“The aim of education or culture is merely the development of good taste in knowledge and good form in conduct.” (Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, p. 393)

What’s so good about knowledge? Why is it better to know than not to know? Indeed, is knowledge always a good thing? Is it sometimes better not to know? Certainly, we cannot realistically pursue a goal of knowing everything there is to know, even about a specific subject. And whatever we do know derives its value, its virtue if you will, from its contribution to the important business of living. Life, we might say, has an “epistemic” component, which suggests an epistemological issue.**

I worry about the epistemic component of the problem of living. That makes me an epistemologist, just as an ethnographer is interested in the “ethnic side” of life, if you will.** The ethnographer is not interested in becoming a better native, a more upstanding member of the community; the ethnographer wants to understand what it means to be native to a particular land. Likewise, I’m less interested (or at least I sometimes tell myself I’m less interested) in actually knowing something, than in understanding the difference that knowing it will make to our lives.

I’m not really very curious person, perhaps. But I am obsessed with what happens when we satisfy, or fail to satisfy, our curiosity. When I consider carefully how our research and teaching environments are organised (my experience is mostly with universities) I sometimes worry that we let real curiosity go unsatisfied, and glut ourselves with trivia instead. Sometimes, I think I’m against curiosity altogether. I suppose that’s a bit like an ethnographer who has a low of opinion of nationalism. You can understand something well enough to be afraid of it.

It seems life would be easier if we were less naturally curious. Or perhaps the problem lies with how easily we let ourselves be satisfied. Maybe I just think we have poor taste in knowledge.

I’d like to try to affect our taste in knowledge. In particular, I think we need to have a much more refined taste for social science. We’re much too eager to learn how society works, how people live together. We’re much too ready to believe what social scientists tell us, what some recent “study” has “shown”. We need to hold claims about the society in which we live to a much higher standard. After all, what we think is true of our society is very much a part of how that society works. If you think you live in a democracy your political activities look very different from how they’d look if you thought you were living in an oligarchy. If you think people’s decisions (including your own) can be manipulated by “priming”, your negotiating tactics will probably show it.

I’m interested not just in how we practice what we know, but in how we go about our knowing. What sorts of practices lead to better kinds of knowledge. Our knowledge will never be perfect, but there must be a sense that we’re striving to improve. What criteria, then, can we come up with for “good” epistemic practices? This is a somewhat different question than the one philosophers classically raise: what are the criteria for knowledge? Instead of asking how we can know that we know one thing or another, I want to describe a set of practices such that, if we practice them, what is likely to result is “good” knowledge. I think it’s much less important to believe the right things than to cultivate the right attitude about our beliefs. I think epistemology should be about that attitude, not about the beliefs that emerge at the end of it.

More later.

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*This post was originally published as part of a series on my old blog.

**It should be possible to distinguish between “epistemic” and “epistemological” as easily as we distinguish between “ethnic” and “ethnographic”. Knowers have have epistemic traits just as people have ethnic ones; our interest in these traits is epistemological and ethnographic respectively. When they produce “an ethnography” of a group of people (sometimes called “natives”) ethnographers delineate their “ethnicity”—the nature of their particular humanity, or what we call culture. When epistemologists produce “an epistemology” of a group of knowers (sometimes called “scientists”) they delineate their “epistemicity”—okay, that’s not a word, but epistemologists do delineate the nature of the knowledge, sometimes the nature of the knowledge that belongs to a particular group of knowers. Ethnos just means “people” in Greek. Episteme means knowledge. Foucault talked about epistemes in part to avoid talking about “sciences”. He preferred to talk about “field[s] of scientificity” over talking of “scientific theories”.

Inspired by Bill Evans, I recently came up with a pretty good metaphor for receiving feedback. Imagine that you are a piano student and your teacher asks you to “play something” for her. You play and afterwards she tells you that she likes the melancholy way you played “How About You?” (“I like New York in June…”)

Now, imagine that you weren’t trying to play “How About You?” but were just improvising whatever came to mind, and you didn’t have any particular mood in mind. Your teacher’s feedback wouldn’t mean very much. But suppose, instead, that you were trying to play “How About You?” in a lighthearted way. Now you’re getting some real information from your teacher. She’s telling you that you have something to work on. You are not getting your musical idea across in your playing.

The same goes for getting feedback on a paragraph you’ve written. If your only goal was to fill half a page with words then you’re not going to learn very much about how well you write from your reader’s interpretation. But if you decided on a simple, declarative key sentence the day before, and you spent exactly 27 minutes supporting, elaborating or defending it, then you can ask your reader to identify the key sentence and the rhetorical posture. If they get it right, you’re doing something right. If they get it wrong you can try to figure out what went wrong. The key sentence here is a bit like the melody — what are you trying to say? The rhetorical posture (support, elaborate or defend) is a bit like the mood — how are you trying to say it? They specify your intentions.

That’s the important thing. If you want to learn something from the feedback you are getting, you have to be doing something specific. You have to have an intention. When your reader tells you how they interpret your words, there has to be a “right answer” to compare that interpretation to.

To be knowledgeable on a topic is to be able to make up your mind about it, to speak your mind about it, and to write it down. I want to look at the second of these competences today — the ability, if you will, to hold your own in a conversation with other knowledgeable people. As a scholar, you can’t be satisfied with just holding a great many “justified, true beliefs”; you have to be able to discuss them intelligently with people who are qualified to tell you that you are wrong. This openness to criticism is an essential part of being a good scholar, a holder of distinctly “academic” knowledge.

I’m sure you’ve been told at some point in your life that there’s “no such thing as a stupid question”. The person who told you this had the best of intentions, of course, but I’m sure you discovered long ago that they were, for lack of a better word, lying to you. There is very definitely such a thing as a stupid question; you’ve asked stupid questions, and you’ve been asked stupid questions. Indeed, what distinguishes a knowledgeable person from an ignorant one is, in part, the ability to distinguish between good and bad questions. Some questions come out of simple ignorance of the subject, while others are informed by the shared body of knowledge that guides work in a discipline. As a knowledgeable person, you want to be able to articulate and recognize good questions and deal with them appropriately.

You are not, of course, obligated to be able to answer every good question. “That’s a good question!” isn’t just an ironic dodge you use when you’re stumped. It is a recognition that, even given everything you know, even given everything we know, it is reasonable to have questions. The important thing is to be aware of the shared body of common knowledge that determines whether a question is good or bad, relevant or irrelevant. Also, do note calling someone stupid is obviously not a competent way of dealing with a question that seems to reveal ignorance of a field’s common stock of knowledge. Your conversational competence here will be displayed in your ability to politely guide the conversation onto more fertile ground, perhaps even discovering the kernel of wisdom that the question does contain. Just make sure that you and you interlocutors don’t waste too much time on matters that have long been settled.

Scholars also have a shared sense of humor. The members of a specialized knowledge community will find certain things amusing that others don’t. Knowledge, after all, plays a central role in establishing the boundary to “the absurd”. An Austrian economist’s reference to a “gale” can be witty in a way that someone unfamiliar with the work of Schumpeter might not detect at all. A sensemaking’s scholar’s allusion to your “map of the Alps” will not make sense to you if you aren’t familiar with Miroslav Holub’s anecdote and the role it plays in the work of Karl Weick. This familiarity with the comedic potential of the concepts and characters in a discipline of course also sets a relatively high standard. Some jokes are told and retold so often that telling them only reveals that you are new to the field. Some jokes ellicit no more than a groan.

On the other side of this boundary there is of course a series of subjects and claims that your peers will have little or no sense of humor about. These are the things that it is “not okay” to say, or what are sometimes called “politically incorrect” utterances. They do not expose your ignorance so much as your malevolence. To put it as plainly as possible, they identify you as a “bad” person. This is something that Thomas Kuhn pointed out half a century ago by suggesting that a scientific paradigm is organized, in part, around a shared set of values. Enforcing those values is a far from trivial part of the conversations that scholars must be able keep their footing in. Understanding the boundary of offensive speech in discourse is therefore an important part of being knowledgeable in an academic context.

Now, you may think I say that as a warning to stay away from offensive speech. But in fact I’m saying it to encourage you to learn how to manage provocations constructively. Just as you must learn to deal with the occasional “stupid” question politely, you will have to learn how to handle the occasional offensive remark. Indeed, just as an apparently stupid question may not, on closer inspection, be inappropriate after all, a remark that offends you may turn out to express an idea that the conversation needs to address in order to move forward. If we are always afraid of offending each other, or too quick to take offense ourselves, our conversations will not be able to tackle difficult subjects and help us learn (or teach) new truths. And one reason we may be afraid of controversy is simply that we lack the rhetorical skills to leverage it as part of a fruitful argument. We’re scared to engage because we feel weak or clumsy. We worry that we’ll get hurt or, worse, that we’ll hurt someone else. This worry is not conducive to interesting, intellectually challenging conversations.

All three conversational skills — a feel for the good question, a sense of humor, and a sensitivity to offense — are acquired by scholars through years of practice. Just as you can’t learn French merely by watching French movies, you don’t master a discourse merely by attending lectures. You have to speak up. You have to risk asking a stupid question, telling a bad joke, or offending the person you are speaking to. The academic system of schooling is generally forgiving of new entrants to a field in this regard, and being a student should, ideally, provide a context in which to make and learn from your mistakes. Like some others, however, I’m watching the developments on university campuses these days with some concern, and I would understand if you told me you were a bit anxious about speaking your mind. Still, it is very important that we learn how to do this. At a university, people who don’t know how to speak their minds can’t, properly speaking, consider themselves knowledgeable.

Since a standard journal article has 40 paragraphs I’ve long been in the habit, when talking to my authors, of referring matter-of-factly to “paragraph thirty-nine”, i.e., the penultimate paragraph of the paper. It is also the first paragraph of the conclusion. It serves a very special function in the paper and is worth giving extra consideration.

You construct the key sentence of paragraph 39 by a simple procedure. Take the key sentence of paragraph 3, the one that begins, “This paper shows that…”, and simply remove those first four words. That is, if the key sentence of paragraph 3 is “This paper shows that the financial crisis was caused by the performative effects of organization theory” then the key sentence of paragraph 39 is “The financial crisis was caused by the performative effects of organization theory.” Notice that despite their similarities, these two sentences make very different claims. The second (§39) tells us something about the financial crisis; the first (§3) tells us something about your paper. Paragraph 3 will therefore provide a description of your paper to support your claim that it will show us something. Paragraph 39, however, will provide a description of the financial crisis to support the claim that it was caused by organization theory.

Like any other paragraph in the paper, you have around six sentences and no more than 200 words at your disposal. Remember your reader. At this point your reader has listened to everything you have said (for about 38 minutes). Your reader knows what your key terms are and has read your entire analysis. Your reader knows what methods you have used to gather your data. Your reader has also been informed about relevant background details. Your reader even knows what implications you have drawn. That means you can expect a great deal of your reader in making sense of this paragraph. You can give it to the reader straight.

Paragraph 39 is not an abstract. An abstract merely describes an argument, and therefore looks more like paragraph 3 than paragraph 39. Paragraph 39 actually makes the argument. It is the part of the paper that expresses your major claim and adduces the strongest evidence you have for it. The strength of that evidence, of course, depends on the strength of the rest of your paper—mainly, the analysis section—but that’s the thing I’m trying to emphasize: Your reader has already read the rest of your paper. You are therefore entitled to presume that your argument is strong. This is the paragraph where you state your conclusion and tell the reader, without blushing, why you think it is true.

For perhaps obvious reasons you do well to rewrite this paragraph several times. It is the statement of your ideas that the rest of the paper is putting you in a position to make. Getting clear about what it will say will therefore also help you write the rest of the paper.

“It’s better to do something simple which is real … It’s something you can build on because you know what you’re doing.” (Bill Evans)

Back at the end of 2014, Jonathan Mayhew drew my attention to The Universal Mind of Bill Evans. Here’s one of the things Evans said about developing a talent:

People tend to approximate the product rather than attacking it in a realistic, true way at any elementary level — regardless of how elementary — but it must be entirely true and entirely real and entirely accurate. They would rather approximate the entire problem than to take a small part of it and be real and true about it. To approximate the whole thing in a vague way gives you a feeling that you’ve more or less touched the thing, but in this way you just lead yourself toward confusion and ultimately you’re going to get so confused that you’ll never find your way out.

When I say you should take a specific moment to write down a particular thing you know, I’m suggesting something similar. When writing, don’t try to “approximate the entire problem”; instead, “take a small part of it and be real and true about it”. A paper consists of roughly 40 paragraphs, of, roughly, eight different kinds. Each of these forty parts can be “attacked” at an “elementary level”. If you keep in mind that you are, ultimately, saying something that is true, you can set yourself the problem of representing that truth in prose.

Appreciate the finitude of the problem. You have to write at least six sentences and at most 200 words in exactly 27 minutes. Together they should support or elaborate one thing you know. That’s what you want to become good at. And if you write each of these paragraphs as simply and truly as you can, then you will have something to build on, both in terms of finishing a paper and in terms of the developing your writing skills.

Most people just don’t realize the immensity of the problem and, either because they can’t conquer it immediately, think that they haven’t got the ability, or they’re so impatient to conquer it that they never do see it through. If you do understand the problem then you can enjoy your whole trip through.

This makes an important point that struck me forcefully a few years ago. Too many people don’t realize that they have to approach the problem of writing in a way that lets them enjoy it. My goal is to help people enjoy their writing, not just “get it done”.