most entertaining company.
I remember way back in English 101 that I wrote a number of papers on science and astronomy, except when we had to write about a particular subject. I recall the topic “write a story from the perspective of a famous figure as if they were in a completely different career,” so I wrote about Carl Sagan as if he was an evangelical minister. It didn’t go over too well.
Short story is that the prof only graded papers well if they were about abortion, women’s studies or feminism. I later took my papers to two different professors male and female, and they agreed not only that the papers deserved a better grade but that “oh, that’s not unusual for Professor X.”
That was my first exposure to fickleness in college and even though not the last, it taught me well that even the academicians have their agendas, too.
Re #107-109
(Having been caught out before in life and online: these are my actual opinions, and not a troll, attempt at irony, or similar. If, like so many others, you believe that this must be a joke because nobody could really mean anything so cretinous, then I regret to inform you that this is all from the heart.)
Bill Dauphin, I think I’m probably guilty of most of the sins that cheese you off, but what do I do about it? Or rather, what virtues should I use to displace those vices?
Some context: Having had a proper British “this is Culture because Teacher says so” education, I managed to get an A in Eng Lit and French Lit (GCSEs, which are taken at age 16), and being near top of the class without any suggestion of any kind of “deeper meaning” to any text. I have no idea what Literature is supposed to be, and how it is distinguished from any other sequence of false statements (If the statements are true, we must be in History class) to be summed up in 500 words in return for an random grade from teacher. Nor was there any metric to compare the depth of meaning, or defining the meaning of “meaning” in a literary context. Aside from regurgitating set texts, my 11 years of English lessons contained 3 lessons of grammar, the only bit of arts&humanities education I’ve ever seen the point of.
If we hadn’t been told in advance that Arthur Miller Wrote Good Plays then there’s nothing in A View From The Bridge and Death Of A Salesman that would have indicated that fact to me. Nor do I grasp this notion of “getting” a work to prescribed extent or in a prescribed manner in order to justify ownership of one’s opinion (beyond any trivial notions like defining “getting” as “agreeing with me, who is axiomatically correct about everything”.)
As a result I read compulsively out some ill-defined sense of cultural inferiority, but have no framework with which to prove that Gulliver’s Travels is a Good Book, and The Day My Bum Went Psycho presumably isn’t (if we define Good with “I like it”, I would humbly suggest that the opposite obtains; if we don’t… then I have no idea what it means). I don’t think I regard things I don’t like as being objectively stupid, but that’s more because I can’t conceive of any defensible notion of quality beyond full-on Subjectivity. Does your disdain for people branding things as “stupid” cut the other way, so that the general acknowledgment that Macbeth is A Good Play is “just a bunch of people’s opinions”? Normally when I raise questions like this with more culturally-minded friends the responses are typically “Fuck off”, “Are you sure you’re not autistic?”, “I think I’m going to cry,” and the teachers’ favourite, “There’s no need to be *willfully* stupid, is there?”.
Having had Books, Music and Art endlessly forced on me resulting only in bafflement and boredom, I implore the successful Culture-bridgers of Pharyngula: how does done “get” Art, how do you know (rather than merely opine) that you’ve got it, and is a claim to “have got” a work falsifiable in some vaguely Popper-ish sense? And if it’s all just subjective, why bother with all the time and effort of repeatedly asserting to children that only certain works are deserving of (perhaps mandatory) study?
Trying to combine replies to Don’t Panic and JohnP, the former first:
Really? Didn’t you say, “But I guess I will be a bit more blunt: It was ‘stupid.'”? The very syntax of that last clause makes it a bald assertion of fact, leaving no room for anyone to disagree without themselves being included in the stupid. If you say that’s not how you meant it, I’ll take you at your word… but you really did seem to go out of your way to make it just that blunt.
Both of y’all have asserted that you’re somehow completely immune to each and every particle of so-called “great” art. I find it hard to believe: Even if your tastes are entirely outside the mainstream, you must have seen some painting or photograph that you found beautiful… heard some piece of music that stirred your spirit… read some book (other than a textbook) that moved and enlightened you. But let’s stipulate that you really just don’t “get” any of it. Fine. My purpose here is not so much to try to save your artistic “souls” as it is to simply get you to stop calling the rest of us “stupid”! Please?
DP, you referred to an article that said Moby Dick is “now considered one of the greatest novels in the English language.” Does it not occur to you that this statement represents the shared opinions of vast numbers of people? Must you implicitly insist that they’re all stupid wankers? Because that’s what “it was stupid” inescapably says.
Both of you seem hung up on finding some “objective” criteria for “greatness,” and I freely confess I can’t offer a metric by which you can measure the literary quality of Moby Dick or Death of a Salesman in the same way that you could measure the mass of a copy of either.
There are markers of craft and skill that really do distinguish well-made art from hack work, but they’re not the true measure of greatness. Art — of whatever sort — is a transaction between the work and the beholder: When that transaction personally enriches you in some way, it’s “good”; when that transaction enriches large numbers of beholders in ways they can agree on, it’s meaningful to call the art “great.” The fact that I can’t put a number on “enrich” does not invalidate the enrichment.
I won’t bother y’all about this anymore, but I have just one request: Many of us are enjoying the “punch” that is art and literature and music; please refrain from crapping in our punchbowl, won’t you? Thanks in advance!
Geez, I didn’t know that calling a book “stupid” (with the implied “in my opinion”) was the same as crapping in your punchbowl. And your jumping from my calling a book stupid to calling you stupid seems a bit of a jump. I’m interested in the asymmetry here. I’m not allowed to express an opinion on a piece of literature — but you are. You, by claiming it as “great” are by implication calling those who think otherwise stupid or dullards, are you not?
And yet, after my asking several times you’ve danced around my thesis that there might be a large component of group think, arbitrariness and random chance in the assignment of the title of “greatness” without comment. Odd, that. I’m not saying there must be a hard-and-fast metric — guess it’s a “know it when you see it thing” … if enough people (of influence) buy into it. To elaborate a bit, it’s a bit of an open feedback loop isn’t it. The powerful declare something “great” and what incentive is there for disagreeing? Even if some disagree, in the end it’s just opinion one way or the other.
And what’s with the “enrichment”/”enlightened” shtick? (Pretentious much?) Sure, I enjoy reading books and some music, but am I “enriched” by it? Often not particularly, or at least not in some “deep” way that most people who write such stuff mean — even, or especially, when experiencing “great art” where I’m explicitly told that I’m supposed to.
I also don’t see much of a transaction. I read a book, the story occupies my time, amuses me, gets me to think about something for a while. I see a picture or painting, it looks pretty, I admire the workmanship. But deep insight into the human condition … not often. Certainly more from “Two Years..” over “Moby Dick”. So why is the second “great” and not the first? And it’s hardly a transaction — I think that word doesn’t mean what you think it means. A transaction is an exchange. But unless you’re talking about any money passed back to the author/artist there is no interaction here. The author/artist sends his works out on a one-way journey.
Don’t Panic,
“The author/artist sends his works out on a one-way journey.”
This might be where postmodern critical theory is useful in literary studies: Roland Barthes’ death of the author theory is important to understanding the relationship between author and audience.
The text is created not just from the author’s conscious intent and biographical background, but from all the cultural influences he or she has absorbed. This means they are not always conscious of the themes they are inscribing their work with.
For example, Virginia Woolf may be a pioneering feminist writer but she addresses a narrow band of women in a particular sphere of society at a precise historic point. For her, “a room of one’s own” to think and work in is a neccessity: for her maid, it is inconceivable. The class dichotomy is played out through her language, which draws its images from the drawing room rather than below stairs. Did Woolf intend to appear to exclude women not of her standing? It’s hard to say, but as long as the crtical reader can justify this interpretation with textual evidence, it doesn’t matter.
A good example of this is Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. He saw the novel as “a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature” (quote from LAWeekly.com) while the majority of critical thinking about the novel teases out themes of censorship and state repression of individual thought. Bradbury has since revisited his interpretation of hisnovel and revised it accordingly.
As for the ‘greatness’ dispute, I’d argue that the richer the tapestry the text is woven from, the greater the work of art. I didn’t like Moby Dick either, but you can certainly spend a lot of time unpicking it as a novel…
Well, I’m spending a lot of time ‘unpicking’ Moby Dick because I wanted to stick with one example and could contrast it with a comparable book that I though was much better. I was thinking that a bit of concreteness would help to solidify the arguments a bit. I still can’t get a “Here’s why I (or critics) think Moby Dick is great” rationale that I can walk away from with at least a “I’ll agree to disagree”. All I seem to get is that the arbiters of greatness have declared it to be so, and thus it is. To me, a lit-crit newbie, it really looks like an “emperor’s new clothes” deal where random happenstance allowed it to fall into a niche that temporarily protected it and then it’s remained there simply because it’s gotten “too important to fail”.
Now on to the post-modern bit. Okay, I can see how some say that unconscious biases might be introduced that add some “depth”. That doesn’t make it a transaction or exchange, the flow still remains one-way. So I which writers would stop implying otherwise.
But the not even extremes of this seem to push the boundaries of reasonableness. Humans are great at finding patterns, we see this is visual processing where it is important to not let your eyeballs run away with you and find what isn’t really there. So too I think there is a tendency to “find meaning” that just freaking isn’t there. Yes, I can see how one can pull the theme of censorship out of F451. But in A Separate Peace is Finny’s fall from the tree truly the author’s unconscious comment on the “Fall of Man when Adam eats the apple”? That one confused me in high school because (1) I wasn’t Christian so it’s not some theme I was looking for (2) it’s such a stretch — yes they both involve trees and falls (at least metaphorically) but sheesh it’s like looking at sheep entrails and divining the future. Once the meme was out there it stuck, but would readers (both normal and those who go beyond looking for that “depth”) really have independently found that interpretation there? Like I said, I’m probably defective in this regard; but I’m trying to get a handle on how common this really is. When you read, do you really stop and think “Hey, this is an allegory for X that the author probably didn’t even know [s]he was putting there”?
Which brings me to another theme. Is lit-crit like religion? You’ve got different people interpreting a book. They gain followers, they have schisms, there’s an ebb and flow of dominant thoughts of how to comprehend the text. The text is “interpreted” in non-obvious ways that often don’t make a lot of sense to outsiders. I mean it does seem to be what humans do: find patterns. And sometimes those patterns are just random noise but get attributed supernatural or supertextual meaning. No?
OK, I know I said I wouldn’t bother you again, but in the cold light of morning I find my comments from last night were a bit snarkier than I intended, and I’d really rather work toward mutual understanding than just score points in a snarkfest… so I’ll try once more to respond in a calm and clear manner. Then I won’t bother you anymore.
1. Tone
I first jumped into this thread not in response to you but to Bob, who made the flat declaration that “postmodernism is stupid.” It was only later (in response to my reply to Bob) that you made a similarly blunt statement about Moby Dick. In both cases, y’all were quite specific about the fact that you intended to be blunt. My point was never to convince either Bob or you (or JohnP) to like something don’t like. Heck, if I knew more about postmodernism, I might agree with Bob’s opinion, and though Moby Dick is less controversial, there’s plenty of room for critics. My point was about the language you both used, and about that sort of language’s effect on the dialog between the “two cultures” this whole thread is about (and for both of which I feel great affection).
You say…
..but my point is that, howevermuch you might have intended to be expressing an opinion, the “in my opinion” part is not only not implied by what you said, but is in fact contradicted by the very grammar of your statement.
Despite all assertions to the contrary, there’s an almost algebraic logic to syntax (in fact, in some algebra texts, the word used for equations is “sentences”), and the word is in your (and Bob’s) declaration is the equivalent of an equals sign. Now, if “Moby Dick = stupid” is true and we agree that “stupid ≠ good,” then it’s unambiguously true that “Moby Dick ≠ good.” In that case, it must also be true that anyone who asserts “Moby Dick = good” is objectively wrong, and anyone who identifies with the supposed goodness of Moby Dick is, by sheer transitive property, stupid.
Now I know that analysis must sound a bit anal and nitpicky, but here’s why I bother to go through it: I don’t actually think you meant to be calling me stupid. I think it was an unintended consequence of the singularly unconditional language you (and Bob) used. Not only that, but this very sort of unintended insult is endemic in the dialog between the “two cultures” of the humanities and the sciences. As somebody who has significant personal investment in both of those cultures, I’ve spent much of my life listening to intellignet people whom I respect and admire unintentionally call each other stupid, and it’s hard for me not to speak up.
Intellectuals in both cultures need to wake up and realize the real enemy is ignorance, not each other. IMHO, of course.
I’m not “disallowing” your opinion; I’m just asking you to stop acting (intentionally or otherwise) like your opinion is objective fact, which has the effect of devaluing all contradictory opinions.
No, because I’ve never asserted its greatness as a matter of unquestionable fact. I agree that “greatness” in the arts is subjective; I just don’t agree that “subjective” is synonymous with “meaningless.”
As for “dullards,” given that you and JohnP both described yourselves as potentially incapable of “getting” art and I said I doubted that was true, I think I’m actually farther from calling you “dullards” than you are yourselves.
Perhaps if you responded to what I actually wrote, rather than to what you imagine “most people who write such stuff mean,” you wouldn’t be so quick to toss out the p-word? It feels like you’re envisioning some snotty, imperious, tweed-wearing professor with a fake British accent declaming on The Western Canon… but that’s not me, and it’s not what I’m getting at.
When I talk about being “enriched” by art, I’m talking about whatever you take away from the experience of a work of art that’s valuable to you. I chose the word “enrichment” because it’s general, and I didn’t want to be presumptuous about the precise nature of anyone’s experience.
I also don’t limit “enrichment” to Deep Thoughts About High Art. If you’re looking at a nude photograph in an art gallery and it makes you think about the nature of physical beauty and its relation to the larger human condition, that’s great; you’re enriched. If, OTOH, you just think “she’s hot… I’m really turned on,” that’s also great; again, you’re enriched (assuming you feel good about being turned on, that is). To me, art is art. I don’t restrict my notions of goodness or greatness to what’s in museums and classical music halls and university libraries. You may have encountered others who pretentiously treat art as their own little high-minded preserve, but I don’t think I’ve said anything like that in this conversation.
2. Evaluating “Greatness”
I don’t think I really have danced around it. I’ve already said I agree that inviduals’ responses to art are subjective, and I’ve said I think “greatness” has something to do a large set of subjective positive responses that have significant intersection. The thing is, you’ve been using “subjective” in a way that seems pejorative, and that phrase “group think, arbitrariness and random chance” seems similarly derisive (“group think,” in particular, seems positively Orwellian). So if I seem to be “dancing” around your comments, it’s probably because I both agree (in part) with their substance but disagree with their tone.
I think (and note that this is my own theory, not some sort of liberal arts orthodoxy) that art (of all sorts, including the most apparently insubstantial pop culture) is good when people’s resonse to it is of value to them, and that it’s great when large numbers of people over time have postive responses, and those positive responses have some elements of commonality.
Now if you want to call that last bit “group think,” I don’t suppose I could argue… but I don’t accept the suggestion of hive-mind conformity that term carries. I also don’t think the admittedly subjective kinds of reactions I describe are either arbitrary or random. Individuals within a culture share referents, history, and experiences that they bring to their interactions with art, so the idea that they should have broadly common reactions to some art is neither arbitrary nor random… nor particularly surprising.
3. The Art “Transaction”
Again you fixate on the necessity of deep significance. Why don’t you value thinking something is pretty or being amused? If you get deep insight into the human condition, that’s wonderful… but IMHO it’s not a requirement for the art to be good or even great.
The transaction I’m talking about is the very subjectivity that you’ve mentioned: Nobody has a totally objective experience of any work of art; instead, we all process our experiences in the context of all our other experiences… some of which are common with the rest of the audience for the art and some of which are personal and distinct.
The photons bounce off that picture and enter your eyes, and your retinas and optic nerves convert the photons into electrochemical data. Because your eyes and brain are similar but not perfectly identical to others’, so will the electrochemical data be similar but not perfectly identical to that of other observers. Now your brain processes the data, constructing an image in the same way the way that the computers at JPL build images from the stream of digital data coming from the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn. And then your brain places that image in the context of all the other images stored in it, and all the sensory and intellectual associations that go with them, and responds to the picture in that context. The response drives physical reactions that may include a small smile or a big laugh or the raised eyebrow that accompanies new insight or perhaps a rush of blood to the genitals… but whatever it is, it’s your reaction, in that particular moment, to that particular art. I call that a “transaction,” but if you prefer another word, that’s cool.
I beg to differ, on two points: First, there’s no requirement that a “transaction” be two-way. If you put a $10 bill in an envelope and mail it to me, is that not a transaction?
Second, there is interaction in the arts: Most obviously, all the arts that involve live performance have an immediate component of feedback. Ask any actor or musician if the audience’s energy (or lack thereof) affects their performance. But even in the less obviously interactive arts, painters and writers and composers almost always have an audience in mind as they create, and have in their minds some sense of how their work has been and will be experienced and responded to.
But finally, I never said that art was a transaction between the artist and the audience (though I believe it usually is); I said art was a transaction between the work and the audience. Not to get all Zen on you or anything, but if a painting hangs in the woods and there’s nobody there to look at it… ;^)
BTW, speaking of transactions and processing, this conversation has forced me to think hard about what I think about art and responses to art, and to bring my previously inchoate thoughts on the subject into the realm of words I can share with others. That experience has been valuable to me, and I thank you for it.
Nick Housewife:
Right. And I would add that each reader recreates the text in his/her mind, adding all the cultural influences he or she has absorbed.
This, of course, usually raises the objection: “But if it means whatever it means to each reader, what’s the sense of writing about it.” And my answer is that all those unconscious themes and absorbed influences are cultural. Because “whatever it means to each reader” is being built out of the same bin of “parts,” there should be enough similarity of reactions to make critical evaluation possible (and, of course, enough variation to make it interesting).
Coming late to this discussion, my own academic background included literature up to first-degree level (I’m still quite proud of my undergrad essay on “Hamlet and Melancholy”, which examined the character of Hamlet in the light of early modern psychological ideas about the “four humours” and about madness). I have no problem whatever with the notion that there is real knowledge and expertise in literary criticism, but so far as postmodernist lit.crit and philosophy are concerned, I am sceptical there is anything much of real value there. Bill Dauphin’s comparison with string theory or non-Euclidean geometry is an illuminating one, but I think has precisely the opposite implications to those he draws. In practically any area of the natural sciences or mathematics I’ve taken an interested in, there have been first-rate practitioners keen and able to get over to me at least some sketch of what the current issues are, and why they are interesting and important. I see no sign of anything similar in postmodernist criticism or philosophy: instead, I see a deliberate, wilful obscurity, and apparent determination to exclude the outsider. I see borrowing of scientific terminology without understanding – which was why Sokal and Bricmont were able to perpetrate their hoax. Could postmodernists conceivably do the same in reverse? What reason is there to think postmodernist criticism or philosophy are like evo-devo, cosmology or algebraic topology, rather than ID, astrology and numerology?
Just to respond to the Sokal hoax, what usually doesn’t get mentioned is (a) that the journal Social Text at that time didn’t have peer review, so that it wouldn’t potentially stifle truly original work (it does now), (b) that the editors of Social Text in fact asked for revisions and (c) that Sokal refused to make the requested revisions. The journal happened at the time to have been putting together a special issue on the “science wars” and decided, reluctantly, that they didn’t want to lose the chance to have a physicist weigh in and so they accepted the piece without the requested revisions and published it in the special issue. The day it was published, as we all know, Sokal revealed the hoax.
This isn’t to say that there wasn’t any fault on the part of the journal and its editors, just that they weren’t the credulous cretins that they’re often made out to be.
Sokal is a liar. He intentionally submitted an article he knew to be dishonest. Hoax or not, Sokal is nothing more than a liar. As we recently saw, peer review has enough issues without authors intentionally submitting dishonest work.
Nick Gotts:
Well, since you mention my name…
Let me just take a second to clarify the (strictly limited) sense in which I intended that comparison. First, I carry no water for postmodernism per se. I’ve said — multiple times now — that I’m not qualified to evaluate it, and that if I were I might well agree with its critics. However, there’s the matter of how it was being used in this conversation. You agree with…
…but surely you know that there are those who use the sheer opacity and obscurity postmodernism and deconstructionism — sometimes knowing little about them other than that they are opaque and obscure &mdash to make the invidious case that all advanced theoretical work in the humanities is nothing but pretentious wankery. In a similar fashion, some folks are wont to use the obscurity and counterintuitiveness of string theory (in particular) to write off theoretical physicists in general as quasi-mystical dreamers.
Ultimately, the validity (or lack thereof) of either postmodernist criticism or string theory is immaterial to my point: These ideas have become the symbolic rallying points for pernicious anti-intellectualism.
To people with little understanding of and/or ill will toward higher intellectual pursuits, cosmological ideas like string theory resemble “ID, astrology and numerology” in precisely the same way that philosophical/literary ideas like postmodernism do. All they care about is that this stuff is weird, and they can use it to discredit anyone who takes it halfway seriously… including even its harshest critics within the field.
And it’s not as if this doesn’t have any effect: It’s not for nothing that we started out snarking at postmodernism but ended up questioning whether there’s anything of value in Moby Dick or Death of a Salesman… hardly the bleeding edge of critical theory!
The reason all this is relevant to the “two cultures” this thread is about is my observation that intellectuals in one culture often tend to fall into the anti-intellectual approach to their colleagues across campus in the other culture (note the symmetry: I’m not accusing either culture uniquely)… and it seemed to me that a little of that was going on in this very conversation.
Look, in any academic field there are going to be some posers and hoaxers, and there are going to be others who are sincere but pursue theoretical notions to extremes that defy common sense. That’s just the price of free inquiry, and no discipline is immune to it. But when there are so many actual barbarians at the gate of the academy (it’s no accident that Barack Obama’s Princeton/Harvard education is a political liability rather than a strength), we really shouldn’t be going out of our way to invent barbarians within the walls.
The world would be a better place for people committed to reason and thoughtfulness if crazy, wild-eyed intellectuals weren’t reflexively sneered at… even if they happen to be wrong.
Ooops, sorry: Obama’s undergraduate education was at Columbia, not Princeton… but, of course, for purposes of the point I was making, one Ivy is the same as the next.
Re #124 It is precisely the commitment to reason of postmodernists that I question. I think such a commitment requires a commitment to clarity, and to truth-seeking; if there are only multiple interpretations of “texts” (a term which postmodernism extends well beyond its everyday meaning), then, for example, the concept of historical truth is abandoned: an interpretation which says that Stalin’s purges were a necessary response to counter-revolutionary plotters conspiring with hostile capitalist powers, or that they never happened at all, is as good as any other. So is Expelled’s thesis that Darwinism led to the holocaust.
Etha:
This may be true in the US or some parts of it, since I see it said so often by people who are obviously intelligent. But I can assure you that it’s not true in Australia. Nor have I encountered it anywhere else I’ve traveled in the world. In fact, I’ve never encountered it on my travels to the US, either, but I admit that my travels to the US have generally involved hanging out with educated people in the Blue states. They may not be typical in the relevant respect. Still, in most parts of the world this religious usage of perfectly good, useful – nay, indispensable – words is an anomaly.
I didn’t say they were committed to reason. (As an aside, my gut feeling is that your general characterization of postmodernists is extreme, but I’ve said several times I don’t know enough about the subject to support that gut feeling, so I’ll stipulate for the sake of argument that you’re right.) My point is that it’s better for those of us who are so committed in a world that doesn’t automatically reject obscure, far-out intellectual theorizing… even knowing that some percentage of such stuff is likely to be baloney.
My reasoning is that the segment of our population that wants to devalue intellectuals either can’t or doesn’t care to distinguish between serious work that’s really weird and pointless wankery that’s really weird… nor are they equipped to follow and evaluate the arguments between the people who do know the difference.
My fear is that if we countenace — or even foster — an air of anti-intellectualism for the sake of criticizing the wankery, we risk allowing the good weird stuff to be written off as wankery as well. Would you rather be on a campus where you could study string theory and postmodernist literary criticism, or a campus where you could find neither?
Bill, I have some sympathy for what you’re saying and am enjoying your long comments; and there’s certainly room for collegiality right acrosss the disciplines. I also think that we should be careful not to buy in to the scribblings of shoddy, populist journalists who will often mock academic work in an ill-informed way.
That said, I don’t think we can assume, when dealing with modern universities that have been infiltrated by all sorts of corporate, ideological, idiosyncratic, and sometimes plainly idiotic, agendas, that everybody on campus is pulling strongly for the side of reason. If some folks are promulgating radical epistemic relativism of various kinds, for example, and using this to give support to dubious causes (since, hey, truth is all relative!), shouldn’t we be prepared to reply with robust critique? There might still (often) be good reason to maintain a show of courtesy suitable to an academic symposium, but bad ideas are bad ideas. Bad intellectual tendencies are bad intellectual tendencies. Sometimes they just do need to be stomped on. Sometimes it’s even appropriate to express scorn.
Or so it seems to me.
That doesn’t entail that entire scholarly fields, such as the study of literature, should be dismissed out of hand, with expressions of scorn or frustration, by those who don’t “get” them. Indeed, it seems clear enough to me that getting undergraduates to engage with Moby Dick is a valuable thing to do. I’m glad to have studied that book in my undergraduate days, and I really must read it again some time.
Russell:
Thanks for the kind words and thoughtful response.
Of course bad ideas are bad ideas, and merit robust critique. (Indeed, often it requires robust critique to conclude that they’re bad ideas.) I hope nothing I’ve said in this thread has suggested I think bad ideas should be given a free pass.
But I’ve been responding to flat declarations of “that’s stupid,” which in my mind doesn’t qualify as “robust criticism.” Worse yet, even when “that’s stupid” is really shorthand for actual robust criticism, said shorthand provides aid and comfort to those who prefer to sneer at anything complicated or abstract. (Note that well-reasoned scorn is qualitatively different from reflexive sneering.) Sneering like that isn’t just a cultural problem within academia, either: It leads to pernicious social effects like the back-to-basics movement.
Further, even bad ideas advance knowledge and thought, in that the very process of critiquing them leads to new ideas and refinement of existing good ideas. If postmodernism ultimately ends up on the intellectual trash heap, we still will be better off for having grappled with it. I thought most of the first wave of punk was bad music (and many of the bands freely admitted they had no real ability on their instruments)… yet the infusion of edge and anger that came with the punks made pop music better across the board. I think the same sort of thing happens with extreme ideas: Even if they’re bad, the challenge they represent to the establishment can be fruitful.
We’re probably in agreement, then. I don’t have a problem with any of that.
My point is that it’s better for those of us who are so committed in a world that doesn’t automatically reject obscure, far-out intellectual theorizing… even knowing that some percentage of such stuff is likely to be baloney. – Bill Dauphin
Obscurity can be the result of the necessary use of technical terms – as in much of mathematics and physics – or it can be the result of intellectual vacuity concealing itself behind pseudo-technical terms. I consider it is actually both very important and fairly easy to tell the difference: if it is the latter, clarity will not valued; there will be few if any practitioners attempting to make their discipline comprehensible to outsiders; terms from other disciplines will be imported without understanding or respecting their use in those disciplines; external criticisms will be dismissed as a failure to “get the point” rather than answered.