So when John Ellis observes of Stanley Fish's work that it ignored the past, that in Fish's work, "philosophy of science begins with Thomas Kuhn, serious questions about the idea of truth and the positivist theory of language begin with Derrida, jurisprudence begins with the radical Critical Legal Studies movement", I think he's exactly right, and not just about Fish.
And this is what we expect: recall that Fish started as a Milton scholar and so when it came time to worry about truth, objectivity, scientific inquiry, law...he was dealing with subjects he had been ill-equipped to examine by his own academic background. Inevitably, corners are cut.
So, what sort of general education should undergraduates have so that when, as professors, they venture into interdisciplinary work and try to answer questions for which they are poorly equipped, they don't make complete fools of themselves. I ask, because I do think that cross-fertilization is valuable.
Shoukd we return to the great books a la Yale's Directed Studies?
A great books education at least makes one realize how crappy one's own work is. That alone would exert beneficial downward pressure on overproduction (and emulation of the sciences) in the humanities.
Did anyone else have this grad school experience? I would read a classic, get depressed, and think I should never write a word. Some time with the journals would perk me right back up.
On Burke's essay: what can you say? When he's right, he's right. I tend to be less sympathetic to Theory than Burke, because -- as Fontana notes re: Fish -- so many of the major practitioners seem ill suited for the job. That ink was spiled over "essentialism" (oh, I beg your pardon -- the strategic deployment of essentialism) seems to me intensely embarassing. Perhaps this impression stems from my own ignorance, of course.
What's really ridiculous about our current educational system is that specialization begins with your second year of undergrad -- no one stands a chance.
I know a guy who started as a English major, then psych, and then at the beginning of his fourth year (maybe end of third, but pretty late in the day) became ... a physics major!
But in Germany, say (or Britain, Britain's this way too, right?) specialization starts even earlier, does it not?
3: I think that, no matter what you specialize in, when you venture into interdisciplinary work you run the risk of making a fool of yourself. I feel as though I'm about to make a fool of myself whenever I talk about ethics, and that's within my department.
(Don't think you can think what you just thought and get away with it.)
If you just read the Great Books, then you won't know about Theory or Contemporary Work or whatever. And you ought to, if you want to be sure you won't make a fool of yourself. I mean, if you talk about oh Jane Austen and you know nothing about feminism, you'll probably make a fool of yourself.
My suggested solution? Talk to the people who are experts in the discipline you're being interdisciplinary about. Have them check your work. Try to make sure they read after it gets published, to make sure your work doesn't turn into a closed loop. And don't be too afraid to make a fool of yourself. We'd never make any progress if no one made a fool of themselves.
I didn't mean to suggest that one should only read great books, but I think it might be good to start with them. Yale's DS includes Foucault and Derrida, I think.
I often wish that I'd gone there. I almost did, but I made my grandmother happy by staying close to her/home. My Core education was kind of silly.
Ah, I should've clicked the link. Still, I think that there's too much stuff to hope to get a decent grounding in it all as an undergrad. Maybe Directed Studies provides a better grounding than most, but maybe not.
The British do specialize much earlier, although it doesn't seem as bothersome in the Humanities. I mean Oxford has a 4 year degree in Lit. and Hum., affectionately known as Greats.
Re 5 Baa, Yes that is exatly right. My dissertation advisor told me before my first trip to deliver a paper at a big time conference: "Don't be nervous. Look at some other sessions first. You'll be stunned by how bad many of them are." And Lord, she was right. I still think I could make quite a nice living publishing three times a year in journals that no one should really aspire to appear in.
Re 7: Kotsko, haven't you heard of themed high schools?
And overall, its not even so much the quality of the ideas in Burke's post (although they are spot on). Its the clarity of the writing. The narrative, and in particular the threading of the ideas through his personal journey that is just so well done.
I lived through more than one battle between "theory" (which is different from "formal theory" as night is to the pits of hell) and everything else. And more than one battle between formal theory and everything else too.
THe parrallels between these sorts of puritanical approaches to learning and understanding and what I see going on all around me in my curent work life are somewhat sad.
I like the focus on academic politics in the Burke post.
I wonder whether string theory is currently doing something analogous in physics departments that theory did in the humanities in the eighties.
The similarities I see are:
1. radical change in the concept of what should be learned.
2. devaluation of previous practices
3. dividing younger and older practitioners, such that older practitioners are threatened and newer practitioners see an opportunity.
4. difficulty or percieved difficulty of the new work leading to greater credentialism than in the past. People from prestigious universities have a greater edge due to person-to-person transmission of the theories as well as greater willingness of others to do the hard work of understanding their papers.
One reason I keep flogging a turn to generalism as a part of the formal incentive system in academia is because I want to make the world safe for interdisciplinary foolishness. Because yes, I feel the same thing all the time now: there's an incredible sense of exposure every time you venture off the reservation. Want to know something even worse? I've occasionally written peer review stuff where I hassle non-historians who are trying to be interdisciplinary for getting their history wrong. Cognitive dissonance alert, Batman! It's hard to figure out how to articulate a sense of what we all ought to be striving for that doesn't turn out to be a rigged game that just amounts to, "Give me what I want and hold the other guy down while I rough him up a bit".
I've occasionally written peer review stuff where I hassle non-historians who are trying to be interdisciplinary for getting their history wrong.
But this is only bad depending on the context and emphasis. If getting one's history wrong leads to incorrect or misleading conclusions, then we rely on historians to correct us. But if a historian emphasizes insignificant historical errors, while ignoring a work's valuable conclusions, then it's reprehensible.
But it's definitely your job to hassle the non-historians. Or to gently correct them, anyway. If you don't, how will they be corrected? The problem may partly be that there's high stakes involved--hard to convey the message "fix this and this and read up more on this area of history and you'll have a good paper" when the journal editor or whatever takes it as "circular-file this stupid article." (I say, as someone who really doesn't do any interdisciplinary stuff at all.)
I think the world actually is getting safer for interdisciplinary foolishness, especially -- and this might strike you as counterintuitive, or possibly even wrong -- in the field of history and even more especially in the higher-profile research departments. I see two things:
(1) "transnationalism" (vile neologism, got by Theory out of desperation) has encouraged people to actually learn something about other countries and about the connections between them -- which often means learning some biology, demography, or economics;
(2) war and politics in the present day have encouraged people trained in intellectual and cultural history to focus on fields not originally their own.
I think interdisciplinary work should be encouraged, at least in philosophy, because it speculates about so many areas anyway it's nice to have some real-world feedback. I don't like working in a vacuum.
I'm not sure a broad-based undergrad program would help much for interdisciplinary studies, though it's probably good for education for other reasons. To avoid making an idiot of yourself you're going to have to know some of the current research in that field, and to get that you're probably better off knocking on doors and talking to the people at your uni in that field.
I have seen some ugly stuff with this though. The metaphor is an invasive weed. Bad concepts from economics get shipped into political science, and then into history etc. And because the reipient discipline doesn't have a defense system all hell breaks loose.
This is especially so in the application of quantitative methodological techniques.
Which is different from a concept of interdisciplinary work that would involve sharing and understanding, rather than publishing.
Obviously one wants to get it right when importing concepts, information, queries from another discipline. And I agree, quant. methods are potentially really problematic.
But this isn't much more than saying, as Bérubé said in his qualified defense of Theory, that liberal arts people who want to write about the sciences ought to learn some science. I would never go further and say, liberal arts people ought not to write about science.
(1) Collaboration, both formal and informal, is already the norm among the sciences. Research universities recognize and reward accordingly.
(2) Collaboration, both formal and informal, is as a result of (1), institutionalized among social scientists, especially economists and political scientists.
(3) Because informal collaboration is already the norm, and some social scientists are decent people (no observations made about present company) scholars in non-collaborative disciplines can free-ride on neighboring communities of inquiry. Which is to say, many seminars featuring working papers are open to you -- right now! Go! Quick!
That said, we're assuming we all mean the same thing by "interdisciplinary work," which I get the feeling maybe we don't.
I mean interdisciplinary work involving people in the disciplines, like history, that barely value collaborative work at all. The various (allegedly) interdisciplinary workshops I've been to have usually involved only historians and the occasional lit scholar hoping someone else would show up some day, or only people in already collaborative disciplines plus one or two historians.
Just getting historians to work with each other across geographical fields is a challenge. You usually just get a bunch of edited collections with introductions claiming how great it was to get people together and how this is the edge of something truly great and new.
And then everyone goes off and writes individual books for their next projects.
Calls for transnational and comparative work have been around for quite some time, by the way. Many call; few are called; few of those actually finish their projects.
You're right to be cynical. Your description of the heady "interdisciplinary" projects that emerge from within history departments seems to me about right, unfortunately (I've checked). Which is why I say, make your own interdisciplinary group -- by finding people in whatever department you can who interest you.
I'm just going to chime in and say I don't follow this discussion, because that, in it's own way, might be a sign of something. I read the Burke piece twice, some stuff at the valve, and sometime today I'll read the Berube. I'm thinking I don't have the relevant experience, even though I've spent not a bit of time with 20th century French philosophers. I'm still trying to work out what "Theory" is, and what interdisciplinary work is that it's so objectionable. (It can't be simple disagreement, can it? I mean, there's tons of disagreement within just a single discipline, so I'd think disagreement wouldn't make a whole enterprise necessarily foolish.)
What "Theory" is.... I think Holbo's essay on "The Advantages and Disadvantages of Theory for Life," pdf here, is a good place to look for that.
Why people object to interdisciplinary work.... long story short, people within the discipline you're stepping outside say what, we're not good enough for you? People within the discipline you're stepping into say, who invited you?
Also, some of the more extreme calls for interdisciplinary work are really attacks on the idea of a certain discipline or on the idea of having disciplines in the first place. People don't like to be told that their entire department, and all others like it, should be abolished.
Cala, I didn't mean to suggest that having a great books education would save one from needing to knock on one's colleagues' doors. I just thought that it might equip one to ask the right questions, when one makes the trek.
Is there a difference between a great books(ish) education and a liberal education (traditionally defined)? My understanding is that a liberal education has the books but includes beginning to intermediate grounding in the sciences as well. Obviously, just the books aren't going to get you too far in technical fields. And people in technical fields would do well to know something of the books.
An environmental scientist could benefit from reading Emerson, for example, just as an environmental historian should know something about ecology.
I think the world would be A Better Place if a) all undergraduate were required to take a course in logic (maybe just studying logic fallacies, maybe not symbolic logic maybe also statistics) b) all humanities majors had a thorough, basic knowledge of science (at the level of freshman chem, physics, and bio, not rocks for jocks.) c) all scientists should have a basic understanding of writing and literaure and d) everyone should take at least two philosophy courses.
Though d) is more to improve the job security in the readership of Unfogged.
Definitely stats, and some understanding of logical fallacies and validity & whatnot. Probably not everyone needs to understand symbolic logic for the world to be better.
Yeah, the symbolic logic thing was just so I don't have to see any more political arguments as
P --> Q
~P
~Q.
It would be nice to have an electorate that understood why that was prima facie bad, but the wish for symbolic logic I suppose is more out of sadism than practicality.
Yup, I don't know anything about statistics (beyond words like standard deviation, mean, median etc.) and I've been thinking about trying to remedy that by taking a course.
I think it may be, from her paper where she was showing (I think) that the arguments that were being used to justify modus tollens could be used to justify modus morons.
I read that book, eb, way before I was in a position to evaluate it. In 2000, probably, since I was still in HS and that appears to be when it came out.
Were you in a position to have an impression of it? I'm thinking of putting this on my "someday I'll read some of this" list (formerly known as a "to read" list).
For instance, this seems right:
And this is what we expect: recall that Fish started as a Milton scholar and so when it came time to worry about truth, objectivity, scientific inquiry, law...he was dealing with subjects he had been ill-equipped to examine by his own academic background. Inevitably, corners are cut.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-14-05 5:00 PM
That is really good. Thanks for making me read it.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-14-05 5:19 PM
So, what sort of general education should undergraduates have so that when, as professors, they venture into interdisciplinary work and try to answer questions for which they are poorly equipped, they don't make complete fools of themselves. I ask, because I do think that cross-fertilization is valuable.
Shoukd we return to the great books a la Yale's Directed Studies?
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-14-05 5:31 PM
My link didn't work.
http://www.yale.edu/directedstudies/directed.html
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-14-05 5:32 PM
A great books education at least makes one realize how crappy one's own work is. That alone would exert beneficial downward pressure on overproduction (and emulation of the sciences) in the humanities.
Did anyone else have this grad school experience? I would read a classic, get depressed, and think I should never write a word. Some time with the journals would perk me right back up.
On Burke's essay: what can you say? When he's right, he's right. I tend to be less sympathetic to Theory than Burke, because -- as Fontana notes re: Fish -- so many of the major practitioners seem ill suited for the job. That ink was spiled over "essentialism" (oh, I beg your pardon -- the strategic deployment of essentialism) seems to me intensely embarassing. Perhaps this impression stems from my own ignorance, of course.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 07-14-05 9:33 PM
OT, but I thought the canonical adjective was "Holbovian" as in "How many Holbovian lengths comprise a sagan?"
Posted by Doug | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 1:18 AM
What's really ridiculous about our current educational system is that specialization begins with your second year of undergrad -- no one stands a chance.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 6:44 AM
I know a guy who started as a English major, then psych, and then at the beginning of his fourth year (maybe end of third, but pretty late in the day) became ... a physics major!
But in Germany, say (or Britain, Britain's this way too, right?) specialization starts even earlier, does it not?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 7:55 AM
3: I think that, no matter what you specialize in, when you venture into interdisciplinary work you run the risk of making a fool of yourself. I feel as though I'm about to make a fool of myself whenever I talk about ethics, and that's within my department.
(Don't think you can think what you just thought and get away with it.)
If you just read the Great Books, then you won't know about Theory or Contemporary Work or whatever. And you ought to, if you want to be sure you won't make a fool of yourself. I mean, if you talk about oh Jane Austen and you know nothing about feminism, you'll probably make a fool of yourself.
My suggested solution? Talk to the people who are experts in the discipline you're being interdisciplinary about. Have them check your work. Try to make sure they read after it gets published, to make sure your work doesn't turn into a closed loop. And don't be too afraid to make a fool of yourself. We'd never make any progress if no one made a fool of themselves.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 9:41 AM
Matt Weiner,
I didn't mean to suggest that one should only read great books, but I think it might be good to start with them. Yale's DS includes Foucault and Derrida, I think.
I often wish that I'd gone there. I almost did, but I made my grandmother happy by staying close to her/home. My Core education was kind of silly.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 11:17 AM
Ah, I should've clicked the link. Still, I think that there's too much stuff to hope to get a decent grounding in it all as an undergrad. Maybe Directed Studies provides a better grounding than most, but maybe not.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 11:21 AM
The British do specialize much earlier, although it doesn't seem as bothersome in the Humanities. I mean Oxford has a 4 year degree in Lit. and Hum., affectionately known as Greats.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 11:22 AM
Re 5 Baa, Yes that is exatly right. My dissertation advisor told me before my first trip to deliver a paper at a big time conference: "Don't be nervous. Look at some other sessions first. You'll be stunned by how bad many of them are." And Lord, she was right. I still think I could make quite a nice living publishing three times a year in journals that no one should really aspire to appear in.
Re 7: Kotsko, haven't you heard of themed high schools?
And overall, its not even so much the quality of the ideas in Burke's post (although they are spot on). Its the clarity of the writing. The narrative, and in particular the threading of the ideas through his personal journey that is just so well done.
I lived through more than one battle between "theory" (which is different from "formal theory" as night is to the pits of hell) and everything else. And more than one battle between formal theory and everything else too.
THe parrallels between these sorts of puritanical approaches to learning and understanding and what I see going on all around me in my curent work life are somewhat sad.
Posted by benton | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 12:55 PM
I like the focus on academic politics in the Burke post.
I wonder whether string theory is currently doing something analogous in physics departments that theory did in the humanities in the eighties.
The similarities I see are:
1. radical change in the concept of what should be learned.
2. devaluation of previous practices
3. dividing younger and older practitioners, such that older practitioners are threatened and newer practitioners see an opportunity.
4. difficulty or percieved difficulty of the new work leading to greater credentialism than in the past. People from prestigious universities have a greater edge due to person-to-person transmission of the theories as well as greater willingness of others to do the hard work of understanding their papers.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 2:09 PM
One reason I keep flogging a turn to generalism as a part of the formal incentive system in academia is because I want to make the world safe for interdisciplinary foolishness. Because yes, I feel the same thing all the time now: there's an incredible sense of exposure every time you venture off the reservation. Want to know something even worse? I've occasionally written peer review stuff where I hassle non-historians who are trying to be interdisciplinary for getting their history wrong. Cognitive dissonance alert, Batman! It's hard to figure out how to articulate a sense of what we all ought to be striving for that doesn't turn out to be a rigged game that just amounts to, "Give me what I want and hold the other guy down while I rough him up a bit".
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 2:41 PM
I've occasionally written peer review stuff where I hassle non-historians who are trying to be interdisciplinary for getting their history wrong.
But this is only bad depending on the context and emphasis. If getting one's history wrong leads to incorrect or misleading conclusions, then we rely on historians to correct us. But if a historian emphasizes insignificant historical errors, while ignoring a work's valuable conclusions, then it's reprehensible.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 2:46 PM
But it's definitely your job to hassle the non-historians. Or to gently correct them, anyway. If you don't, how will they be corrected? The problem may partly be that there's high stakes involved--hard to convey the message "fix this and this and read up more on this area of history and you'll have a good paper" when the journal editor or whatever takes it as "circular-file this stupid article." (I say, as someone who really doesn't do any interdisciplinary stuff at all.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 2:46 PM
I think the world actually is getting safer for interdisciplinary foolishness, especially -- and this might strike you as counterintuitive, or possibly even wrong -- in the field of history and even more especially in the higher-profile research departments. I see two things:
(1) "transnationalism" (vile neologism, got by Theory out of desperation) has encouraged people to actually learn something about other countries and about the connections between them -- which often means learning some biology, demography, or economics;
(2) war and politics in the present day have encouraged people trained in intellectual and cultural history to focus on fields not originally their own.
Presto, interdisciplinary work!
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 2:49 PM
I think interdisciplinary work should be encouraged, at least in philosophy, because it speculates about so many areas anyway it's nice to have some real-world feedback. I don't like working in a vacuum.
I'm not sure a broad-based undergrad program would help much for interdisciplinary studies, though it's probably good for education for other reasons. To avoid making an idiot of yourself you're going to have to know some of the current research in that field, and to get that you're probably better off knocking on doors and talking to the people at your uni in that field.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 2:56 PM
I have seen some ugly stuff with this though. The metaphor is an invasive weed. Bad concepts from economics get shipped into political science, and then into history etc. And because the reipient discipline doesn't have a defense system all hell breaks loose.
This is especially so in the application of quantitative methodological techniques.
Which is different from a concept of interdisciplinary work that would involve sharing and understanding, rather than publishing.
Posted by benton | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 2:57 PM
Obviously one wants to get it right when importing concepts, information, queries from another discipline. And I agree, quant. methods are potentially really problematic.
But this isn't much more than saying, as Bérubé said in his qualified defense of Theory, that liberal arts people who want to write about the sciences ought to learn some science. I would never go further and say, liberal arts people ought not to write about science.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 3:03 PM
Interdisciplinary work will not improve markedly until the incentive structures of academia start to reward collaborative work.
Discuss.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 3:40 PM
to 22: Disagree politely, here's why.
(1) Collaboration, both formal and informal, is already the norm among the sciences. Research universities recognize and reward accordingly.
(2) Collaboration, both formal and informal, is as a result of (1), institutionalized among social scientists, especially economists and political scientists.
(3) Because informal collaboration is already the norm, and some social scientists are decent people (no observations made about present company) scholars in non-collaborative disciplines can free-ride on neighboring communities of inquiry. Which is to say, many seminars featuring working papers are open to you -- right now! Go! Quick!
That said, we're assuming we all mean the same thing by "interdisciplinary work," which I get the feeling maybe we don't.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 3:46 PM
I mean interdisciplinary work involving people in the disciplines, like history, that barely value collaborative work at all. The various (allegedly) interdisciplinary workshops I've been to have usually involved only historians and the occasional lit scholar hoping someone else would show up some day, or only people in already collaborative disciplines plus one or two historians.
Just getting historians to work with each other across geographical fields is a challenge. You usually just get a bunch of edited collections with introductions claiming how great it was to get people together and how this is the edge of something truly great and new.
And then everyone goes off and writes individual books for their next projects.
Calls for transnational and comparative work have been around for quite some time, by the way. Many call; few are called; few of those actually finish their projects.
No, I'm not cynical.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 3:58 PM
You're right to be cynical. Your description of the heady "interdisciplinary" projects that emerge from within history departments seems to me about right, unfortunately (I've checked). Which is why I say, make your own interdisciplinary group -- by finding people in whatever department you can who interest you.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 4:04 PM
I'm just going to chime in and say I don't follow this discussion, because that, in it's own way, might be a sign of something. I read the Burke piece twice, some stuff at the valve, and sometime today I'll read the Berube. I'm thinking I don't have the relevant experience, even though I've spent not a bit of time with 20th century French philosophers. I'm still trying to work out what "Theory" is, and what interdisciplinary work is that it's so objectionable. (It can't be simple disagreement, can it? I mean, there's tons of disagreement within just a single discipline, so I'd think disagreement wouldn't make a whole enterprise necessarily foolish.)
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 4:18 PM
What "Theory" is.... I think Holbo's essay on "The Advantages and Disadvantages of Theory for Life," pdf here, is a good place to look for that.
Why people object to interdisciplinary work.... long story short, people within the discipline you're stepping outside say what, we're not good enough for you? People within the discipline you're stepping into say, who invited you?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 4:22 PM
Link no worky.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 4:29 PM
I see I posted a busted Holbonic link. This one should work for you, I think.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 4:31 PM
a 45 page article? jesus christ, man!
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 4:38 PM
Also, some of the more extreme calls for interdisciplinary work are really attacks on the idea of a certain discipline or on the idea of having disciplines in the first place. People don't like to be told that their entire department, and all others like it, should be abolished.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 4:39 PM
Actually, it's a 45-page dialogue.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 4:39 PM
Philosophers get used to that.
(you know, "end of philosophy" and all that jazz.)
Also, picking up on 27, philosophy has accepted interdisciplinary elements, which may account for my nonexpose to interdisciplinary hostility.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 4:42 PM
Cala, I didn't mean to suggest that having a great books education would save one from needing to knock on one's colleagues' doors. I just thought that it might equip one to ask the right questions, when one makes the trek.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 4:45 PM
Is there a difference between a great books(ish) education and a liberal education (traditionally defined)? My understanding is that a liberal education has the books but includes beginning to intermediate grounding in the sciences as well. Obviously, just the books aren't going to get you too far in technical fields. And people in technical fields would do well to know something of the books.
An environmental scientist could benefit from reading Emerson, for example, just as an environmental historian should know something about ecology.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 5:02 PM
I think the world would be A Better Place if a) all undergraduate were required to take a course in logic (maybe just studying logic fallacies, maybe not symbolic logic maybe also statistics) b) all humanities majors had a thorough, basic knowledge of science (at the level of freshman chem, physics, and bio, not rocks for jocks.) c) all scientists should have a basic understanding of writing and literaure and d) everyone should take at least two philosophy courses.
Though d) is more to improve the job security in the readership of Unfogged.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 5:33 PM
Michael needs some cock jokes.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 6:33 PM
Definitely stats, and some understanding of logical fallacies and validity & whatnot. Probably not everyone needs to understand symbolic logic for the world to be better.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 6:37 PM
Yeah, the symbolic logic thing was just so I don't have to see any more political arguments as
P --> Q
~P
~Q.
It would be nice to have an electorate that understood why that was prima facie bad, but the wish for symbolic logic I suppose is more out of sadism than practicality.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 6:44 PM
That's a basic logical fallacy, though, you wouldn't need upside-down or backwards letters for that shit.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 6:51 PM
Yup, I don't know anything about statistics (beyond words like standard deviation, mean, median etc.) and I've been thinking about trying to remedy that by taking a course.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 7:09 PM
I took a logic class one summer and the teacher characterized arguments of the form "p->q, ~p, therefore ~q" and ˙˙˙ the other one as "modus morons".
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 07-15-05 7:19 PM
I think that's more or less standard actually. Google google...
So-called by Susan Haack. Don't know if she was first.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-16-05 1:09 PM
This Haack book is supposed to be a pretty good moderate take on some of the theory stuff.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-16-05 1:14 PM
I think it may be, from her paper where she was showing (I think) that the arguments that were being used to justify modus tollens could be used to justify modus morons.
I think it could be called modus politicans.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-16-05 1:15 PM
I read that book, eb, way before I was in a position to evaluate it. In 2000, probably, since I was still in HS and that appears to be when it came out.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 07-16-05 7:22 PM
Were you in a position to have an impression of it? I'm thinking of putting this on my "someday I'll read
some ofthis" list (formerly known as a "to read" list).Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-17-05 5:53 PM
Not one I'd rely on.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 07-17-05 6:22 PM