> 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.
This is what one is trained for through the tutorial system at Oxbridge. One
perceptive person I know who (like me) studied history at Oxford said that
the course taught you little about historical research and was really
training for the higher reaches of the civil service where the skills
required are those of presenting a brief which appears to be objective but
is really a / the establishment point of view. (cf 'Yes Minister')
I wonder whether there is any connection between the turn towards discourse
as the 'explain-all' social category and the move towards argument for
argument's sake.
> 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 think that's true. False consensus tends to cover up important conflicts -
by which I mean those that represent real differences rather than
point-scoring - and is therefore supportive of the status quo. Synthesis for
synthesis' sake (or in order to admit everyone has something to contribute)
is no better than argument for argument's sake. Some ideas cannot be
synthesised coherently. To take one's ideas seriously and to have ideas that
are worth defending will often mean a fight (to use Tannen's scare word),
particularly when they don't fit in with the majority view. (It should be
clear that I don't mean that in the sense of mindless abuse and invective or
in the sense of defending one's own personal reputation - both can be
counter-productive in convincing the unconvinced.)
I cannot believe that the world outside the university does not take our
research seriously because there are serious divisions of opinion.
"Policymakers
who come across relevant academic research immediately encounter opposing
research. Lacking the expertise to figure out who's right, they typically
conclude
that they cannot look to academe for guidance." [Tannen] It's more likely
that policymakers in this situation would choose the research most
consistent with their prejudices or social interests and use it then as a
battering ram against their opponents. There have been some startling
examples of this recently in the UK with foot and mouth disease and BSE.
Personally, I see eclecticism (a form of thought that is deeply rooted in
the social position of academics today) as a much more serious threat to
academic integrity than 'the argument culture'.
> 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.
Fair point. Certainly not idiots. But sometimes life is too short to read
the collected works before venturing an opinion ;).
> Thanks for the stimulus to labor day thoughts, Bill.
That's why it's so quiet. Just another grey Monday in Manchester.
Bruce
> mike
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Oct 10 2001 - 15:49:07 PDT