These are two things you have to acknowledge. If someone asks you where you got your information from, you have to tell them. You may have learned something just from reading a book or you may have gleaned it from careful analysis of data. You may have happened on a long-forgotten document in an archive. Whatever is the case, you have a story to tell about how you know something. If you are a scholar, other people have a perfectly legitimate interest in that story. If you refuse to share it, you have stopped behaving like a scholar. Even telling someone that you don’t know where you got it (if you in fact don’t remember) is a (true) story about the basis of your claim. Being a scholar means having to be honest about that.

The same goes for your mistakes. If someone points out that you’ve gotten something wrong, you have an obligation as a scholar to do something about that. You have to acknowledge the mistake and you have to try to correct it. This also means that you have to check whether it affects the general conclusions you’ve reached. Don’t assume (or pretend) that it doesn’t matter. “When the authors protest that none of the errors really matter,” Andrew Gelman reminds us, “it makes you realize that, in these projects, the data hardly matter at all.” You seriously undermine your credibility by not taking people who think you’re wrong seriously. If they do spot a mistake, you really lose us if you act like it’s of no importance to you. Why did you assert a fact that it’s of no importance to you to be right about?

Remember Wayne Booth’s story about “the two standard tutorial questions at Oxford”: “What does he mean?” and “How does he know?” Make sure you know the answers to those questions. Think of them as answers to the questions, “How could I be wrong?” and “Where can I find more information?” That is, if you know a thing you also know how things could be different, and you know how to find out whether they have changed and how similar things are now arranged. You are not just saying things that other people can take or leave, believe or reject. You are proposing to discuss these things with people whose opinions you respect. Scholarship is an ongoing conversation among people who are mutually committed to acknowledging both their sources and their errors.

Philosophers have long thought of knowledge as a special case of belief. The idea is that in order to know something you have to believe that something is the case. It also has to actually be the case, which is just to say that the belief has to be true. Finally, you have to understand why it is true; you have to have a justification for believing what you believe. While many issues can still be raised, this definition of knowledge as “justified, true belief” offers a nice heuristic for deciding whether you, as an individual, know something. In this post, however, I want talk about what we can call “epistemic institutions”, i.e., social arrangements that support knowing and believing.

I’m thinking especially of the institutions* of journalism and education. These institutions shape what we think, they direct our “epistemic” states. But it recently occurred to me that we do well to distinguish between institutions that help us to know the truth of things and institutions that aim merely to get us to believe that particular things are true. The difference, it seems to me, is that which exists between journalism and propaganda, education and indoctrination.

Now, it should be obvious that no organization* would identify itself as a propaganda machine or indoctrination center if its aim was to actually get us to believe something. It would say it was engaged in journalism or education. So it is on us to make the necessary distinction, i.e., to exercise critical judgment. What then are the criteria for deciding whether or not an organization is engaged in journalism or propaganda, education or indoctrination? When we open a newspaper or enter a classroom, how do we know whether we are being supported in our search for knowledge, or being manipulated into believing something? From the other side, when we sit down to write an article or stand up to begin a lecture, how do we know what we’re doing? Are we journalists or propagandists? Are we educators or indoctrinators?

More instrumentally, suppose we wanted to become good at any of these things. (I may find it distasteful, but is it really my place to say that propaganda and indoctrination are always bad things?) I think it would be good not to kid ourselves that we are doing one thing when we’re really doing another.

Obviously, from the point of view of immediate action, a belief is as good as knowledge. If I falsely believe that a threat is imminent or that a reward awaits I will be guided to the same action that I would take if I were right. The difference lies in what the consequences of that action will be, how successful it will be. (This is why pragmatists sometimes tell us that “the truth is what works”; a true belief is simply one that guides action towards its desired outcome.) Since knowledge is a species of belief, an educator’s immediate effect on me may be indistinguishable from an indoctrinor’s. Both will get me to believe something. How can I tell the difference between the processes that got me into this state of belief? Or can I, perhaps, tell the difference between the states of belief themselves?

I think the most important clue is the role that criticism played in the formation of your belief. Another is whether the soi-disant journalist or educator cares very much what you end up believing. Was the belief you formed at any point challenged? Were you afforded a means to make up your own mind?

It’s relatively easy to decide whether your situation is a “critical” occasion. Try asking some questions. “How do you know?” is a classic question. If your instructor immediately takes this as though it’s a polemical one, you might be dealing with an ideologue (which we can take as a covering term for propagandists and indoctrinators). Also, you should be skeptical (i.e., less disposed to believe them) if they answer this question by invoking their authority rather than telling you what their evidence is and how they got it. My favorite example of this is a professor I once heard answer a sincere question from a student about his method by explaining where he got his millions in funding from. Education and indoctrination have very different “foundations”. If drawing attention to them immediately causes a crisis, you’re not going to be able to do much in the way of critical thinking.

The other question is whether your instructor leaves you a dignified place of disagreement. Do they imply that you are either stupid or evil if you don’t believe what they are trying to tell you? Or are they content to lay out a set of arguments and let you draw one of several conclusions, including (as per the previous paragraph) the possibility that some of those arguments are unfounded? Someone who truly knows something will be patient with your attempts to learn it; they know themselves how difficult it is to understand. Someone who has merely been instructed that something is “true” will be distressed (and perhaps disgusted) when you do not process the instruction to “Believe!” as easily as they did. An ideologue is someone who thinks you should believe things even if you don’t understand them. A teacher is someone whose primary aim is to get you to understand something. Only that way can you also know when you finally come to believe.

_________

*A quick terminological note. We sometimes use the word “institution” to denote what is really an organisation. As I use this distinction (I’m sure imperfectly at times), journalism is the institution of bringing news of current events to the population and CNN, for example, is a news organization. When we say that the New York Times is an “institution” we mean that in an honorific sense. Really it’s just another organization; it’s just that it is so powerful that it has a formative influence on what we think journalism is. A particular university is an organization; higher education is an institution.

“Both these worries aggravated my already long-standing misanthropy.” (J. L. Borges, “The Book of Sand”)

Jon Winokur runs a blog called Advice to Writers and an associated Twitter account to remind us of the “writerly wisdom of the ages”. The other day he tweeted Shannon Hale’s approach to writing a first draft, which she describes as “shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” I retweeted it with a caveat. “Please remember,” I said, “that what is good advice for writers of young adult fantasy is not necessarily good advice for early career researchers.” Novelists and literary types are not always good models for researchers and scholars. You may admire the result, but you don’t want to write like Henry “Vas-y” Miller.

Jo Van Every, an academic career guide, came to the defense of Hale’s metaphor,  however, suggesting that early career researchers, perhaps, “already have sand in a box. They are now using that sand to create different published outputs.” This was a good prod for me to clarify the issue I have with the image of writing as filling boxes with sand. I prefer to think of scholarly writing as building something out of relatively well-defined and sturdy parts, I said, not as shoveling and shaping a mass of undifferentiated particles. I could have added that I don’t think it is helpful to think of producing scholarly output on the model of weeding a garden or pruning a tree. That metaphor has other, perfectly legitimate, uses in academic writing.

The correct metaphor, if you ask me, is that of a construction. It’s not as limited as, say, Lego, but more like a constructor set that also lets you include bits and pieces of everyday reality, ordinary household objects and other toys. There are general structural elements and more specialized parts. Your paper will present a theoretical “framework”, for example, built out of concepts that your reader recognizes and it will then then put it to work by subjecting it to a “load”, i.e., by introducing data that has been gathered according to a methodology that, again, is recognizable to the reader. A paper can certainly “fall apart” on you (or in the hands of your reader) but it cannot, meaningfully, be “smashed to atoms”. Its meaning does not erode like a castle in the sand.

Maybe some novelists have a more rugged conception of their materials but, like I say, I’m not going to tell novelists how to write a first draft or how to think of their writing process. I’m just trying to help scholars avoid a less than apt metaphor with which to understand their own writing.

In any case, Jo rightly reminded me that researchers aren’t usually “starting from scratch” when they’re writing journal articles. They’ve “already got a conference paper, a working paper, pages and pages of analysis” or some basis like that to proceed from. This happens to be something I have an opinion about too., and I answered that conference papers and working papers are best seen as unfinished journal articles. They should be written in the same way. You still need to decide what to say (i.e., what you know) before you begin one. As for “pages and pages of analysis”: I would encourage researchers to think of them merely as a warmup. After they have helped you decide what to say, throw them out. Now write what you know for the purpose of discussing it with your peers.

Understandably enough, this suggestion puzzled Jo. “Isn’t that ‘warm up’ the first draft?” she asked. “I’m not sure what is gained by calling it something that isn’t writing.” And this is indeed exactly my point. The metaphor we are evaluating is one of shoveling sand into boxes and then later shaping that same sand into castles. I’m suggesting that you should not try to shape your drafts, and therefore that you should not produce them as though they are made of a “malleable” substance. Instead, write it around claims you identified through the “free-writing” process.

I realize that it is counter-intuitive to say that that process isn’t actually “writing”. But I really do believe that it stands in the same relation to your final text as drawing a mind-map, talking to a colleague about your results,  or just going for a walk and thinking things through. It’s as far from scholarly writing as that. Or as close to it, if you will. And here Hale’s image of a box of sand may have some carry after all.

Some researchers (especially ethnographers, I have found) approach the writing of their analysis as shoveling particles of experience into their paper where they will gradually be given meaning. That is, they are simply importing their data set into their word processor, which they think of as a tool to help them with their analysis. (There are much better tools for this purpose, I’m told.) In the first instance, it’s just a box to distinguish their “sample” from the “population”. If they had been working with more quantitative data, there would be no confusion here; it obviously wouldn’t be writing. But because qualitative analysis is, indeed, very much like drafting a novel–they are drawing , not just on their interview transcripts and field notes, but  also on their memory of their research experiences–it feels like they are actually in the first stages of their writing. This is the feeling I’m trying to get writers to understand better.

Just because you are putting words together, even in sentences, doesn’t mean that you are writing. You might, for example, be speaking. Even if you are typing, you might be transcribing or, to come closest to drafting a novel, thinking “out loud”, i.e., transcribing what is on your mind about something. But to be really engaged in scholarly writing is to be composing a paragraph–at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words that say one thing and support, elaborate or defend it. If you’re not doing that you may as well be talking or drawing a picture … or, of course, thinking. That’s also something you should do, of course. But it isn’t writing.

There is a lot of talk these days about Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. I have ordered it and I’m looking forward to seeing whether it lives up to its hype. Because of the highly polarized rhetoric around Peterson, this can be taken both ways: I wonder whether it’s as good as people say it is. And wonder whether it’s as bad. It may be both or neither.

The quality of an advice book is usually very much in the eye of the beholder. This shouldn’t surprise us since the book’s virtues will probably be apparent mainly to people who need the advice. Those who don’t may not understand why such “banalities” are being codified into “rules of life”. Indeed, I’ve noticed that there are people on both sides of “the Jordan Peterson moment” who seem eager to make clear that they certainly don’t need these rules. Perhaps, they’re already a matter of habit. I sometimes wonder if they understand that what is second nature to them, or what various accidents of life and work have spared them the need to think seriously about, may not be obvious or even imaginable to many others. The right book at the right time can make a great difference to someone whose life has not gone as yours has.

In this post I want to address “the very idea” of rules for living. I have my own set of rules, (though not for life but for writing and they only go to 11) so I think I understand the spirit of Peterson’s project. I also recognize the misunderstandings that it has been subject to in the discourse. I’m not thinking here of the polarized political and scientific rhetoric that has characterized the book’s reception. I’m thinking more about the ridicule Peterson has had to suffer merely for thinking he can help people get their lives together, and the resentment he has encountered because, it would seem, he actually can.

Moralists are always open to the charge of hypocrisy. If I tell you how you should live, I can expect you to notice if I don’t uphold those standards. I’ve never been quite convinced that charges of hypocrisy are a useful part of our ethical discourse — after all, can’t my morality be as aspirational for me as I’m proposing it should be for you? — but I think this line of criticism fails outright when we’re not talking about moralizing and merely about advising. If I’m only telling you how you could live, am I really implying that this is how I do it too? Does it matter whether I am successfully following my own advice? Does it even matter whether I have a successful life? I’m not sure the answers to those questions are obvious.

I’m certainly not sure that pointing out that Peterson breaks his own rules in his book is a very incisive criticism. After all, breaking rules is a sign of mastery. Only a novice worries about following rules to the letter in all things. The master knows how to do things without the rules, bending and even breaking them as needed, often without giving them a thought. Noticing that the master didn’t follow a particular rule normally means you didn’t notice the contextual factors that made it inapplicable. So “he doesn’t follow his own rules” isn’t really a stinging barb; it’s giving the game to him by saying that the only standards by which to judge him are those he gives us.

It’s also important to notice that Peterson’s “rules for life” aren’t going to be enforced by him, or any other human authority, but by, precisely, life. These are not injunctions but instructions. You are not bending to his will but to the way of the world–assuming of course that Peterson has, on the relevant point, discovered how the world works.

Finally, after over ten years of advising people about how to write, I’ve stopped being surprised to discover that the real reason my advice didn’t work for someone was that they simply didn’t follow it. Sometimes they tried to follow it but had badly misunderstood what I had suggested they do. Other times they simply decided that it wasn’t for them. It’s as if advice has to be immediately persuasive in order to be counted as “good”.

Of course, that’s a very important part of the qualification of a coach (or any other adviser). Someone who gives excellent advice that no one ever finds compelling enough to follow isn’t going to do much good. But it is important to realize that the quality of a piece of advice for dealing with your particular problem can only finally be determined by following it and seeing where that leaves you. Apparently, Peterson is having some success in reaching people and he seems to be coming by it honestly. People just like what he has to say and find it useful in their lives.

Anyway, from the advance press I’m broadly sympathetic to Peterson’s project. I think it is perfectly reasonable to talk of rules for living and it’s a perfectly legitimate aim to try to explain what you think works to others.  When the book arrives and I’ve read it, I’ll write a proper review of it from the point of view how it might help the lives of scholars.

One way to decide whether you should include an idea in a paper you’re writing is to ask yourself how willing you are to discuss it. You should, of course, also be able to discuss it; that is, you should be aware of your reasons for believing what you believe and have some sense of how someone else might think otherwise. But this issue won’t arise if you have already decided not to engage with someone who disagrees with you. My advice is to leave such ideas out of your scholarly writing.

You’ll never be able to do that completely, but it is worth trying. It is a companion rule to Oliver Smithies’ suggestion to “never write something you don’t understand”. You will find, I suspect, that your unwillingness to discuss something is often grounded in not quite understanding it. You may be quite certain that it is true, but on closer inspection you realize that this is just because so many people you respect are saying it. Worse, you may remember that the only reason you think what you think is that it sounded good in the “hot take” you read a few months ago. Better go back to the source and do a little fact checking. Once you’ve got your facts in order, you may still believe it–after all, it may still be true–but now you also know why. And this, you will sometimes find, has the added benefit of giving you the will to talk to other people about it. It’s at this point that it should go into your paper.

Now, since you originally didn’t find them worth discussing, these ideas often go unnoticed in your writing. The issue will only really come up when you run into difficulties with a sentence, or when one of your readers does. If the paper is already published, it’s of course too late, and you will just have to step up and admit that you hadn’t thought that point through well enough. (There should be no shame in this.) But you might also notice it during the writing and revision process, when you are struggling with how to express a particular thought. That’s when you should take a step back and ask yourself whether you’re actually willing to discuss it. How would you react if someone tells you you are wrong. And if your answer is that you’d just stop talking to that person then I strongly advise you just to delete it. The implicit subtext of all scholarly writing is (or, rather, should be) “Here are few things I’m happy to discuss.”

Please note that I’m not saying you should not hold beliefs you don’t want to discuss. Nor even that your published work be entirely insulated from those beliefs. It can certainly be useful to put some distance between, say, your scientific investigations and your religious convictions, so that your results can stand or fall independent of your faith, but, through a long and varied life, most of your beliefs will come into contact with each other at some point and, when they do, they will demand a modicum of consistency. So you will sometimes find that the discussion you are willing to have leads (sometimes surprisingly quickly) to one you don’t want to have. That possibility should not prevent you from writing things down either.

I am suggesting mainly that you let ideas you don’t want to discuss go without saying. If you hold beliefs that you really think can be held without question, then you should give your reader the credit of presumably holding them too. You should write some sentences about ideas you do want to discuss in such a way that they sometimes, and sometimes shamelessly, presume things you don’t want to discuss. A reader who would question those things should get the sense, even before raising the question, that doing so will not begin a conversation, but rather end it. You are, in a sense, granting that if you are wrong about this then your point will fall. But your interlocutor will have to wait until you discover your error for yourself before a retraction is forthcoming. That’s a limiting case, however. Your paper should not consist solely of such sentences. Your readers should not be only those that take your hints about what you don’t want to discuss.

Scholarly writing, I always say, is the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. It presumes a will to discuss things. This will, I would add, is grounded in a commitment to what Foucault called “the law of coherence”:

a procedural obligation, almost a moral constraint of research: not to multiply contradictions uselessly; not to be taken in by small differences; not to give too much weight to changes, disavowals, returns to the past, and polemics; not to suppose that men’s discourse is perpetually undermined from within by the contradiction of their desires, the influences that they have been subjected to, or the conditions in which they live. (Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 149)

Of course, he talked about this law with some irony. He was not proposing that we do or should at all times obey it, only that it is presumed in discourse and, especially, in our history of ideas. I think this obligation is worth considering from time to time in your own procedures. When you feel undermined by your desires, the influences that you have been subjected to, or the conditions under which you live, ask yourself whether or not you are open to discussing them. If not, leave the idea out of your writing for now. Come back to it when you’re feeling stronger.