Michael Eldridge

Pragmatist philosopher Michael Eldridge died unexpectedly on Sept. 18, sad news indeed.

Talking with Mike has always been a highlight of my attendance at SAAP. Always ready with something interesting to talk about, Mike was one of those philosophers, not as common as you might think, who led his life and interacted with people in a way that was of a piece with his philosophical convictions.

His personal support and his welcoming attitude at SAAP meetings were instrumental in turning me toward pragmatism. In his company, it was obvious that a philosophical attitude which is meliorist--optimistic about human progress--but pragmatic--grounded in factually assessing how to make a difference--is not only well-justified but also a fine way to lead a life.

Bullshitting and Brainstorming

Thanks again to Philosoraptor for recommending an article on BS’ing by Kerry Walters in Teaching Philosophy.

The article does discuss the doubts that were raised for me in reading Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit” with my class. I was disturbed that the students 1.) thought that philosophy was a perfect example of bullshit; and 2.) thought that all the writing assignments they are expected to do in their liberal arts classes are best satisfied by bullshit—in fact, that they can only be satisfied by bullshit.

My interpretation of this second claim was that Frankfurt defines bullshitting as speaking about something that you know little about or giving an opinion about something when you aren’t really committed to what you say. When you aren’t an expert on a subject, you just spin together the few thoughts that you do have and try to construct them so that they satisfy the questioner. BUT that is exactly what learners have to do all the time. They try out views before they are experts, and this exercise is part of what helps them build skills while increasing their expertise.

Moreover, this applies to a lot of original thought—not just for college students, but for professionals, too. Say I have an idea. In order to test whether it’s a good idea or not, I often have to put quite some amount of work into writing it up. Along the way, the idea changes. This does not mean, though, that I was bullshitting all along. It’s the normal course of development for new ideas—a writer goes through stages from less to more commitment. Hopefully, by the time I’m done, I’m convinced. And this development is true not only of philosophy or only of the liberal arts. In science, too, an experiment may start with one hypothesis, but as the data are collected, they suggest a slightly different and more interesting question.

Walters describes how the bullshitter and the brainstormer can appear, at the level of behavior, to be identical. The bullshitter may even be better at philosophical discussion—precisely because there is no inner conflict. She is what Walters calls a “rhetorical robot.” Both are ready to defend a position and then to change their minds. Both can appear to be engaged and excited and enjoying themselves. But the bullshitter has a (merely) rhetorical aim, while the brainstormer is engaged in a deeper intellectual challenge.

In my class, I struggled to reconcile two kinds of bullshit. On the one hand, there are students who bullshit. (Now, I’m not talking about the ones that feel as though they have to bullshit no matter what they do, but the ones who knowingly, intentionally, write fluff with as little intellectual effort as possible.) On the other hand, I have colleagues whom I know—without a doubt—are bullshitting. Some of them have bullshitted their way to elite academic careers.

These are the ones who disagree with my commitment to philosophy’s practical use in problem solving. To them, philosophy is a game. A difficult but thrillingly competitive rhetorical game. They excel at strategy but could just as easily have taken philosophical stances opposite to the ones they've published.

What I didn’t understand was the connection between these two kinds of bullshitters. The student type—typically—bullshits because it's easy but would rather be doing just about anything besides philosophy. On the other hand, some of my colleagues (at other universities, I should add) are very passionate about philosophy. They work long, hard hours at it. They speak with delight about what “shark tanks” their departments are. Though their product is insincere, they are not taking the easy way out!

Walters connects the dots. He says these kinds of philosophers are “intellectual robots”:

“…it may be the case that habitual bullshitters who wind up buying their own rhetoric graduate from rhetorical to intellectual robotry. After all, young bullshitters must grow up sooner or later. When they do, we sometimes call them academics.”

What is experience?

I’ve been thinking a little about what philosophers and scientists mean by “experience.”

Science is empirical; it is based on what can be observed, what can be experienced. This has several important implications. First, explanations are natural, not supernatural. Second, scientific knowledge is based on observed data, not on guesswork, tradition, or sentiment. And third, evidence must be public. In principle, more than one person should be able to observe the evidence; indeed, anyone who is properly positioned to have the experience should have it.

But this is not the only meaning of experience, or even the primary one, in many contexts.

A part of the controversy over evidence-based medicine can be traced to different ideas about the kind of experience that is the basis for medical knowledge. Evidence-based medical practitioners think of medicine as being like a science, for which controlled empirical studies of large numbers of patients provide the best evidence for which treatments work. Others see medicine as being more like a craft that is based primarily on the clinical relationship between doctors and their patients. For them, experience is personal, and some doctors believe that what they have learned from their experience treating patients as distinct individuals cannot be replaced by generic studies.

In an April 2007 New Yorker article by John Colapinto titled “The Interpreter: Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?”, the linguist Dan Everett claims that members of the Piraha tribe are “the ultimate empiricists.”

Colapinto writes

The tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Piraha do not think, or speak, in abstractions - and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths. Everett pointed to the word “xibipio” as a clue to how the Piraha perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience–which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Piraha say that the person has not simply gone away but “xibipio”–”gone out of experience,” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light “goes in and out of experience.”

The extreme attitude toward experience of the Piraha points out the limits of empiricism, and why a culture that is empiricist to such a degree could never develop anything resembling modern science, because science is just as dependent on the trustworthiness of testimony as it is on the trustworthiness of direct experience.

On the one hand, our culture, which is a culture thoroughly permeated by science and technology, is resolutely empiricist. On the other hand, we are reliant on information about experiences that are not our own.

I’m reading a book about children and education that quotes ecological psychologist Edward Reed:

There is something wrong with a society that spends so much money, as well as countless hours of human effort—to make the least dregs of processed information available to everyone everywhere and yet does little or nothing to help us explore the world for ourselves.

and

[We are beginning] to lose the ability to experience our world directly. What we have come to mean by the term experience is impoverished; what we have of experience in daily life is impoverished as well.

I have a hard time seeing that what we mean by experience is at fault, or that abundance of information is necessarily a barrier to having first-person, direct experiences.

Although Reed is allied with pragmatists James and Dewey, to hold that our concept of experience (as second-hand, testimonial information about the world rather than direct perception) strikes me as less than pragmatic. Isn't it possible that our easy access to information, and increasingly good and well-vetted information, may serve us in gaining direct, first-hand experience? For instance, if I’m interested in trees, I might look up what trees grow in the forest outside my back door, learn that tulip trees are common and a little about them, and then by going into the forest be able to distinguish tulip trees from other trees by their flower and leaves. Although this is not the same kind of activity as aimless noodling about, I can learn to be a better direct observer by having access to second-hand information.

In the context of childhood education and the value of spending time in nature and time in creative play, then it seems to me that it is not the meaning of ‘experience’ that is at fault but an education system that is relentlessly competitive on many different levels and that relies on simple tests to gauge complex learning. A completely different matter.