The university provides a structure for learning. Within it, learning situations arise, all of which are ambiguously related to structure. Indeed, the names we have for situations, like “class” or “task” or “exam,” are also names for the structures in which the situations arise. After all, a situation is a space of freedom within a structure. The structure of a class, which constructs the position of teacher and student, leaves open a space of possibilities, for both teachers and students, that are not determined in advance.

This space is not always easy to navigate successfully. If we define “success” here as an outcome wherein learning takes place, it is easy to see how fraught the situation within any given structure can be. The class, construed as a situation, becomes a predicament for the teacher; construed as structure, it affords opportunities for learning that the teacher must exploit. (The student can choose to engage actively in this endeavor, of course; and the teacher may see their own task as motivating such engagement.) Likewise, an exam is familiar predicament for the student when construed as a situation. To crib a line from Sartre, we can say the student is condemned to the “freedom” of an examination, but they must also acknowledge that the structure of the exam provides an orderly time and place to demonstrate what they have learned, usually within a predictable format for which they can prepare. They are given a task and a set of constraints and will be judged only on how well they exploit the freedom granted by the structure. The structure affords them an opportunity to shine.

“Homework” is a structure and a situation that we do well to think seriously about. How does homework afford learning opportunities? How can students exploit those opportunities? On the old model, homework was a learning opportunity when seen from the teacher’s point of view: you could make students do homework and presume that the doing yielded learning (even if the student wasn’t quite aware of this, or even a little resentful of it). From the student’s point of view, homework was a task, and even a test, the important thing was do it “correctly,” i.e., to the satisfaction of the teacher, so that it may received the desired grade, which was the counted toward the final grade. For obvious reasons, this will no longer work. The best way for students to satisfy their teachers with homework, will, in most cases, be to leave the work to artificial intelligence. And if they do this, they do not learn anything by, literally, doing the homework. There will be no doing involved.

Here, I believe we must structure the homework as a task that practices a competence to be performed in an exam. That is, homework will be an exercise in establishing something like “exam conditions” at home. The only way to this, as far as I can tell, is not to grade homework assignments, or, at the least, not to grade them in a way that counts toward a final grade. (You can give students an indicative grade: a grade that tells them what the result would be if it had been performed in an invigilated situation.) The idea will be to teach students to situate themselves at home in ways that affords them opportunities to demonstrate what they have learned in class. In doing homework, they will demonstrate to themselves what they are capable of.

Obviously, I’m here talking about homework assignments, not what we might more generally refer to as “studying”: which involves reading and drilling and thinking and talking to peers and many other things besides. These situations are also best faced within structures, often of the students own making, but always in some way related to the larger, overarching structure of “the university”.

“No one has yet determined what the body can do.” (Spinoza)

While it has always been thus, today more than ever, higher education consists of helping students find out what their bodies can do. We can, perhaps, limit this learning to their ability to do things with words, or, somewhat more generally, symbols. I stress that these “symbolic” skills are bodily because we have become a little too used to “off-loading” our understanding of the “mental” to machines. (Note, that when I call this a “symbolic” competence I don’t mean “merely” symbolic, or “just for show,” but pertaining to symbols.) I will never tire of emphasizing how impressed we should be with people in their twenties who can compose themselves, given their bodies as they are, in orderly prose paragraphs. I am, of course, also impressed with their math skills. And the essential thing in developing both of these skills is practice — to actually put words and numbers together by hand in meaningful ways. Prosthetic hands are perfectly legitimate, but mental prosthetics simply beg the question. In an important sense, a mind just is what the body can do with symbols.

I think we need to be straight with our students about this. Their time at university should be spent disciplining their bodies so that they (their bodies) may “know things.” They must become able to make up their minds, speak their minds, and write down what they think; they must learn to compose themselves, in public but also in the privacy of their own minds, in coherent prose. Their thoughts should flow in a stream of consciousness that becomes sentences that become paragraphs that become essays. When they speak, they should speak with the confidence of someone who knows what they’re talking about. When they write, they should have the courage (born of that confidence) to expose their thinking to the criticism of their peers. They should present themselves as people who want to know if they wrong, ready to engage with people who are qualified to tell them when they are. This is a bodily comportment, a posture, a way of carrying yourself. It requires an attentive attitude and a particular tone of voice. The aim is to be become articulate, to find your composure.

Do I need to say that this training, this discipline, cannot be left to machines? There is no workaround when developing your own style. You must assemble your sentences and develop your arguments yourself.

One reason to subject students to “exam conditions” is that it offers them an opportunity to experience what they are capable of. Obviously, the conditions must be reasonable and the prompt must be relevant to the course. But this is easy to ensure by giving students, say, three hours to compose a thousand words of coherent prose that answers a question they have been equipped to understand. The mere fact that (or degree to which) they understand the question gives them an initial indication of their mastery of the subject. The knowledge needed to answer the question can be acquired through, well, study, including reading, attending lectures, participating in discussions with fellow students, both in and out of class, and carefully thinking things through. The ability to compose two and half pages of prose in two and a half hours can be developed through deliberate practice during the semester, one composed moment at a time.

We typically give our students 12 to 16 weeks to master a subject in this way. Our goal should be to give them confidence when forming beliefs, expressing them, and writing them down. Of course, that confidence should come with a measure of humility, a sense of limits, an understanding of where their knowledge can be applied and, importantly, an openness to being wrong, grounded in a sense, also, of the limited consequences of error. That is, a course at university should equip students to think about a subject. And when they “sit for the exam” they should enter a space and a time that is familiar to them, it should be an experience that they have, in various ways, subjected themselves to, a discipline they have cultivated, not for the purpose of the examination, but for its own sake, and which just happens to be required by the conditions of that moment. It is a situation that they have learned to respect and it is by passing through this humbling, which the sincere student should never experience as humiliation, that they will gain their confidence.

“Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.” (Barthes)

“We are faced with the problem of error.” (Quine)

The editor of the Philosophers’ Magazine, Daniel Kodsi, recently defended AI-supported writing as not essentially different from traditional approaches. Letting AI draft a text for you is like using a dictionary or conferring with an editor or following a style guide. “Writers have always relied on external supports,” Kodsi reminds us: “teachers, editors, friends, books, style guides, dictionaries, templates, stock phrases, genre conventions, and prior texts absorbed over years of reading. AI is simply another such support.” In fact, our resistance to AI is grounded in a myth (and even “cult”) of writing as “self-expression,” which Kodsi thinks we do well to abandon:

the basic purpose of writing is not to display the unaided workings of an individual mind. The point of writing is to communicate: to convey information, make arguments, issue instructions, tell stories, record events, or produce understanding in a reader. Once that is clear, the importance of asking who first generated a given sentence diminishes. What matters first is whether the writing says something true, useful, illuminating, or worth reading.

Kodsi does grant that there is a “narrow range of cases” where writing might be understood as “fundamentally self-expression” (though he is quick to remind us that here, too, the shoe only fits “imperfectly”.) In my reply to his post, I upped the ante a bit, suggesting that there is a broad class of cases where we want writers to “display” the “workings” of their minds and where we are, in fact, interested in their ability to do this “unaided”. This is a kind of writing that I teach and coach, namely, academic writing.

Kodsi disagreed. Academic writing, he suggested, is also mainly communicative; its aim “is to advance knowledge by putting claims and arguments into public circulation.” Here it doesn’t matter who is making the claim. “What matters is the research, not the researcher.” Moreover, published research today is not a pure representation of what one or several researchers had on their minds at the time of writing, put the result of a complex processes involving a variety of actors. “Research assistants, editors, peer reviewers, and colleagues already shape academic work in extensive ways, and none of that is thought to invalidate it.”

I countered (as I had already suggested in another thread) that the so-called replication and criticism crisis is rife with scandals in which blame for errors (and outright fabrications) is deflected onto, precisely, research assistants and co-authors. While I grant that the contributions of research assistants, editors, and peer-reviewers is a normal and accepted part of academic writing, this happens on the background of a presumption of authenticity, authorial intention. Anyone who has let a chatbot generate a text that expresses (even quite accurately) their own ideas knows the sadness of lost authenticity. Signing your name to it feels fraudulent.

But there is a deeper issue here, which arises, not in cases of research misconduct, but precisely in the cases were it conducted normally. Kodsi suggested I elaborate a bit on it because it didn’t seem obvious to him. This post is an attempt to re-articulate my intuitions about the essence of academic writing, why AI can’t do it, and why you shouldn’t let it. As you’ll see, I could be wrong.

In science, publication is not just a means to “circulate” ideas and discoveries. In fact, I would argue that good ideas and real discoveries will find receptive audiences willy-nilly, whether or not they are published in reputable journals. They will circulate as working papers, seminar and conference presentations, and in personal emails. And they will be implemented in subsequent scientific research and technological development. The main purpose of academic publication is not to communicate research results, but to expose those results (and the ideas they embody) to the criticism of qualified peers. This requires the researcher to present them in ways that are open to interrogation by other knowledgeable people, both pre- and post-publication. In a word, publishing our results (in conventional academics form) makes us corrigible. It tells our colleagues, not just what we found, but how we found it, so that any mistakes we may have made along the way will be noticed by people working with the same methods, framed by the same theories.

Here the researcher does in fact matter as much as the research. Research is embodied in social and material conditions, including the actual flesh-and-bone bodies of researchers. It is the researcher whose methods must be corrected and whose instruments must be re-calibrated if they are making serious errors (or, in those hopefully rare cases, if they are committing outright fraud). “Publish or perish” is a defensible norm precisely because we want our epistemic authorities, whether they are speaking in the classroom or to the media, to be under continuous “peer review”. We want the people who speak confidently about how the world works to also be speaking carefully and clearly to people who know something about it too. In short, it matters whether the words on the pages that they sign their names to were “generated” by their own minds, not by computing statistically plausible passages of prose on the subject, even when the claims made are perfectly true.

More importantly, perhaps, composing our thinking in critically open paragraphs that make explicit claims about the world, and support, elaborate, or defend those claims, shapes our thinking, preparing it to be corrected (or corroborated) by peers we respect. That is, scholars who do their own writing are establishing precisely those logical connections between their ideas that will let them more efficiently update what Quine called their “web of belief” in light of counter-evidence to any one of them. Prosing our worlds, we might say, weaves the web in ever finer threads that allow changes to be made precisely, without, except in the extreme (but also easily identifiable) cases, having to discard a whole theory and replace it with another.

We expect academics to be thus prepared for criticism. Not just willing to hear it, but able to respond to it, sometimes by changing their minds. And we don’t want these changes to result in chaos and confusion; we don’t want our knowledge of the world to be turned on its head very often. (We don’t want “progress through revolution” all the time!) We rely on our institutions of higher education (including academic research) to keep the ebbs and flows of our stream of consciousness orderly, to keep our questioning within reasonable limits.* This is simply what it means to be academically “literate”; and we expect this of, precisely, academics themselves — not just their editors or machines.

Kodsi’s argument tends in the same direction as those who declare, on Barthes’ dubious authority, “the death of the author” in order to liberate the reader from the intentions of the writer and make what they will of a text, except that Kodsi seems more intent on liberating writers from the moralizing demands of their readers. As a mode of (or, as Susan Sontag suggested, a stance against) literary interpretation, I’m all for it. But, for academic purposes, I would deploy Foucault’s proposed “author function” (an application of his idea that a discourse is shaped, in part, by its “enunciative modality”) with a straighter face and insist that our authorities commit themselves to recognizable roles. Not least, to assume the position of a subject in the discourse, an author — or even a potential author, a peer, a hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère — is to open yourself to questions from other knowledgeable people. The prose of the world prepares our minds for critical discourse. Academics should be better prepared than most to be wrong. It is by writing that we prepare our bodies to face our errors.

_______
*As I was writing this sentence I couldn’t help but think of Kafka’s little allegory in “The Great Wall of China”:

“Try with all your might to comprehend the decrees of the high command, but only up to a certain point; then avoid further meditation. A very wise maxim, which moreover was elaborated in a parable that was later often quoted: Avoid further meditation, but not because it might be harmful; it is not at all certain that it would be harmful. What is harmful or not harmful has nothing to do with the question. Consider rather the river in spring. It rises until it grows mightier and nourishes more richly the soil on the long stretch of its banks, still maintaining its own course until it reaches the sea, where it is all the more welcome because it is a worthier ally. Thus far may you urge your meditations on the decrees of the high command. But after that the river overflows its banks, loses outline and shape, slows down the speed of its current, tries to ignore its destiny by forming little seas in the interior of the land, damages the fields, and yet cannot maintain itself for long in its new expanse, but must run back between its banks again, must even dry up wretchedly in the hot season that presently follows. Thus far may you not urge your meditations on the decrees of the high command.”

“If its object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a University should have students.” (John Henry Newman, 1852)

In the coming years, I expect, the purpose of higher education will be a recurring topic of discussion among academics. What are students supposed to learn at university? How are they to be improved? What do we want them to become better at? The answer will have to take seriously the fact that we have the authority only to impart and certify knowledge, to arm them only with ideas and “the authority of right reason,” as Scotus Erigena put it. We may only teach and examine our students. Why should students submit to this authority? What do they gain from it? What does society gain from demanding it of them?

An alternative, after all, is fast coming into view. Students are learning to use artificial intelligence to “support their learning,” which, unfortunately, is often indistinguishable (sometimes to themselves and sometimes, it seems, even to their teachers) from avoiding the problem of learning altogether. I’ve pointed out before that when Bertrand Russell suggested that a “system of notation” could almost serve as a “live teacher,” and “a perfect notation would be a substitute for thought,” he was probably not imagining the “stochastic parotting” of large language models. But they certainly do seem capable of substituting for a great deal of the thinking we’ve traditionally demanded of our students. We seem to be on the verge of automating the very problem of knowledge. Our students have been given an epistemic workaround.

Now, I have served for about two decades as a writing coach at a major European business school and during that time I have developed what I think is a healthy, working epistemology. I don’t claim to have solved all the problems that philosophers have raised in regards to the nature of knowledge, but I have a confident grasp of what we mean, or should mean, when we say that we are “knowledgeable” people and are helping our students to become likewise “able”. As I never tire of telling them, to be knowledge-able is both to be able-to-know things and en-abled by that knowledge to do things they would not otherwise be capable of doing. Knowledge is a competence that is manifest in a performance. In what, then, does that performance consist? What should university students become increasingly better at doing? What does it mean to be able to “know something” for, let us say, “academic purposes”?

First, if you are knowledgeable about something you are able to make up your mind about it. Invoking the long tradition of Western epistemology, I usually characterize this competence as the ability to form a justified, true belief. Given a series of experiences or a set of materials, a knowledgeable person is able to reach a determination of what is going on and what it means. They can convert what William James (and, later, Thomas Kuhn) called “the bloomin’, buzzin’ confusion of experience” into sterner stuff: propositional attitudes about stable facts, and theories that arrange concepts into orderly frameworks. Obviously, even very knowledgeable people can be wrong about particular facts and this is why I have increasingly come to emphasize that knowledge isn’t so much being right about things as being able to change your mind about them in an orderly fashion. On the path “from stimulus to science,” as Quine puts it, “we are faced with the problem of error” at every step. Knowledgeable people face this problem, let’s say, squarely.

But forming a belief, no matter how true or justified, is not sufficient to be considered knowledgeable in an academic setting. You must not only know what you’re talking about, you must be able to talk about what you know. To know something at university is to be able to hold your own in a discussion about it with other knowledgeable people. For students, this should be understood as an ability to discuss topics raised in class with their fellow students. It is sometimes argued that “academic writing” lacks “relevance” for students because it doesn’t relate to their “lived experience” or “real life”. Against this, I have long tried to argue that the “academic situation” offers an entirely meaningful context for rhetorical engagement. The classroom is a microcosm of the discipline and the students are learning to address their peers and respect their criticism. In that sense, students are apprentice scholars.

But nor is that all there is to knowing things “for academic purposes”. Knowledgeable people are not just able to make up their minds and speak their minds; they are able to write it down. The test that I recommend is whether you are able to compose a coherent prose paragraph about something you know in under half an hour. More specifically, are you in an epistemic position to decide at the end of one day to write a paragraph a start of the next about something you knew was true last week? This is not just a good test of whether you actually know the thing you think is true, it is also a good skill to have in itself. It’s nice to know that you can write half a page about anything you know in half an hour. Doing it regularly should give you a certain confidence, not least that confidence which comes from regularly experiencing that you do, in fact, know things to be true.

It is this competence that I hope the university will continue to represent and this confidence (which is not without humility) that I hope we will continue to instill in our students. To that end, I never miss an opportunity to plead for a shift of focus in our assessments, from homework assignments back to on-site, off-line, invigilated written examination. A university student who has taken a course (or is in the middle of a term) should be able to answer a relevant 20-word question given 4 hours and 1000 words (with relevant accommodations for disability) in a way that can be easily graded by their teacher. The ability to write, say, five coherent prose paragraphs is a good proxy for whether the student is able to make up their mind on the subject they are studying, speak their mind, and (of course) write it down. I would certainly argue that the plain in-ability (that the exam conditions of course make, precisely, plain) to write such an essay should call into question their claim to be a “knowledgeable” person on the subject in question. Higher learning is manifest in such basic skills.