No man ever knows enough about any art. I have seen young men with most brilliant endowment who have failed to consider the length of the journey. (Ezra Pound)

In my last post, I suggested that logic lets us improve the consistency of our beliefs and that such improvement is what science is really all about. In this post I want to emphasize that this is an ongoing, collective enterprise. We do not discover the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and certainly not once and for all. Rather we are constantly revising our system of beliefs, adding truths, removing falsehoods, and, no doubt, introducing new errors as we go. That’s true of everyone from the individual student to the whole of science. We manage the process through discipline and discourse, governed by disciplines and discourses.

That’s not just a clever play on words. A “discipline” can be understood as a community of researchers working a range of problems, framed by accepted theories and guided by trusted methods, and the problems, theories, and methods may change over time, but only as a result of the steady and careful (“disciplined”) work of the members of the community. Moreover, they can’t just make discoveries, report them, and expect to be believed. They must persuade their peers that their results are both significant and reliable. That is, they must discuss their results with each other and be open to criticism. This conversation is itself disciplined by what we call “discourse,” which are the not merely logical but also rhetorical conditions under which scholars revise each other’s beliefs about the world.

Students experience this in the microcosms of their minds and classes. Their own personal web of belief is constantly revised as they read, write, and talk about their subjects, and the conversation among them (for they can see each other as “peers” too) also changes as their progress through the curriculum. They are not merely accumulating “truths” one at a time, by addition only. Rather, they are learning and unlearning and learning things again and again, always trying to maintain some semblance of consistency among their own beliefs (again, personally, in their own minds) and the beliefs of their peers (in their classes). Though they sometimes fail to notice it, they are also building craft skills: they are becoming better readers and writers and talkers about their subject, they are disciplining their minds and bodies, fashioning themselves as scholars of their subjects.

There is no end to this process. Science never reaches the final truth on all things and the student never stops learning, even when she makes full professor. And all the while, as science progresses and careers develop, new generations of students are being invited into the conversation, encouraged to change their minds again and again, belief by belief, always (I hope) supported in their efforts to maintain consistency and therefore rejecting some of the things we are trying to teach them until they’ve made the necessary adjustments elsewhere in their web. (I put this hope in careful parentheses because lately I’ve been getting the impression that students and teachers are getting impatient with each other. Some teachers don’t want to be questioned and some students just want to be told what to be believe for the exam. Hopefully, there are still some patient people in academia who understand that forming a belief “correctly” can take a little time, sometimes longer than a semester.)

All research is embedded in an ongoing conversation. It has been going on as long as there has been language, I would think, but since the advent of writing, it has been increasingly disciplined. Modern research is beholden to often very specific discourses that determine the meaning of words and the significance of statements. It even determines limits to what can be said. Fortunately, none of the conventions that govern discourse are absolute and they are likely to change under the pressure of the need to acknowledge particular truths. The good researcher is simply the person who applies that pressure, carefully and consistently, over the course of their career.