In chapter four of his Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault asks three questions to help us understand what the “enunciative modality” of a discourse is. Simplifying somewhat we can state these questions as follows:  (1) Who may speak? (2) Where may they speak? (3) How are they supposed to speak? In traditional academic disciplines, we can answer these questions at a general level by saying that (1) professors are authorized to speak in (2) university settings (including classrooms, conferences and academic journals) in (3) a manner that opens their speech to criticism.

Lately, I’ve been most interested in that last question. Too many academics, in my opinion, think of themselves as authorized to speak merely on the basis of their credentials and institutional setting. They are missing the part of academic discourse that is an ability, not just an authority.

Foucault says that the “position of the subject” (i.e., the authority of the professor) is conditioned, in part, by “a certain grid of explicit or implicit interrogations”. That is, when a claim is made in discourse, it may be questioned in specific ways. The meaning of the claim depends on the answers that the speaker is able to offer to these questions. The discourse itself is defined, in part, by what questions are likely to be asked and, in part, by the questions that cannot be asked. (The questioner can risk their authority to participate in the discourse by asking a “stupid question”.) The claim (or what Foucault calls “the statement”) is made with an expectation of being interrogated and is formulated in anticipation of being questioned. It is “open” to those questions and at the same time “braced” for them.

The more I look at academic discourse these days, like I say, the more I wonder how well this is understood. Too often, one sees an academic make a statement and then taking offence at being asked straightforward questions about its basis. It’s not just that the speaker seems unable to answer, they seem unwilling to answer, and they seem bewildered by being held to account. This is not promising for the future of human knowing.

Karl Popper’s famous demarcation criterion — that a claim is scientific only if it can be falsified — is no longer the reigning wisdom among scholars. I’ve always liked it, however. And I’ve also liked to use it as part of a semantics of academic writing. While there’s something appealing about A.J. Ayer’s verificationism — the view that a sentence means whatever would be the case if it were true — it must be remembered that for a great many claims (especially very general ones) the truth-making “fact” would simply be too huge to verify the existence of. In that case, it’s nice to know also what would make a statement false.

This, I believe, is something that scholars are forgetting in their discussions. Indeed, their communications can hardly even be called discussions any longer because they are not probing each other’s statements often enough for how they might be false. Such a “critical” posture is in many areas taken to be impolite. But it should be a basic habit of mind. When someone claims something — or when you assert a claim yourself — you should always ask what sorts of things would demonstrate the claim’s falsity. If your interlocutor cannot imagine any fact in the world that would disprove what they are saying, then they are not making a scientific claim.

Similarly, if the claimant to knowledge refuses to even discuss sources of error, you are not dealing with a scientific claim. Or you are not being invited into a scholarly conversation.

I used to think it was Laurence Sterne who said that “Gravity is a mysterious carriage of the body invented to cover the defects of the mind.” I had let Ezra Pound tell me so. It turns out that Sterne was quoting La Rochefoucauld. I now claim that you can find the sentence in the works of both authors, with the former attributing it to an unnamed “French wit” and the latter claiming it as his own. It is possible La Rochefoucauld plagiarized it from someone else, of course. But I’m not making any claims either way. I’m claiming only that Sterne quoted Rochefoucauld. You can try (and fail) to falsify this statement by consulting Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims.

Until today, I made a different claim. It was false. I claimed that Pound quoted Sterne and that Sterne wrote the original. Even a look at Sterne’s use of the sentence would falsify my assertion. Not even Sterne claims to be its author.

Too few scholars make claims about what others have said with this attitude. More gravely, they do not treat their empirical claims, or those of others, with this degree of seriousness. They don’t seem to care what would show them to be wrong. They don’t seem moved by evidence to that effect.

What does it mean to know something? How do you know you are doing it right? What sort of activity is “knowing”? We know what it means to be strong–i.e., to be able to lift something–but what does it mean to be smart? What does it mean to knowledgeable? What makes us able to know? What does knowledge feel like when we’re in the midst of it?

This has been an abiding question for me, probably since grad school, starting 20 years ago. I now have a simple three part answer that, of course, merely scratches the surface of a much more complicated one. But it’s important to me to emphasize that the three simple parts of my definition of knowledge are all things you can go ahead and train if you want to get smarter. You don’t need anyone to help you get started, though you might need someone to help you polish.

Compare strength again. Weight lifting is a sport that doesn’t just depend on raw strength. Body building, likewise, is an art that doesn’t just depend on muscle mass. In both cases, there are important skills that need to be learned from others. You need a coach. But there is also a simple, ordinary, nonspecialist approach to strength that you can do completely on your own. You can do push ups, and sit ups, and jumping jacks, and you can go for a run. All these things will make you stronger, and if you do them within moderation (and sensitivity to pain) they are unlikely to injure you.

The same goes for getting smarter. The three basic things you should become good at are:

1. Making up your mind.
2. Speaking your mind.
3. Writing it down.

It’s literally that simple.

First, recognize that making up your mind has to do with forming a belief that you have good reason to think is true. You practice this every day by asking yourself a question that you think it’s within your power to answer. Is there water on the moon? Are there more people alive today than have ever died? What caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? What is a CDO? Start with a question that you don’t quite know the answer to but, of course, one that you are curious about. Then go online and try to make up your mind. What sorts of reasons can find to believe one thing or another? Remember that you don’t just want to find “the right answer”, you want to understand why it it the right answer.

Next, tell someone about it. Try to tell someone that you think is knowledgeable about the subject. Are you able to converse intelligently about the subject you have researched? Does the conversation become you merely listening to this other person explain it to you? Or do you do all the talking (suggesting that they are not actually as knowledgeable as you thought)? Is the conversation interesting? If you know what you’re talking about, it should be.

Finally, write it down. Spend 18 or 27 minutes writing a single prose paragraph about what you have learned. Make it at least six sentences long and most 200 words. Make sure you provide your sources.  When you’re done, read it out loud. If possible, have someone else read it back to you. It should be easy to read. It should constitute a strong confident statement of the fact you know to be true along with your reasons for thinking so.

Smart people can carry out these activities in the same way that strong people can lift, carry and throw things of various weight with confidence. Even when they are operating at the edge of their strength, they know what they are capable of. That’s because they are used to using their muscles. You want to be used to using your knowledge in the same way. Think, speak, write. These are the basic disciplines.

Whether it’s student demonstrations or failed replications, academic discourse seems to be in a lot of trouble these days. My view is that it can be traced back to the 1960s and what is sometimes called “the crisis of representation”, or what Gilles Deleuze called “the indignity of speaking of others”.  This has steadily eroded the institutions we needed to maintain our composure, if you will, in the face of conflicting claims. Though he meant it in a somewhat more technical sense, Wittgenstein was onto something when he said that “the civil status of a contradiction” is the philosophical problem. The crisis is that we don’t know how to react when someone (or someone’s data) contradicts us (or our theories). It terrifies us. Even an election result traumatizes us.

For some time now, my working hypothesis is that the quality of our discourse depends on the strength of our prose. We have to learn to approach experience as something that can be articulated in an orderly sequence of paragraphs, each stating and supporting a claim. In that form, opinions should not appear at all threatening (as they certainly might on a placard in an angry mob). I think we have failed to maintain our universities as sites of rigorously “prosaic” experience, places where even poetry is read, not to carry us off into ecstasies, but to bring about a reorganization of our emotions, a reordering of the prose of the world.

For a re-ordering to make sense, of course, there has to be some order to begin with. And this, it seems to me, has been lost. I need to think some more about this. I think it is very important. We need to cultivate, once again, “the prose of world”, and this will require us to establish some decorum. Deleuze to the contrary, we need to learn how to speak for others with dignity. Otherwise, it seems, we can’t even speak with each other.

Next year, I want to hold a regular colloquium at the Library about the nature of scholarly or “academic” writing. I am of course referring to the kind of writing that researchers are supposed to “publish or perish”, but also, by extension, to the sort of writing that students are required to submit for examination. I believe that the first is a model for the second, that students are being taught in their studies how to do what scholars do for a living.

But what is so special about this kind of writing? What sets it apart from other kinds of writing (writing that is no less important) in life and business? What specific difficulty does “academic writing” imply?

My answer is that academic writing is the presentation of what you know in such a way that other knowledgeable people can help you decide whether or not you really do. It opens your thinking criticism by qualified peers. While it is, in a certain sense, intended to persuade your reader of the truth of your claims, this rhetorical force is always tempered by keeping the text open to criticism. That usually means it has to be written in a clear and coherent manner, so that defects in thinking are not concealed by defects in writing.

In an important sense, the text will not be persuasive to an academic audience if it is too obviously “rhetorical”, too eagerly trying to convince the reader of the truth or justice of its message. It must demonstrate a self-consciousness about the possibility of error. It contains an implicit declaration of “correct me if I’m wrong”. This makes demands of the style of the paper, of course; but it is also why academics are so “hung up” on references. It must be possible to check a claim against its sources.

Anyway, the colloquium I want to hold will be an open discussion among CBS faculty about how we can understand the adjective “academic” as the unity of student and scholarly writing. It’s the craft that the university conserves and transmits to future generations. The art of writing down what we know.