If you\u2019re an academic, why bother to write a blog post? Here\u2019s why I need to do it. I have to retain a sense of possibility in an era of nihilism. To not \u201cput honest words out there\u201d is to abandon the idea of a public sphere (something many democratic theorists abandoned long ago) or at least to give it over to a politics where ideas don’t matter, only brutal power and interest. <\/p>\n
What do I mean by \u201chonest words\u201d? I don\u2019t mean unassailable truth. We don\u2019t have that and cannot presume to have it. But what we do have is a good faith effort. At our core, we are supposed to reject invalid truth claims. I\u2019ll be the first to admit that we often fall short of that goal, but we are guardians of an epistemological way of knowing that needs to be protected.<\/p>\n
Since antiquity, we\u2019ve known that episteme isn\u2019t the only way to know things. I\u2019ve been intrigued recently with the work of Nicholas Nassim Taleb, in particular his view in a recent article<\/a> that some academics and \u201celites\u201d are what he derisively calls \u201cintellectuals yet idiots\u201d because they fall victim to an evangelical devotion to \u201cscientism\u201d or a naive belief in the inviolability of epistemological truth at the expense of other ways of knowing like experience or tradition. <\/p>\n I think this view gives us in the academy good fodder for reflection. Many of us in the academy and in the journalistic elite do use \u201cscience\u201d as a cudgel in arguments. We use this type of knowing without always being entirely certain of the underlying science. We presume to know the unintended consequences of thing we couldn\u2019t possible know. I can admit as a member of the \u201ccoastal elite\u201d that we can come off a little entitled and superior when talking about \u201cred America.\u201d<\/p>\n Accepting all these things as true, where does the leave someone who tried to create, synthesize and disseminate knowledge for a living? I think it means to go forward and speak, with humility, about what we know (and what we don\u2019t). But above all, it means that we demand that other make explicit their claims to truth and that we call out insincere discourse laden with hidden agendas. In other words, we need to be vigilant in looking out for bulls**t (HT to Harry Frankfort\u2019s great book<\/a>). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you\u2019re an academic, why bother to write a blog post? Here\u2019s why I need to do it. I have to retain a sense of possibility in an era of nihilism. To not \u201cput honest words out there\u201d is to abandon the idea of a public sphere (something many democratic theorists abandoned long ago) or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5022"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5024,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5022\/revisions\/5024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}