A good philosophy of science should make you a better academic writer. In fact, a healthy approach to academic writing probably depends on having an adequate philosophy of what science is. After all, you are writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. Before you can do that, you need to have a working understanding of what it means to “know things”; and, if you’ve paid attention in your introductory philosophy class you will know that we’re now already well on our way into the thickets of epistemology (“What is knowledge?”) and ontology (“What things are there?”).

I’m going think out loud about this over the next few posts, reflecting a little on my own understanding of what science (or research or scholarship) actually is. I’m always looking for a positive sense to give to the word “academic”, which today suffers from misuse both as a pejorative and an honorific, leading us to either ridicule or venerate academics in unhelpful ways. There’s a T-shirt I see promoted online with the variations on the slogan, “That’s what I do. I read books, I drink coffee, and I know things.” There’s something at once self-deprecating and self-important about talking like that, but it also captures that key question of the philosophy of science: What is it we think scientists do? What are they doing when they “know things”?

More tomorrow about how this will make you a better writer.

Knowledgeable people are people who are able to know things. This means that they are able to conquer their ignorance. Obviously, you can’t conquer something that fills you with dread whenever you encounter it. So one of the things you often find in very accomplished scientists and scholars is a sanguine attitude about the things they don’t know.

This comes up in my writing instruction when I prepare students for the experience of sitting down to write and discovering, only in that moment, that they don’t know what they’re talking about. They followed the plan. They took a moment at the end of yesterday to decide what to say today; but, when the moment arrived, and they were typing out their key sentence, they realized they had nothing more to say, or nothing, in any case, that they felt comfortable saying to someone who was qualified to tell them that they’re wrong. Now what?

The short answer is to take the planned 18 or 27 minutes of your writing moment and use it to explore the depth and the breadth of your ignorance on the chosen topic. Rewrite the key sentences a few times at greater or lesser levels of generality until the gears click. Or simply write the negation of the same sentence; if you don’t know why the sentence is true, maybe you know why it’s false? Try to imagine specific examples of the general point you’re making, even if you don’t know they are true. And try to imagine precisely the cases that your key sentence seems to exclude, the experiences that would falsify your claim. Here you can imagine actual facts in the world or the opinions of the scholars you had planned to cite. These images are excellent ways to understand what you mean.

Whatever you do, make sure that you write the paragraph you said you would, however imperfect you already know it’s going to be. Later, when the writing is done, you can go looking for the facts or sources that you have vaguely imagined while you were writing. Resolve the issue. Then, next week, write the paragraph properly.

The idea of the intangibility of that mental state in estimating the time is of the greatest importance. Why is it intangible? Isn’t it because we refuse to count what is tangible about our state as part of the specific state which we are postulating?

Wittgenstein, PI§608

Many of the writers I work with think of writing as a very intangible process. A good way of seeing this is when they tell me that it took them “a whole week” (or several weeks!) to write something. They don’t distinguish the tangible from the intangible parts of the process, so they count their reading and thinking and worrying about their writing as part of the time they spent “writing”. But writing, properly speaking, is what actually happens on the page. When I ask you how long it took you to write a paragraph, I’m asking you how many minutes you spent writing it. When I ask you how you did it? I don’t want to hear about all the reading and thinking and considering-how-others-did-it that you did. I want to know how you composed in the moment.

“I’ve glimpsed into our future and all I can say is…go back.”
Diane Court

Lately, I’ve been finding myself comparing ChatGPT to PowerPoint in my discussions with students and colleagues about artificial intelligence in higher education. PowerPoint has undeniably had a profound impact on teaching and learning at universities. In particular, it has changed the nature of lecturing and the attention implicit in “attending” a lecture. My view is that the effect has been, on balance, a negative one, validating the concerns of its critics, who have been speaking out since it was introduced.

PowerPoint shifted the attentions of both students and teachers from each other to the slides, and it gave the false impression that an “official” record of the lecture existed in the slide deck. (Today, some lecturers even skip slides and tell students they can read them later on their own.) Many students defer the effort of understanding what was said in the lecture — the process of learning — to that magical period later in the semester known as a “studying for exams” when the presentations they have downloaded (instead of making their own notes) will supposedly make perfect sense to them. The slides do not support lectures, they essentially replace them.

All of this criticism is obvious and has a familiar retort: PowerPoint is a good thing when used correctly. PowerPoint isn’t bad; bad PowerPoint is bad. My response to this is simply that we’ve had thirty years to learn how to use it well and, while in the right hands (and in front of the right eyes) it can, yes, do impressive things, it is very, very rarely in the right hands (and very often slides past glazed eyes). Its overall effect on university lecturing has been a negative one, exacerbating the worst tendencies of mass higher education rather than helping us to maintain our standards in the face of them. Again, these criticisms are obvious and very old and you’re no doubt already bored by them.

I bring it up in conversation to say why I’m not very hopeful that we’ll learn how to “leverage” AI in higher education. Even my fellow writing instructors and librarians seem eager to “embrace” this new technology. I’ve heard it said that it will make English “the hottest programming language on Earth”. The enthusiasm for this technology is overwhelming. I fear it will be deployed widely before it is applied wisely. In a few years, there I’ll be, quaintly lecturing without slides and teaching students to write their own sentences and paragraphs. Chalk and talk; pen and paper. A grumpy old man.

I told you so.

For the third year in a row, I’m running my series of informal talks about the Art of Learning here at CBS. It starts today. It’s a great chance for me to hear what I’m currently thinking about the state of knowledge in higher education. As usual, the plan is to begin with the art of knowing things, and then move on to reading, thinking, writing, listening, talking and enjoying things. There’s a final talk at the end about how to retain what we learn and maintain the ability to learn (and relearn) still more things.

This year, there’s a shadow hanging over me, of course. Students are asking themselves whether their time over the next five years is best spent developing their natural talents or learning how to use an artificial intelligence. As I said already at the end of last year’s series, I fear we’re approaching a dystopian future in which getting an education really just means fine tuning (and perhaps learning how to prompt) a bespoke AI, an artificially intelligent assistant (or outright alter ego) customized to your particular discipline.

For now, I’m sticking to my guns. Students should learn how to use their minds and bodies, shaping their senses and their motives ever more precisely to engage with an increasingly digital environment. They should not leave their thinking to machines any more than they should leave their feelings to them. Norman Mailer once said that technology is always offering more power and less pleasure. I understand the temptation. I’m going to spend some of my talks offering some arguments for resisting it.

A university education is already a very artificial thing. But, as with art, the point is to use this formal setting to explore the gifts you were born with, to find out what your body can do, as Spinoza put it, not just, pace Deleuze and Guattari, to plug it into a bunch of machines.