Old Email Archive

digest 1998-11-03 #001.txt


Sunday
From: "Society for Literature & Science" 

Daily SLS Email Digest
-> Re: the truth in plain language, epistemological confidence
by Everdell@aol.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 1 Nov 1998 21:07:58 -0800
From: Everdell@aol.com
Subject: Re: the truth in plain language, epistemological confidence
Wayne Miller strongly suggests that:  <>
and adds, specifically, the elegant call to humanists to internalize:
<>
I blame the creation of such classes in the first place by default: 
the
failure to educate in a democratic manner, in the interests of a
majority, and
with a responsibility to the public interest.  Too many who have made
some
little progress in remedying their own ignorance are willing to abandon
the
public, as well as those in other disciplines, by not condensing what
they
know that they judge important and trying in good faith to pass it on.
I suspect that a rigorously logical argument could be made that the
amount of
'stuff worth knowing' is infinite; but even if it were only very large,
the
requirement to condense and edit would be logically imperative.  So
every
knower condenses and edits, perhaps even those who are content with
learned
silence.  But behind every condensation and editing there are
philosophical
premises, assumptions, probably even narratives (ordinary or "grand
master").
Epistemological confidence for people who have learned a lot, I think,
consists in rejecting the nihilist premise that nothing they have
learned is
true, and then condensing and editing it responsibly, even when they
know the
job could be done differently.  One who makes a cheatsheet or a Cliff's
Notes
should be able, on call, to distinguish them from other objects of
knowledge
that are less condensed.
This I'd call teaching, and its outcome, education.  Ignorance, on the
other
hand, is the condition for which education is the palliative, the one
all of
us suffer from, and must continue to suffer from, especially if the
amount of
'stuff worth knowing' is indeed infinite.  Ignorance of reading I'd say
is
especially insufferable since it is the precondition of most other
learning,
not to mention the precondition of social power.
So, to Wayne's happily shared 2 cents I happily add my own.  Pretty soon
it
may add up to real money.
- -Bill Everdell, Brooklyn
To quote Wayne's two points:
<<1) the recent short list about the principles of science and its
lack of
equivalence among humanists is hardly to the point, and that it elides
large
differences among scientific branches in notions of "adequacy"
of method and
proof; indeed, that if one were in fact to chart a trajectory of
"adequacy"
from, say, math to physics to chemistry to microbiology to evolutionary
biology to psychology to social sciences to, say, humanities, one would
have
to agree that the subject matter of the humanities may be wronged by a
cheatsheet of idealized rules?
2) humanists hide behind their overly elaborate rhetorics in an effort
not to
admit their own sense of inadequacy over against the scientific
juggernaut --
without really internalizing the fact that human insight is necessary
to
correct the blindness (in opposition to ignorance!) exhibited by all
classes
of people, when confronted with self-interest on the one hand, and the
unknown
on the other.>>