I found the Tannen article reflective of a lot of my experience in Academe
and a good deal of it relevant to the vicisitudes for xmca discussion.
I take the extreme forms of agnoistic discourse to be pretty close to the
British debating culture which we discussed a couple of weeks ago -- a
culture in which, at its worst moments, it does not matter who is right or
even what right is, but only who can kill off the other person rhetorically.
I am oviously sympathetic to the barn raising metaphor, but I am suspicious
of how it is deployed and used. It assume an awful lot of commonality:
commonality of goals and of means and of social organization, that when
take to its extreme in application to disccussions like XMCA can cover up
real differences that need to be explored.
I was amused by the way that our norm of valuing half baked ideas (once upon
a time norm?, still present norm?) was transformed by the idea of dough rising
from the inclusion of many incredients only to be pounded down again. Seems
like our metaphor of "half baked" or "pol fabrcant" (in russian) or "ready for
the microwave to complete" celebrates those times when someone takes a half
baked idea and produces a tasty intellectual meal out of it which we all get
to share in.
The comments by Tannen about the inculcation of skills in finding weaknesses
without a parallel set of practices that support creative synthesis are
depressingly right on. I feel this especially as I see the new generations
of grad students who KNOW that Skinner was a fool, but have not read Skinner,
or who KNOW that Parsons was an idiot, but have never read Parsons, etc. Neither
were fools. Both were almost certainly better read and more thoughtful than
99.9% of the people who know they were fools. That kind of a-historical
and shallow scholarship is reason enough (and there are many others) for
the public to beware of academic wisdom.
Thanks for the stimulus to labor day thoughts, Bill.
mike
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