Education: Between Two Cultures

Hi Paul,

I think one of the points where we disagree lies in your account of "civility," which you claim is not "a set of standards used to admit or exclude people from the conversation nor a means of avoiding differences in pursuit of "consensus."  Civility, in other words, is not (should not?) represent a projection of power that shapes our discourse.

Here I'd say that this is exactly how "civility" has functioned historically and continues to function on our hot-button issues.  "Civility" is one of the values  that kept questions about the Iraq war out of the US media "mainstream" for a very long time (it was different elsewhere) and it has been used historically to justify restricting discussion of everything from discrimination against women and gays to Jim Crow. 

So, from my point of view, "civility" is not going to be much help in your project of acknowledging "that everyone has something useful to contribute to the conversation and so should be ecouraged to do so," because it ignores the need for those excluded from the conversation to introduce their concerns into discussion.  (And this still does not answer Trimbur's notion that "abnormal" and "normal" discourse are not distinguished by their relation to reason, but by their relations to power)

So I would argue that civility is an insider's value, not an outsider's, and in many contexts we would be better off using terms like "hegemony" to describe how discourse works. 

At this point in time, I think we need to do without the idea that there are "shared values" that can help morally ground communities, because I think communities at this historical moment are much more complex, fractured, virtual, or scattered than that model would allow. At the very least, I would follow Trimbur by seeing communities as shaped as much by disagreement as by agreement.  And I think that both "community" and "consensus" have to be thought in tandem with the effects of "inequality," "power," and "difference," if we don't want to over-idealize how communities actually work.  After all, what groups are routinely thrown into jail nowadays in the US, who protests, and who attends to those protests?

DM

Hi Paul,

I think we're largely in agreement, but I think that this notion of "dissensus" really needs to be fleshed out.  I found a very interesting essay by the rhet/comp person John Trimbur that critiques and extends Rorty's notions of scholarly discourse as "conversation" in a very interesting way.  Here's an apposite quote from Trimbur:

At just the moment Rorty seems to introduce difference and destabilize the conversation, he turns crisis, conflict, and contradiction into homeostatic gestures whose very expression restabilizes the conversation. What remains, once we've removed universal reason, narratives of emancipation, or "permanent neutral frameworks" as the grounds for adjudicating knowledge claims, is civility, the agreement to keep on talking. The "power of strangeness" in abnormal discourse "'to take us out of our old selves" and "to make us into new beings" (Philosophy 360) simply reaffirms our solidarity with the conversation.

Left-wing critics are uncomfortable with this position. They want to interrupt the conversation, to denaturalize its workings, and to talk about the way conver- sation legitimizes itself by its very performance. Left-wing critics worry that Rortyian conversation downplays its own social force and the conflict it gener- ates, the discourses silenced or unheard in the conversation and its representa- tion of itself. They suspect there are other voices to take into account-voices constituted as otherness outside the conversation. For this reason, left-wing critics want to redefine consensus by locating it in the prevailing balance of power, as a marker that sets the boundaries between discourses (608, my emphasis)

In other words, Rorty's anti-foundationalism leaves him with nothing stronger than "civility"--local agreements not to rock the boat or question the status quo--to hold the conversation together.  At the same time, the silences or decorum enforced by civility leave those who have been silenced with no avenue to enter the conversation or alert others to their plight.

Trimbur instead advocates for a dialectical reading of consensus that enables us to see the role of difference and conflict in creating its structures:

Redefining consensus as a matter of conflict suggests, moreover, that consensus does not so much reconcile differences through rational negotiation. Instead, such a redefinition represents consensus as a strategy that structures differences by organizing them in relation to each other. In this sense, consensus cannot be known without its opposite- without the other voices at the periphery of the conversation.

So this raises an important issue: what is the difference between a "productive" and an "unproductive" conflict?  And how do those questions of power, silencing, and discursive peripheriesmake their way into the conversation?

DM

Hi Paul,

I wouldn't argue with much that you said in the post above, but this line jumped out at me:

In fact, my guess is that most "universals" are actually asserted not "at the expense of local customs, values, etc" but rather in defense of them.

This is true enough, I suppose, but the problem in ordinary discourse lies in the unwillingness/inability of most people at any point in time to abide by the skeptical "rules" you've laid down for public discussion. 

For one thing, how likely is it that any of us would accept someone else's judgment about what is local and contingent and what is universal and unchanging?  This is the problem of any theory of modernization as progress toward (universal) secularization, and so we are left with the messy and uneven historical process whereby technological advances in no way guarantee the adoption of "scientific" attitudes. So I think we are left with the fact of dissensus when it comes to distinguishing universal from local knowledges. And I think any theory of inquiry on the scale of what you're after would have to deal with these kinds of issues of protracted disagreements and permanent dissensus.

In short, I think the problem lies not so much in the forms of skepticism we can individually cultivate inside our own heads (and I think that there are limits even to this as a collective goal, as even Hume acknowledged), but how we can organize ourselves at broader levels so that meaningful dissent, doubt, disagreement, etc. can be heard and collective actions still be undertaken? 

In other words, the problem may not lie so much in our conceptions of knowledge, but in the politics of knowledge and rational deliberation as these are currently practiced.

DM

Hi Anne,

To keep to your local/global theme, I should note that I'm able to blog this from a hotel lobby in Ft. Lauderdale just before embarking on a brief family vacation.  But I thought your post here deserved an answer, and I've got a brief moment, so here goes:

It makes sense that we both appreciate Taylor, because Taylor represents one of the most important philosophical exponents of both multiculturalism and secularization in modernity, which I think gives his critique of universalism some bite.  When people assume such universals, it's usually (always?) at the expense of local customs, values, etc., but it's also understandable how much pressure a global system of trade puts on local cultures, understandings, etc.  The question is always how these changes get negotiated locally, and who gets to decide how changes play out on the ground. 

But absolutely, yes, having suffered through umpteen "standards" discussions in Texas, and when the same people behind NCLB are now proposing high-stakes standardized testing for higher ed in Texas, performative assessments look like the way to go.  They just need to be better accepted by the people who help fund public education (i.e., taxpayers, etc.)

 DM

I think that this is right: begin with questions that students find relevant, or better yet, are already curious about.  Teach them inquiry by modeling it in one's own follow-up questions, and let them try to develop their own questions, so that this questioning can be extended into a systematic and continuous process of investigation (another phrase for disciplinary understanding). 

I don't know if they need to know that they are participating in a discipline.  That may be less important than the questioning they engage in.  But I think that the teacher needs to be very aware of their questioning's relation to a discipline's structures, to keep up the momentum of the discoveries, and to give them a direction.  So disciplines provide certain models of continuity and connection for students, with the aid of the teacher, to rise from one level of observation/abstraction to another.  

On the other hand, articles like this one from George Hillocks, Jr. on Inquiry and the composing process would argue that the process of composing is inextricably part the investigation process. (writing is one of the things that the arts and sciences both do, believe it or not, and would constitute another one of the commonalties that Paul is looking for). 

So the goal, I think, is for the investigator in training to integrate her tasks into some self-generated, self-reflexive, continuous process, not to master one thing, then another and another.  When I drive my car, I'm not focused on when, precisely, I need to use my hand-brake or check the odometer.

As for getting it backwards, I think that the biggest obstacle to inquiry education is not instructors, but the current prevalence of high-stakes testing and Back to Basics in K-12, only somewhat dampened by the unpopularity of NCLB (No Child Left Behind).  This is one place where the education community has never successfully communicated to the public the difficulties with these models of teaching-as-testing.

DM

Hi everyone,

I sense that the discussion is petering out, because people have taken from it whatever they were looking for, but I wanted to bring forward a few points  before it shut down completely.

1.  Despite the well-known difficulties of communicating across disciplinary boundaries, I would probably question the usefulness of the "two cultures" story at this point, because it limits us to binary, mutually exclusive definitions of activities that in fact have many developing points of contact and intersection, as this blog tries to show.  My preference would be for a open-ended, multiple "publics" model along the lines described by Robbins, with each discipline addressing a virtual public that contains all the other disciplines, along with all the smaller "publics."  Important in this regard would also be Michael Warner's updating of Robbins's story, in his article and book on "Publics and counterpublics." But I suspect that scientists would have a much harder time accepting the notion that an outside public must accept their findings than humanists, because it opens the door to all sorts of notions of Creationism, pseudo-science, etc. 

2.  When scientific and humanities disciplines do learn from one another, the process is conducted at the level of metaphorical exchange, with a kind of intuitive, self-reflective learning-via-translation-and-accommodation that is officially accepted in humanistic discourse but not necessarily in scientific fields that historically defined and legitimated themselves by the radically decontextualized "objectivity" of their observations.  Elements like language, narrative, rhetoric, history, context, conditioning, the role of the individual subject as observer, all these things are interpreted very differently when these fields produce their knowledge, and cannot be treated as incidental to the stories generated.  So any possible translation from one field to the next will be affected by the fact that strategic decontextualizations have historically produced knowledge for science, while contextualizations have become one of the major vehicles for furthering knowledge in the humanities.

3.  As I have learned, some of the most interesting commonalities between scientific and humanistic learning occur at the level of teaching, when instructors are trying to enlist the curiosity of the entry-level learner, in the devising of activities capable of suggesting to learners the fundamental concepts of a field, and in the re-learning of one's own discipline under the pressure of teaching it to others.  So the commonalities, as usual, exist more at the level of practice than of "doctrine."

Hi Anne,

I suppose that in my view there are many, many versions of the "free-will/determinism" binary, which take the forms of historical, scientific, theological, etc. impasses, and that my training has conditioned me to think of these versions as incommensurable with one another.   

Your question about Turner, though, is interesting, because his career seems to unite two qualities, sublimity and repetition, that are not usually associated with one another, yet seem to have some independent relation to the determinism/free-will binary.  In this respect, there seems to be some kind of Freudian "compulsion" going on that repeatedly brings him to the same kinds of awesome scenes.  (And I'd treat psychoanalysis as part of that modernist matrix of scientific/humanistic determinism that included your fictional "Turing" and "Godel")

I have to say that I don't find much "freedom" in the semiabstractions of Turner's painting, because I don't see him as breaking away from conventions so much as submitting himself to a certain kind of experience and recording the results with obsessive care.  Something was let loose in those paintings, to be sure, but it was not Turner.  So perhaps we should talk about a constitutive tension between freedom and compulsion in his art.

I also wonder if we need to set aside the special case of the artist, and restore the social or collective dimension to this discussion of freedom and compulsion?  Frankly, what arrested me in the Warner essay was not the cheery discussion of an advancing brain science, but this near-parable about how distinct psychological states can be "produced" by a truly crappy situation:

I learned that you can make a mouse “depressed” by dunking it repeatedly in cold water, by giving it electrical shocks over and over again, by subjecting it to “chronic forced swimming,” or making it experience “social defeat,” by putting a mean mouse in its cage. The latter method is the best way to test antidepressants, because after such a negative social experience it takes a mouse three weeks of drug therapy to recover, an interval that neatly parallels the amount of time antidepressants take to reach their optimal effectiveness in humans.

[Am I the only one who feels that this description makes the experiments sound like an Abu Ghraib-like situation in miniature?]

What this "story" suggests to me, perhaps against the grain of Warner's conscious intentions, perhaps not, is that when we look for the causation for "depression," for example, the place to look may not be "neurons, dendrites, action potentials, the localization of function, visual perception and transcranial magnetic stimulation," but the fact that the clinical subject is under another's power, unable to resist what is being done.  What does brain science add to such an observation?

DM

Hi Paul,

Your suggestions here make a lot of sense to me, though I'm beginning to think that there's more to the observations/interpretations distinction that needs to be unpacked: for example, could it be a disciplinary split wherein the sciences rely much more heavily on observation, and the humanities on interpretation for their respective forms of inquiry, though both dimensions are present to some extent in both?

 I also suspect that some of the newer, more interdisciplinary fields like geography do take in some of the time-scales you're talking about here.  In history, particularly, Annales-style reflections certain parts of the globe, like the Mediterranean or Atlantic "worlds," might partake of this spirit.

So perhaps some of this is happening already, at least at an academic level.

The other aspect of this is about what remains to be done: and here I'd point the discussion back to Robbins's point about the constitutive incompleteness of the public addressed by each of the disciplines. 

Part of the issue is the fantasy of self-sufficiency fostered by each disciplinary vocabulary for what it does, its assumption that it can, all by itself, adequately represent the world.  (this is the sticking point for any strong notion of interdisciplinarity: each discipline represents a strong claim for its own perspective, so what do they give up when they interact?)  So how do scientists, for example, address a public that is only vaguely aware of the difference between evolutionary thought and creationism?  One potential answer is that the "public" consists not only of the non-scientist part of the population, but all the other disciplines and their perspectives on evolution, for example.  What do you make of such a claim?

DM

Okay so now this is REALLY getting interesting....
...and I think actually "getting some place"?
(at least it feels like it's getting me someplace new....)

I didn't know Robbins' Social Text piece on "Interdisciplinarity in Public"
before, but having just read it now, I found it making a solid contribution, on three different counts, to our conversation here about education "between two cultures." The first has to do with using the concept of "rhetoric" to articulate a structure we can use to speak "from" a discipline "to" a larger public.

* Robbins argues that historically, entering into a discipline has meant adopting "the undemocratic exclusiveness" of "disciplinary specialization," and so entering into exile from the public sphere.

* He then suggests that we might re-construct a public sphere within the private domain of scholarship "by building a bridge between fields, one that "names a common discourse" that will "speak the language of its hearers."

I actually think that's how Serendip works (when it works best) to facilitate open-ended conversation: declining an authoritative posture and using widely accessible language in order to promote on-going (rather than trying to end) discussion.

...Which brings me to relevant-point-#2: Robbins' observation that "'quality' or value has always been a criterion of literature": The rhetoric common to all the disciplines of the humanities, he argues, is the rhetoric of praise and blame, which gives rise to "awkward," "absurd," "untenable" oppositions (like Bathes' "writerly" vs."readerly" texts, or Bakhtin's contrast between "monological" poetry and "dialogical" prose). Robbins goes so far as to claim that this "urge to generate differential value" appears "for the moment to be a disciplinary necessity"--which suggests to me that building interdisciplinary bridges might be a very effective way of challenging the necessity of such judgments, by moving the conversation to a different "inbetween" place where judgment (and the stopping of conversation that entails) isn't primary--or even possible.

The third and-also-related point may be a delight mostly to me (and mayhaps to my co-authors of "Metaphor and Metonymy, Synecdoche and Surprise"): it's Robbins' evocation of a rhetorical framework of "four tropes--metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony" as defining the "deep structure of the historical imagination." Compare our schematic of the intellectual exchange between two individuals in a cross-disciplinary conversation, each traversing their own metaphoric and metonymic levels,

which is, in turn, a re-working of the semiotic square
first designed by Algirdas Greimas:

What I notice in this sequence of revisions is Jameson's suggestion that "Not S2, the negation of the negation...is always the most critical position," "the one that remains open or empty for the longest time"--and the absence of irony (on both counts) in our own scheme. By keeping the conversation open, keeping the ideas in play, we never arrive @ the space of absolute contradiction--and stalemate.

Which may return us to both of what Robbins calls the "rival" definitions of rhetoric: as a "perpetually destabilizing figuration" and as "practical, public speech...which links its indeterminacy not to language...but to the contingencies of action."

Anybody else following this....or have I gone "too" far?