Life (especially for bloggers) affords limitless opportunities to engage in disputes. Far, far too many to be able to pursue them all. So I guess we just pursue those few discussions which strike us as particularly interesting and enjoyable. Can we say any more than this? Are there distinctive features of a good or worthwhile discussion? Can you identify any rules of thumb you follow in deciding (i) whether to leave a comment, and (ii) whether to continue or quit an ongoing exchange?
No doubt there are many possible ends an online conversation might serve. For example:
(1) Collaborative inquiry, in pursuit of knowledge and understanding.
(2) Asymmetric teaching, or the imparting of knowledge and understanding to others.
(3) Non-epistemic goals, e.g. creating/reinforcing social ties, "winning" an intellectual competition, etc.
Let's just consider epistemic goals. Discussions between epistemic peers (i.e. #1) tend to be the most interesting and rewarding. It's really wonderful to have the opportunity to improve one's understanding, as when others discern potential flaws in one's initial views. But what about the other case? There are plenty of people out there who are not epistemic peers. Arrogant though this may sound, sometimes you can tell that your disputant is in the grip of a certain confusion, or that they don't really understand the issue, so that there's little you can learn from them.*
The main motivation for continuing, then, will be that niggling itch we feel when "someone is wrong on the internet". They're in a bad state, and so we feel some pull to help make this clear to them, to set them right. Moreover, the act of teaching always has some benefit to the teacher's own understanding, as per my footnote below. So it's not a total waste of time. But if this is time that could have been spent engaging with more insightful interlocutors, this opportunity cost may still be sufficient to deter one whose primary goal is to improve their (own) understanding (or even that of the broader community, if the mistake in question is not widespread).
This relates to my old post, 'engaging persons or ideas?' If we're just interested in ideas for their own sake, then many discussions (i.e. with people who lack sufficient understanding of the relevant ideas) will probably not be worth having. If we think the discussions are worthwhile nonetheless, it must be because we value engaging with the other person.
* = But compare R. Porter:Almost every new way I have to devise to explain a concept (and sometimes these are pretty simple concepts and thick-headed pupils) makes that concept clearer to me. It's not that the students know something useful that I don't; it's that I need to learn a new facet or explore an uncharted avenue in order to teach them.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
The End(s) of Discussion
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Comments and Quality Control
I've written before about the value of filtering out abusive or otherwise unconstructive comments for the sake of promoting reasoned discussion. It's an easy decision to delete comments that don't contribute to the conversation at all. I'm less sure what to do about relevant but low-quality comments. At present I tend to just leave them there but ignore them. (Of course, sometimes I fail to respond to good comments for other reasons, e.g. lack of time.)
But this liberal policy has some unfortunate consequences. The inclusion of low-quality comments may bring down the quality of discussion overall. As Tyler Cowen observes, "the best comments come in the first fifteen or so, after which quality declines precipitously and often exponentially." Short comments are no problem, I think, but long rambling ones are a disincentive for later readers. (One may feel obligated to read the earlier comments before responding, or even feel less comfortable responding to the original post after the conversation has apparently "moved on" to the rambler's choice of tangent.)
The ideal solution would be to have graded levels of comment prominence. I like blog templates which highlight the blogger's own comments relative to the norm. It would also be helpful to be able to make some particular comments less prominent than the norm. The text might be 'greyed out', for example, paled or even completely hidden by default unless readers select to 'click here to display this comment', or some such. Most readers could thus easily ignore the comment, reducing the risk that it will derail the thread, without resorting to heavy-handed deletion (which risks provoking [misguided] complaints of "censorship").
[I've posted this feature suggestion to the Blogger help group, and anyone who likes it is also encouraged to tell Blogger, since they will be more likely to implement a feature for which there is more demand.]
In the meantime, I'm tempted by the following policy: if a comment is both lengthy (i.e. more than a couple of sentences) and unproductive (by my lights), I may delete it and invite the commenter to instead repost the comment on their own blog -- they are then welcome to post the link in my comment thread, since that is far less obtrusive and distracting. (I'm happy to email the person their deleted comment, of course, so they needn't worry about having to rewrite it from scratch.)
Feedback welcome: Is this a good policy -- would it serve to increase the quality of discussions on this blog (which I think is generally quite high to begin with)? Does it seem reasonable? All things considered, do you think I should implement it?
Thursday, April 10, 2008
How to start a philosophy blog
I've already had a couple of classmates ask about starting their own blog, which is an encouraging sign. (More philosophy blogs = more interesting conversations, more helpful summaries of interesting books or lectures that I didn't have time to read/attend myself, etc. Every grad student should have one!) In hopes of encouraging yet more people to join in, I thought I'd offer this 'Getting Started' guide.
(Step 1) Create a blog. Go to www.blogger.com and follow their instructions. It really couldn't be easier: select a pre-made template and you'll be up and running within five minutes.
(Step 2) Start writing posts. If you're unsure where to start, see whether any of the following three post types appeals to you:
I think there are three kinds of philosophical activity to which blogs are especially well suited. First is the exploration of half-baked ideas, to get some early feedback and test their potential for further development. Secondly, blogs are a great study and teaching tool, as students can attempt to summarize an issue, and their readers may respond to help correct any misunderstandings. (A good summary may also benefit the readers' knowledge, of course.) Finally, a tightly focused blog post can make technical contributions in response to other work, perhaps critiquing a particular step in an argument, or offering an alleged counterexample.(I must admit I'd especially appreciate seeing more posts in the second category, e.g. distilling out and sharing the most valuable new insights you've come across in classes or readings, etc.)
(Step 3) Enhance your blog.
- You may wish to add a hit counter so you can see how many visitors you're getting, and where they're coming from. (You can also do a Technorati search for your blog URL, to see if anyone has linked to it.)
- Add a recent comments widget to your sidebar, if you wish. (I recently removed mine due to technical problems. But may reinstate it soon, since they're handy things to have.)
- Sign in to draft.blogger.com and navigate to your blog's 'Layout' page. Here you can add new gadgets to your sidebar, e.g. polls, subscription links, and blog lists. I especially recommend the latter two.
(Step 4) Join the community! So, you have a sparkling new blog, with groundbreaking and insightful posts, but nobody else seems to notice. That's not the end of the world: there's plenty of benefit in simply writing your thoughts down. But there's plenty more benefit to be gained by attracting an intelligent audience with whom to engage in discussion. There are several things you can do here.
The simplest is to submit posts to the Philosophers' Carnival, or even sign up to host a future edition yourself.
But it's probably more effective to interact with other bloggers that you like. (Hopefully there are some!) At the very least, add a 'blog list' to your sidebar, as mentioned above. Most bloggers regularly check who's linking to them, so this is an easy way to attract their attention (at least for a moment) and gratitude. That's a very minimal form of interaction, of course. Better: leave (intelligent) comments on their blog. They'll be more likely to reciprocate. Participate in silly memes and other forms of community-building -- any excuse to link, however trivial, will bring you closer together. Best of all: write a substantive post responding to one of theirs (and link to it, of course). You'll find yourself engaged in a fruitful back-and-forth discussion in no time.
[Any other tips? Add them in the comments below...]
Monday, March 17, 2008
Good political blogs?
There are a number of good, thoughtful liberal blogs out there. I'd say hilzoy's Obsidian Wings is far and away the best.
There are a number of good, thoughtful libertarian blogs out there. Here my top vote goes to Will Wilkinson.
Can anyone recommend some comparably good, thoughtful conservative bloggers? (Jeremy Pierce is decent, but only occasionally writes on politics. Russell Arben Fox is also thoughtful, if idiosyncratic -- he certainly doesn't present a mainstream conservative perspective. So neither is quite what I'm looking for here.) Are there any Burkean traditionalists out there, offering wise counsel on the pressing issues of the day?
Consider this an open thread. If you can't recommend any conservatives, feel free to recommend someone else.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Engaging persons or ideas
[My worries about history requirements reminded me of this old draft from a couple of years ago that I never got around to publishing. Better late than never, I suppose.]
It often happens that a reader "takes away" something quite different from a piece of writing than the original author intended. Does this matter? I think that the answer is "sometimes", but I'd like to get clearer on precisely which times those are.
Let's say a blogger goes away and writes up a response to the idea X they "took home" from another writer W, whom it turns out really meant to say Y instead. I'm wondering: in what circumstances is the latter fact relevant? This seems to turn on the further question: is the blogger engaging with idea X for its own sake, or are they instead trying to respond to whatever person W might be saying? Which should they be doing? Here are a few cases where engaging with the person (and their actual claims) seems important:
1) If you insult or dismiss W on the basis of what they're (allegedly) saying.
2) If W is specifically trying to engage you, say by offering an objection to an earlier argument of yours.
3) If you're in a forum where W gets to choose the topic, e.g. commenting on their blog post.
Are there any others?
Those cases aside, I'm partial to the "disembodied ideas" approach, myself. Of course, it's worth listening to W all the same, because this new idea Y might be more interesting-in-itself and worthy of your attention than X was. But if not, that's fine too. As a general rule, the intellectual interest of an idea shouldn't turn on which particular people believe it. (Though I guess winning the support of a reliably discerning person might constitute 'abstract'- or meta-evidence that an idea is worth a closer look.)
Public interest may be another issue: of all the possible bad arguments out there in logical space, we're usually only interested in refuting the ones that are (or threaten to be) actually taken seriously by a significant section of society. Even so, the Writer's personal beliefs don't seem directly relevant here. But perhaps egregious misreadings are. That is, if nobody else is likely to interpret W the way you did (as arguing for X, say), and no-one else has defended X either, then arguing against it doesn't serve much of a public purpose. But hey, not everything has to: if you found it interesting to clarify the issue in your own mind, or whatever, then that's fine. Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that.
To address the flip-side: how should we, as writers, react when others offer false "responses" to our posts, e.g. criticising claims that we're not really committed to? Again, it may depend on the particular situation, but it seems like the ideal would simply be to clarify your position without forcing the other person on to the defensive. (E.g. "Note that my post merely meant to establish Y, which is consistent with your denial of X. So I don't think we really disagree here.") Focusing on the assessment of disembodied ideas seems more likely to lead to a pleasant exchange than some of the more conflict-ridden person-involving alternatives.
(Which is not to say that I always live up to these ideals, of course.)
P.S. A related question for historians of philosophy: is it intrinsically important to discover what old philosophers "really" meant, or should we use them more instrumentally, to garner whatever interesting ideas they might suggest to us? (Or do you think that the historical task is essential to the instrumental one?)
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Motivated Incomprehension
Take the following passage, written by a respected academic:
Hillary Clinton suffers from being a Clinton, as well as having one of the most unappealing public personae of a national politician in recent memory. Dick Cheney is creepier and scarier, to be sure, but “fake” is the only word that captures the impression Ms. Clinton makes every time she opens her mouth.
Now, could any competent speaker of the English language reasonably interpret this as RM does?
“unappealing,” meaning–I, Brian Leiter, would not want to sleep with her?
Because that just sounds completely loony to me. When I asked RM to explain how she[?] could possibly interpret the talk of 'appeal', in this context, as referring to sex appeal, RM wrote:
the “context” is the historical characterization of women being evaluated in terms of sexual appeal. This context is always present, regardless if it is explicitly referred to or not.
So apparently it is impossible in our linguistic community to successfully refer to any kind of 'appeal' other than sex appeal, when speaking of a person who is female. That would surprise me. At least, when I read the original quote, the "sex appeal" interpretation did not even occur to me. Yet RM leaped at it as the only possible interpretation. So one of us must be way out of touch with the rest of the speech community. (I assume it's RM who's wrong here, but I'd encourage any readers to report their linguistic intuitions in the comments, just so I can be sure.)
This illustrates one of the things that really bothers me with ideological movements: they seem to impede clear thought (to put it mildly). Paranoia leads ideologues to see threats and insults where none exist. Further, some seem motivated to twist others' statements and read them in the most uncharitable light, willfully misunderstanding them in order to get that dark rush of moralistic pleasure that comes from thinking ill of others. (Cf. Hilzoy's 'Hatred Is A Poison' - possibly the best blog post I've ever read.)
Indeed, RM repeats the debacle later in the very same comments thread. I wrote: "if we are to take sexism seriously, then wrongful accusations of sexism are also pretty serious, to my mind." To which RM responded:
Richlet,
This my last comment. If you feel the need to get the last word in, well, I’ll write that off to your nature.
Have you ever heard of Modus Tollens (it’s related to Transposition)? When we have a conditional statement if A then B, and if not B is shown to be the case, we can conclude not A. This means that B not being the case can, indeed, show that A is false (or as you loosely put it, call A “into doubt”).
In your example, B NOT being the case would be making false accusations of sexism, i.e. if we prove that there are lots of false accusations of sexism then we should not take sexism seriously.
So, my dear boy, given that you think that Leiter has been falsely accused of being sexist, we have at least one instance of not B that could call A (taking sexism seriously) into doubt. Granted, how many more of these “false accusations” are needed before you really begin to question sexism is not clear.
Regardless, I suggest you take a quick look at Modus Tollens. Google it. I teach it in my intro logic class.
Hugs,
RM
Never mind the patronizing false intimacy, or the passive-aggressive posturing re: getting the last word in. Here we have a logic professor suggesting that "if we prove that there are lots of false accusations of sexism then we should not take sexism seriously" is the contrapositive of the previously quoted conditional (apparently misreading the actual consequent, i.e. 'wrongful accusations of sexism are serious', as the very different claim: 'wrongful accusations of sexism don't occur'). The mind boggles.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Top of the Blogs
Crooked Timber invites nominations for the five best blog posts ever. The following spring to mind:
(1) Hilzoy's 'Hatred is a Poison'.
(2) Hilzoy on 'Liberating Iraq' (and the distorting effect of violence more generally)
(3) Katherine's series on "extraordinary rendition".
(4) Jason Kuznicki's 'On Nurturing as the True Purpose of Marriage'.
(5) Fafblog with The Priest-Avatar of the State:
[The President] exists not to guide the nation to where it should be. He exists to project an image of what it wants to be.
America doesn't need a President to lead them; America needs a President who projects leadership. America doesn't need a President who's honest with his country; America needs a President who's honest with his wife. America doesn't need a President with a firm grasp of policy and a commitment to serving his country; America needs a President with the appearance of irrepressible optimism and Wholesome Heartland Values. America doesn't need a capable wartime President; America needs a President who makes himself look like war.
And President Bush has done a magnificent job of that. Indeed, he's even started a couple of them. Remember, it's not the President's job to finish or win wars - that falls into the lower realm of policy. But within the realm of Strength - or the apprearance of Strength - it is the Strong Leader who charges boldly into wars, undaunted by the humdrum webs of "post-war planning" and laborious "coalition-building" called for by "sensitive" policy-makers.
The job of the President of the United States is to forcefully emote the conscious and unconscious will of the American People. He is not the commander-in-chief. He is the Happy Warrior. He is the Priest-Avatar of the State.
(Again, Hilzoy offers the best serious version.)
Others have suggested Jacob Levy's contrasting of political theory and political philosophy, and Jack Balkin's 'What I learned about blogging in a year' - which is all the conventional wisdom now, but pretty insightful for its day (Jan 2004!).
Any other suggestions?
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Revived Discussions
Here are some old threads that have seen recent discussion (feel free to jump in!):
Aiding Infidelity
Multiversal Ethics
Is longevity good for you?
On Jealousy
The Problem with Non-Philosophers
Progress in Philosophy
Accommodating Unreason
Moral Goals vs. Side-Constraints
The Examined Life
Investing in Rational Capital
On your blog, anything goes?
Vigilantism and Civic Respect
P.S. You're also welcome to leave a comment here reminding me if you have an old question or objection somewhere that you would like me to address. (You can also ask new questions, for that matter.) I can't promise to spend any great amount of time on it, but I'll try to at least state my position on the issue, if not argue for it.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Deleted Comment
Peter at On Philosophy wrote:
Accepting that philosophy is about the world also eliminates the idea that philosophy is to uncover the correct definitions for words like “justice”. The question “what is justice?” has no right answer outside of the context of a philosophical theory... Justice can be defined however we wish in the context of a philosophical theory; the theory is not judged by how well it defines justice by how well it describes the world. Of course it is preferable to define justice in a way that fits with our intuitive usage for the sake of clarity, but it isn’t necessary. And this saves us from the impossible task of trying to find the “right” definitions.
I commented:
Well, certainly the question what is 'justice'? is uninteresting. 'Justice' is a word. There, that was easy. But the question what is justice? remains of interest. (Sure, you could stipulate that 'justice' is henceforth to mean zebra. But that wouldn't make the ethical question any more black and white.)
See Is Normativity Just Semantics? (The short answer is: no.)
His response? Deletion.
I guess I won't be commenting there again any time soon.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
On your blog, anything goes?
Clay Shirky offers a good partial defense of blog comments. But I was puzzled by two aspects of the following:
I have long thought that the ‘freedom of speech means no filtering’ argument is dumb where blogs are concerned — it is the blogger’s space, and he or she should feel free to delete, disemvowel, or otherwise dispose of material, for any reason, or no reason.
1. The ‘freedom of speech means no filtering’ view is dumb for reasons that are not specific to blogs. The value of free speech lies in its contribution to reasoned debate, as J.S. Mill himself recognized. We're not infallible, and so rational progress is made more likely if critics are allowed to question the conventional wisdom. (And even if we're right, reasoned challenges keep us on our toes, and prevent the truth from becoming a 'dead dogma'.)
But "no filtering" won't necessarily advance this end. If someone in a town meeting is yelling so loudly that no-one else can be heard, their unfiltered contribution is in fact preventing reasoned debate from taking place. In this way, they are violating the spirit and purpose of free speech. So it may be necessary to silence the loudmouth precisely for the sake of (everyone else's) free speech. The same goes for blog comments: nonconstructive or abusive comments should be deleted precisely for the sake of ensuring that the blog can remain a venue for reasoned debate.
Not all forms of speech are valuable. Strictly speaking, we should replace 'free speech' as a slogan with the 'free exchange of reasons/ideas'. Abuse is not an idea. And it merely serves to scare off those who might actually make a positive contribution to our discourse. So, while we ought to tolerate any civil disagreement (no matter how strongly we disagree with the substance of the view expressed), the arguments for free speech do not extend to the protection of abusive or otherwise unreasoned discourse.
2. I'm also puzzled by the suggestion that there are no ethical limits to what a blogger might do in "their space". Imagine, for example, a blogger who deletes civil but critical comments -- merely because the blogger doesn't want his mistakes to be exposed. Surely such intellectual dishonesty is unethical in any situation. It's possible to act badly even in your own home, after all!
This does seem a remarkably common view, however. For example, earlier this year NZ blogger Span (in an otherwise excellent post, which noted that accusations of spin have become a too-common substitute for reasoned counterargument) wrote:
What do bloggers owe their readers? Do we owe you honesty? Do we owe you truth? No, not really.
A comment Make Tea Not War made (on a post she wrote about phalloblogcentrism at What We Said) challenged me to think about the annoyance I feel when other bloggers don't link or hat tip - we don't even owe each other that. There is no code of ethics for nz pol bloggers.
No Right Turn concurred, adding that he chooses to "maintain some basic intellectual standards" - as if it were just a personal quirk - YMMV, and all that. I don't think he really believes that, fortunately, as he's quite scornful of the 'sewer', and isn't shy to denounce their lies and bullshit. But then I'm puzzled by his claim that there are no "obligations" in the blogosphere. (Why so critical of the sewer-dwellers if they haven't done anything wrong?) Perhaps he was talking about enforceable obligations.
People have the "right" to act like jerks, in the limited sense that it would be wrong for others to coercively prevent them. But the mere fact that we are at liberty to act in some way, says little about whether we should so act, or whether it's even morally permissible. The relevant question is not, 'Are others allowed to stop me from doing this?' but 'Is this something that any minimally decent human being would do?'. Morality obliges us to be minimally decent people. Blogging, like any other arena in life, provides ample opportunity to violate this most minimal standard, e.g. through abusive or intellectually dishonest behaviour.
(That's not to endorse proposals for a blogging 'code of ethics'. Rules are tedious and often stupid. We can merely point to some general virtues - civility, honesty, etc. - and let people discern for themselves how these apply in any particular situation.)
Monday, July 16, 2007
Philosophers' Carnival #50
The 50th Philosophers' Carnival is here.
A nice milestone -- we've come a long way since August 2004! There were a few fits and starts early on, but thanks to the support of early participants (e.g. Brandon and Chris) - and promotion on Brian Leiter's blog - the carnival eventually grew in momentum. So I'm pleased that it looks set to remain a valued fixture of the online philosophical community for some time to come.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Reckless Punditry
Alonzo Fyfe suggests that "[committing] informal fallacies in public discourse is morally contemptible... a sign of intellectual recklessness."
Right now, people throw fallacies around with reckless abandon. Once upon a time, drunk driving was, for the most part, an accepted activity. This was until enough people got fed up with the harm done by those who engage in this activity that they decided to ‘raise the consciousness’ of society to those harms. I do think that we are long past due for a concentrated effort on the part of individuals to insist that people recognize the harms that result, and the moral problems associated with using, these fallacies.
He adds, "It should be considered a minimum standard of competence for any reporter that they can demonstrate capacity to recognize informal fallacies by name," but this seems excessively schoolmarmish. What we really want to promote is the art of good reasoning -- something not readily reducible to such mechanical competencies. This presents us with something of a catch-22: it takes broad rational competency to diagnose incompetence, so when everyone is incompetent, nobody quite realizes it. (Hence the need to promote philosophical education, to break the cycle of bad reasoning!)
Those quibbles aside, I'm definitely sympathetic to Fyfe's complaint. Public discourse is often of quite poor quality, and this ought to be considered a bad thing. Fallacies are just one symptom of this; the broader problem is a lack of meta-political principles or commitment to deliberative democracy, understood as collective inquiry into normative issues.
Metapolitical principles are ethical principles, which identify the bounds of healthy political behaviour. Pundits who flout these principles are behaving unethically, and should be recognized as such. Our democracy is a moral cesspool, polluted by those who show no concern for truth, reason, or intellectual honesty. It's about time we cleaned it up.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks
This is the "contents page" for a short series of posts that will highlight my favourite bits of Yochai Benkler's brilliant book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. (Though if you want to read the whole thing, download the free PDF of the book!)
The individual posts will cover:
1. "Growing Knowledge" - the economics of information
2. Cultural Transparency and Participation
3. Creative Values, Peer-Production, and Social Media
4. How the Internet Enhances Autonomy
5. Shifting from Passive Consumers to Active Citizens
6. Safekeeping Cyberspace
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Blogging, Masks and Self-Expression
There's an interesting article at Inside Higher Ed about "risky writing", or self-disclosing essays, in English classrooms:
I was still their teacher, but I had now become another member of the class, one who was struggling, like everyone else, with a personal issue. I had never used the word “intersubjective” in class, but the classroom suddenly became a space where every person, including the teacher, was sharing aspects of his or her own subjectivity with each other.
It's curious how thoroughly impersonal most philosophy (that I'm aware of) is, in contrast. Especially as it seems that one of the deepest philosophical questions is that which immediately confronts us in life, namely, how to live? We discuss abstract moral dilemmas, and formulate broad theories and principles, all from an emotionally disengaged, "God's eye" perspective. Such work is plenty valuable in its own right, of course; but I don't know how often it really helps anyone to live better. So I wonder whether insights might also be gleaned by grappling more directly with the human condition, confronting the problems we struggle with in life, and thinking about how best to respond to them. Is this not a proper role for philosophers? (Should we engage with emotions, as well as reasons?)
Maybe self-disclosure in the public sphere is problematic, though. I'm reminded of Nagel's 'Concealment and Exposure', where he defends social conventions of reticence and non-acknowledgment:
The trouble with the alternatives is that they lead to a dead end, because they demand engagement on terrain where common ground is unavailable without great effort, and only conflict will result. If C expresses his admiration of D's breasts, C and D have to deal with it as a common problem or feature of the situation, and their social relation must proceed in its light. If on the other hand it is just something that C feels and that D knows, from long experience and subtle signs, that he feels, then it can simply be left out of the basis of their joint activity of conversation, even while it operates separately in the background for each of them as a factor in their private thoughts....
In a society with a low tolerance for conflict, not only personal comments but all controversial subjects, such as politics, money, or religion, will be taboo in social conversation, necessitating the development of a form of conversational wit that doesn't depend on the exchange of opinions. In our present subculture, however, there is considerable latitude for the airing of disagreements and controversy of a general kind, which can be pursued at length, and the most important area of nonacknowledgment is the personal -- people's feelings about themselves and about others. It is impolite to draw attention to one's achievements or to express personal insecurity, envy, or the fear of death, or strong feelings about those present, except in a context of intimacy where these subjects can be taken up and pursued. Embarrassing silence is the usual sign that these rules have been broken. Someone says or does something to which there is no collectively acceptable response, so that the ordinary flow of public discourse that usually veils the unruly inner lives of the participants has no natural continuation.
These concerns only seem to apply in social settings, though, where others are physically trapped in the same room as you. Written discourse may be ignored at will, and left "unacknowledged" in subsequent settings where it might otherwise cause conflict. (Though the unspoken awareness could still cause tension, I suppose.) Blogs, especially, are addressed to no-one in particular -- the audience is purely voluntary and self-selecting -- so they arguably provide a distinctively unassuming form of self-expression. Anyone who doesn't wish to read it can simply stop.
So much for other-regarding concerns, then. How about prudential objections? Most obviously, you might not want your personal struggles to be public knowledge. But why not, exactly? We're all human, it would hardly be reasonable for anyone to hold it against you. On the other hand, people can be unreasonable, and it's at least possible that your future employer (for example) will be one of them. Unscrupulous characters may even seek to use your disclosures against you. So there's some risk. Enough that we should be deterred from self-expression in this context?
This raises a prior question: would one already face comparable risks in discussing controversial topics? One's views are, perhaps, revealing in their own way, though it would seem more conducive to free inquiry for others to refrain from explicitly drawing attention to this in practice. Cf. the very public shaming of a well-meaning libertarian blogger, here:
Ironically for a series of posts concerned with the boundaries of public displays of private sexual behavior, the disturbing thing about EV’s post was that I felt I was getting a window into his mind that I really, really didn’t want to look into. Somebody close the drapes up in here!
Ouch! Though the writer did qualify her criticism somewhat:
[I]n real life, we share polite acquaintanceship with all sorts of people who think all kinds of wrong and crazy stuff. We just don’t usually have to hear about those crazy things. At a party we will edge away from the crazy “let me tell you about my views on minarchy RIGHT NOW” guy. Then again, we might have a great time discussing the latest Italian election results, say, or poor draft choices recently made in the NFL, with someone who was, in fact, a crazy minarchist, but who didn’t go out of his way to tell you about it. Unfortunately, the blogosphere is like an extended drunken party in which the probability of you having to hear the crazy minarchist’s theories about government asymptotically approaches 1. But while it’s appropriate to get into high dudgeon if one of the Catallarchy guys says something you find morally repugnant, it isn’t necessarily a good idea to start picturing him to yourself as some sort of moral monster, slavering away in a basement.
Given my contrarian sympathies, I can't help but feel that there's something disturbingly oppressive about accusations of "thought-crime", and subsequent witch-hunts. But then, I'm kind of attached to the free exchange of ideas, even "wrong and crazy" ones. (I'm sure J.S. Mill wrote a word or two on this once.)
Back to the main issue, consider Nagel's observation:
We don't want to expose ourselves completely to strangers even if we don't fear their disapproval, hostility, or disgust. Naked exposure itself, whether or not it arouses disapproval, is disqualifying. The boundary between what we reveal and what we do not, and some control over that boundary, are among the most important attributes of our humanity.
Velleman notes that deliberate self-exposure doesn't undermine one's status as a self-presenter in this way, though. So it's still unclear why that would be a problem. Perhaps there's a clue in the following:
[O]thers cannot engage you in social interaction unless they find your behavior predictable and intelligible. Insofar as you want to be eligible for social intercourse, you must present a coherent public image.
Would multiple masks/"public images" undermine this coherence? I shouldn't think so. Nagel discusses the example of an author engaging in polite small talk with their harsh reviewer. They both refrain from acknowledging the potential source of conflict, even though it is out there in the public domain. They wear different "masks" at the cocktail party than at the publishing house, and know not to confuse the two.
Still, I've a niggling feeling that I'm missing something really obvious here. So here are two questions for the reader:
(1) Is there anything essentially problematic about public self-disclosure? (See also my related discussion, on a different kind of self-exposure, here.)
(2) Would the world be a richer place if more such (unobtrusive but openly accessible) self-expression took place? Or is it better to keep it locked away in the strictly private sphere?
Monday, May 21, 2007
Perfect is the Enemy of Good Discussion
I'm occasionally chided for blogging about a topic without having first read up on all the relevant literature. The latest example is here:
So: my complaint is that the discussion above unwittingly touches on and conflates some issues in philosophy that have a much deeper literature than you assume; and, one SHOULD go off and read the collected works of these people ['Plato, Aristotle's Nich. Ethics, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Spinoza, Decartes, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and more recent philosophers Stanley Cavell, Pierre Hadot, Michel Foucault, and Arnold Davidson'] and others, precisely because it is directly concerned with the discussion attempted on this web-page. Do I really want to make serious claims on astrophysics without having read Einstien [sic]?
Of course, if I were truly obligated to read the collected works of every commenter's 13 favourite philosophers before blogging, I'd never get anything posted. And, imperfect though this blog and its discussions might be, I still find them to be of value (and hope others do too). So I consider the posturing of such self-appointed gatekeepers to be both offensive and wrongheaded. Would you interrupt a lunch conversation to tell the participants that they 'SHOULD' spend more time in the library before opening their mouths? They'd be apt to punch you in yours, and rightly so.
Don't get me wrong, I like libraries, and welcome suggestions for further reading. I have a long reading list, and will no doubt benefit from getting further through it. But in the meantime, there's also much to be gained from exploring one's own half-formed ideas, and having others respond to them. Indeed, it's this process of dialogical learning, of mutual engagement and constructive exchange, that I find most exciting about philosophy! So I don't welcome attempts to shut down casual conversation until such a time as all participants are so perfectly educated and well-read that they can perform "up to standard". What an oppressive demand!
To blog is to participate in an ongoing conversation. I'm throwing some ideas out there, and responding to others. That's all. I don't purport to present only well-researched, polished work. There are journals for that. Blogging fills a different niche.
Of course, the aim is still to reach the truth through good reasoning. So constructive criticism is always welcome. If I say something misguided, I very much hope others will respond by explaining how my views could be improved. In other words: join the conversation! That's always helpful.
But what's not helpful is to declaim the discussion from on high, dismissing it as worthless because the participants haven't yet read the right texts or otherwise "qualified" against the gatekeeper's chosen criteria. (As if philosophical banter were a blameworthy offense, and the "ignorant" would do better to remain in embarrassed silence.) Such an attitude is not just rude, but downright anti-philosophical -- can you imagine a better way to stifle intellectual curiosity than to condemn the curious for their "failure" to already know everything? So much for 'the examined life'.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
New Guest: Introduction
Hello all. I am Michael Bycroft and I am lucky enough to be a guest poster on Philosophy Etcetera. In this post I want first to introduce myself and then to say what I intend to do in my short time on this blog. If I can do the first without boring anyone, and the second without sounding too much like a schooolteacher, I’ll consider it a job well done.
In the world of blog comments, I am Mike B. In the world of blog authorship I am the person who maintains New Leaves, a young blog with haphazard ambitions. For information about my blogging in general, here is a good place to go. For information about what sort of philosophy I intend to put on my blog, and why I bother with philosophy at all, follow the links.
In my guest posts I want to make the most of the features of blogging in general, and philosophy blogging in particular, that make those activities distinctive and worthwhile (and which I think make this particular blog especially distinctive and worthwhile). I refer especially to three such features (Other people will have other ideas. Here are some of Richard’s thoughts on the matter, for example). First, the interconnectedness that blogging facilitates. A link is easy to create and even easier to follow: it lends itself to a network of references that has all the advantages of traditional referencing and few of the traditional hassles. This system connects different writers, but it also connects the various elements in the writings of any particular author; and the latter is especially useful for a discipline like Philosophy, were any one post is likely to rely on other posts for the soundness and intelligibility of its reasoning.
By encouraging the habit of linking with other writers, I do not mean just to discourage plagiarism. Intellectual honesty obliges us to avoid the unacknowledged duplication of other people’s work. Intellectual ambitiousness, however, obliges us to go further than just avoiding redundancy in a writing community: it also obliges us to avoid the fragmentation of that community, the disorder and stagnation that would occur if everyone wrote honestly but in isolation from one another. So blogging resists fragmentation by making linking easy: I want to take advantage of this feature of blogging, mainly by referring back to posts that have appeared previously on this blog.
I also hope to take advantage of the communal discussions that are facilitated by this medium. Other people have said a lot about how useful this facility is, in intellectual activity in general and in philosophical activity in particular. Here I just want to underline this usefulness by pointing out some of the advantages of the written medium over the verbal medium: the former is not as susceptible to the latter to being handicapped by unhelpful interruptions, whether those interruptions be too long, too peripheral in their subject matter, or too rude in their tone; the former is more permanent, meaning that past contributions can be easily returned to for the sake of further scrutiny or clarification; and the former lends itself to less hasty, more carefully worded contributions than the latter does. I will try to make the most of this feature of blogging by writing some “discussion questions” at the end of each post (I think that this practice is in danger of being patronising and school-teacherish, suggesting as it does that readers cannot ask questions for themselves. But I think it could also be a helpful practice, so I’ll try it out and see how it goes.)
The third feature of blogging that I want to highlight here is its openness; I mean its openness to contributions from anyone who has a bit of spare time and internet access. This openness means that by commenting on this blog, or on a number of other blogs, I immediately gain the attention of a wide range of different people, from those who have devoted their working lives to the discipline of philosophy, and who can answer hard questions (or at least can eliminate bad answers); to those who are merely curious. This strikes me as a wonderfully civilised state of affairs. (This is not an original thought, of course. Hopefully the Carnival of Citizens or something like it has a long and busy life, along with the ideal of open, intelligent inquiry upon which it is based.) And this state of affairs is especially appealing to people such as myself, people who do not have the time or the ability to live a life of philosophy, but who nevertheless wish to live a philosophical life (more about this approach to philosophy over here).
So much for my thoughts on blogging in general. This is probably also a good place to say something more specific about the content of my guest posts. Those posts will all deal with Educational themes, though not necessarily with themes from the Philosophy of Education. I can see two problems with this choice of content. First, that it may not be sufficiently philosophical for this blog. I take it that the Philosophy of Education has at the best of times an awkward relation to the rest of Philosophy: it is like the Philosophy of History, a discipline of dubious parentage, an intellectual half-caste that is either ignored by pure-bred Metaphysics and sturdy Epistemology and the good son Ethics, or lightly humoured by them. My defense is that Education is a highly valuable discipline, even if it is unclear were it stands with Philosophy; and also that Education has been discussed quite earnestly on this blog before (all such discussions on the topic can be found here. I will refer to particular discussions from that set as I go along.)
The second problem is that I am not, and never have been, a schoolteacher. My hope is that I have a reasonable idea of which educational questions can and cannot be competently asked and answered by a person who does not have such experience. But I will no doubt slip up in some places, partly because the distinction between the two is in fact fuzzy, and partly because I don’t have a very clear view of it. I apologize in advance to any schoolteachers out there who are more well-equipped than I to answer some of the questions I will put forward; and invite them to take advantage of the second of the three qualities of blogging mentioned above, and set me right.
That should do by way of an introduction, except to say that my next three posts will be a series entitled “Teaching as an Ideal.” The first of these three posts will be pretty ponderous, but the posts should get shorter as I go on. Thanks for reading.
Friday, March 02, 2007
Citizens, Carnivals, and Symposia
The 4th (and perhaps final) Carnival of Citizens is now up at Positive Liberty.
My post on Religion and Deliberation elicited an interesting response from Mark Olsen (I've left a comment there, in turn). Another post, by Ruth Joy, argues that Democracy Needs Religion. Her post rests on the confusion of religion with ethical reasoning (moral philosophy). What we really need, of course, is the latter. ("Without it, we are left [with] making decisions based on force or power.")
Moving on, Don Jr. has helpfully organized a new Citizens’ Symposium, which will hopefully prove more successful at fostering dialogue than the old carnival format. The first edition will be on the topic of "free speech", with entries due by March 24th. Consult the website for further details -- and spread the word!
Blogs That Make You Go Hmm...
Sage was kind enough to tag me with a 'Thinking Blogger Award'. The rule: If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think. It's interesting to trace the thread back and see all the interesting blogs that various people have chosen.
Anyway, since every blog that I read qualifies, here are five that I happen to feel like highlighting today...
1. Stumbling and Mumbling - a left-libertarian challenging conventional wisdom.
2. Peter Levine - discusses civic engagement, deliberative democracy, etc.
3. Will Wilkinson / The Fly Bottle - a thoughtful capitalist.
4. The Splintered Mind - philosophy of mind, etc.
5. Philosophy from the Left Coast - but not too left. Plus philosophy. Good stuff.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Moral Guides
Over at TNR's Open University, David Greenberg wrote:
I once heard Paul Berman, in toasting Michael Walzer, say (and I'm paraphrasing) that when tough questions arise, he asks, "What would Michael Walzer think?" In other words, he looks to Walzer as a moral guide, a man whose opinions he might regard as wiser than his own. I've thought the same about my fellow Open U contributor Alan Wolfe. When Alan offers an opinion, it has to be taken seriously, and it often causes me to revise my own.
That immediately made me think of Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings. (Posts like this are the reason why.)
Whose opinions do you regard as wiser than your own?
Friday, February 23, 2007
Blogging Philosophy
A while back I was interviewed by Ophelia Benson for an article in The Philosophers' Magazine on philosophy and blogging (placing me in the esteemed company of Nigel Warburton, Brian Leiter, and H.E. Baber). The article itself doesn't seem to be available online yet [update: now it is], but my own thoughts can be found below. Feel free to add your own...
1. What motivated you to take up blogging?
I was just starting to really get into philosophy, and I found that I had a lot of ideas but nowhere to put them. So I created a blog to serve as a kind of notebook. Soon others joined in, which added a whole new dimension to the experience. (As a student hidden away in New Zealand, it was an invaluable opportunity to discuss philosophy with students half the world away.) And of course now there's a thriving online philosophical community, complete with carnivals and all...
2. Do you think blogs are a good medium for philosophy?
I think there are three kinds of philosophical activity to which blogs are especially well suited. First is the exploration of half-baked ideas, to get some early feedback and test their potential for further development. Secondly, blogs are a great study and teaching tool, as students can attempt to summarize an issue, and their readers may respond to help correct any misunderstandings. (A good summary may also benefit the readers' knowledge, of course.) Finally, a tightly focused blog post can make technical contributions in response to other work, perhaps critiquing a particular step in an argument, or offering an alleged counterexample.
Of course, blogs are no replacement for the sustained philosophy one finds in longer articles and book-length treatments. But, in light of the above, I'd say that they at least have a valuable supplementary role to play. Blogs are a good medium for some philosophy.
3. Do you think they're a good thing more generally?
Yeah, I think so. Like the internet more generally, blogs enable us to overcome geographic boundaries to communication. That's got to be a good thing. I guess it's the political ones that are most controversial in this regard -- there may be worries about group polarization and "echo chamber" effects, for example. But I'm optimistic that they can also serve to promote reasoned dialogue, so I'm working on a new "Carnival of Citizens" to this effect.
4. Do you think there are any drawbacks to blogging as a popular medium? If so, do you think they're more acute for philosophy (and/or academic subjects in general)?
Blog posts tend to have a short shelf life, typically dying away after a short burst of discussion. Academic topics may benefit from more sustained attention. But again, there are other mediums to provide that -- so long as blogs don't presume to provide everything, such limitations needn't be a problem.
