Intellectuals
Robin:
Hello, Agnes.
Agnes:
Hi, Robin.
Robin:
What shall we talk about tonight?
Agnes:
Intellectuals. What is an intellectual?
Robin:
So I'd like to start at the most, more abstract level of, there are different
kinds of concepts. And we might ask, what kind of a concept do we want for
here? So, dictionaries will give us a definition of this term as say, somebody
who deals in ideas. And that's useful for that sort of purpose, but I'm
guessing you want a different kind of a concept. So one kind of concept we
could have is maybe a brand promise, like a description of what it is we are
promising to our customers as the producers of some sort of product. Another
thing might be a sort of a community promise that is, if I am with you in the
same community, what are we agreeing to do together? What is our promises to
each other? Or, it could be like a personal goal statement. If I'm declaring
myself to be an intellectual, what sort of goal have I declared myself to
pursue? These are at least three different examples of different kinds of
concepts you might be looking for. Did you have one of these in mind?
Agnes:
Well, so just with the definition, just while you were talking, I went and
Googled it. And so there's sort of unhelpful ones like possessing a developed
– that someone with a developed intellect or something.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
But Wikipedia has an interesting definition, which says, an intellectual is a
person who engages in critical thinking, research and reflection about the
reality of society. That phrase is weird. And who proposes solutions for the
normative problems of society. OK. I think that's interesting, because what I
really wanted to discuss with you is, the sort of the question is an
intellectual somebody who tries to understand things? Or, is an intellectual
somebody who tries to make changes in the world? And those really seem – and I
thought I was, if I look at the definition, it was going to say, "Yeah, it's
just the first thing." But it's interesting to me, Wikipedia is kind of siding
with you a bit, though, it's only siding with you by means of an and that
connects two things that I see as really quite OK.
Robin:
But I might just say, "Look, there are many different people who can have many
different goals and many different things they achieve on purpose and
accidental, why do we have to pick the purpose or the function of an
intellectual?" That's why I was trying to distinguish these different kinds of
concepts. You might think, well, if we are making a brand promise, for
example, then we need to figure out what it is we are promising to do for
people, but – they come to a university, we need to tell them what to expect.
And if they come and get something different than they expect, they may
complain that we have misled them. Or, if you hire me for a job in your
school, and I think it means one thing, and you think it means another thing
that maybe we will be at cross purposes, trying to coordinate together. Those
would be reasons why we might need to agree on something. Are those the kinds
of things you have in mind?
Agnes:
Well, so if I can take address generally this issue that we disagreed about
and I talked about before where you don't like, I always wanted to use one
purpose for everything. I've been thinking about this, and I think it's sort
of related to the project of idealization. The idea that we're looking for an
ideal version of things like, in – for many roles and institutions and
society, we want them to be perfect. We want them to be as good as it could
possibly be. Right? Those are not just quite the same, perfect and as good as
they could possibly be. But let's say, we were always wanting to improve them.
And in wanting to improve something means moving it towards some kind of
ideal. And you really only get an ideal if you have some unified conception of
like a single goal that its after, that it could then do perfectly. You can
have multiple goals, right? It's like, if you wanted to get the perfect
bicycle, right? And you want it – you're searching and you put a lot, invest a
lot of energy into like, do I want it to be made out of steel or titanium? And
then you might, as you're working on this, realize, well, you use bicycles for
two different things. You use them in order to like commute to work. And then
you also like do mountain biking. And then you might be like, "Well, actually,
I need two bicycles. I need the perfect commuting bike and the perfect
mountain bike, because I think they might not be the same bike. And you might
even get to a point really, "Yeah, but I can only buy one bike. And so I need
to be thinking about it as the
Robin:
Sure. What are you going to use it for? But different people might use them
for different things, so they don't have to agree on what the perfect use is.
So, you and I might use universities or libraries for different things. And is
that OK?
Agnes:
I mean, I guess, like, I don't... I don't take myself to be passing judgment
on what people might use something for, like, "Here's a pen, right? You might
use it to give an example of the color light blue." Right. Sorry, people can't
see what I'm doing, but it's a light blue pen. And that's, you know, you can
use it for that. Yeah, but like pens are for writing, and they're going to be
optimized for writing. And they – and so these are things...
Robin:
But that many things can be used for multiple purposes and are optimized for
multiple purposes. That is, there are many kinds of things that we design to
make sure they can be used in multiple ways.
Agnes:
Right. And so, I'm fine with saying, there are multiple ideas that we have to
be thinking about here, multiple purposes. As long as those purposes don't
conflict too much, because if they conflict a lot, we would then want like two
different things to do those two different jobs, right? Like if what it took
for a good, have a good commuting bike was just really in tension with what it
took to have a good mountain bike, you just want to get two bikes, if
possible. So, yeah, but like, I think, you know, I mean, even just finding one
purpose is kind of an achievement. Like one purpose where – were you to
optimize and tailor something to ideally fulfill that purpose, you would know
that you are getting something good, that you are improving thing. That's
already a challenge.
Robin:
We could easily list some of the social functions that people called
intellectuals appear to be able to serve in a larger society where you could
probably list a half dozen or a dozen of them. And then, I might be willing to
accept all of them as some sort of function, that's, it's OK for somebody to
pursue. And then I might wonder which ones I want to be closer to, that is, if
some people are focused on some of them or others, maybe I have a preference,
and I would like to be that kind of intellectual. But I might not complain if
the other people are called intellectuals. So, you know, for example, one
function of intellectuals is to teach and to help students sort of show
themselves to employers as good job candidates, and to show off that ability
and other – functions of teachers might be to allow people to be knowledgeable
and impressive in cocktail party conversations later in life. And some kinds
of intellectuals help people find out about news and what's happening lately.
Some kind of intellectuals help people maybe understand, in practical sense
the world they're in terms of the physical devices and the social worlds and
things they're around. Other people help people understand, maybe more grand
cosmology outside their practical concerns. Some intellectuals advance perhaps
the state of the art or the frontiers of knowledge. Other people make sure
that we don't forget what we once knew. Some people try to better summarize
what we know so that it can be more easily communicated to a wider audience.
Some people try to go back and challenge things we thought we knew to make
sure maybe see if they're wrong. Other people maybe just practice the sparring
of arguing and help other people learn to spar and argue in wider contexts.
These are – I've just listed, you know, presumably, what will be familiar
things that people called intellectuals often do, and that have some value in
the larger world.
Agnes:
So I feel that was a really like pluralistic speech. But, at other times when
I talk to you about like, intellectuals are mostly interested in cocktail
party conversations and in coming off in a certain way, like you don't seem
very approving of that. So maybe you're like approving of it right now. But
when you talk about like, in other conversations we've had about like the idea
that there are intellectual norms. That is, in fact, you seem to think they're
special norms for intellectuals that are going to cover like the whole class
of intellectuals. Right? And I don't think you're primarily thinking about
cocktail party conversations. Like credit, I definitely want to talk about
this, even though we've talked about before, it's like intellectual credit,
right? In a cocktail party, you might not give that much credit, or you might
give the kind of credit that would give – end up giving you more credit in the
cocktail party conversation. But then we don't generally do citations during
cocktail party. So like, when you're thinking about what are the appropriate
norms for intellectuals? Like I take it, you're not thinking about the
cocktail parties, and you're probably not even thinking about the people who
keep the older stuff alive, or this are kind of my people. But you're like,
you know, like, here's how I would capture your sense of what an intellectual
is, it's – in another conversation we talked about like how you go around and
you ask people, what's the biggest question in your field? And then you like,
look down on them if they don't have an answer, and they're not working on it,
OK? Like, only a very peculiar kind of intellectual namely, you, like thinks
in that way, right? Most people don't care. Most intellectuals don't, as a
matter of fact, care about what's the most important question in their field,
at least according to you, in terms of your research just of asking this to
people. And they're not pursuing it. Right? But still, you want to say, "Yeah,
but that's..." You want to get some purchase, some normative purchase on the
concept of intellectual to be able to say, "Don't do the cocktail party thing.
Don't do the like competitive publication thing. Instead, do my thing of
finding the important questions." And it's that – that's the Robin I want to
talk to about intellectuals, not the pluralist Robin, who accepts everything.
Robin:
So, you know, it's about what I want to do and who I want to do it with. And
that's separate than what this word intellectual means. And so I am in
general, like, forgiving and encompassing about words, perhaps, but want to be
more particular about my allies or associates, or people that I'm doing things
with. So I might say, "I want there to be a community of people who see their
project as together, knowing things and learning things. And that's not just a
side effect of other things they do. You know, the sense in which the
community I'm interested in is more self consciously trying to, together know
and learn things. And that's what justifies perhaps a number of intellectual
norms with respect to that community. So one norm might be, "Well, be honest
about what you know or don't know. Don't pretend to know things you don't
know." I'll say. And, for example, if you see a critique of a claim you've
made, and it makes solid points, then you should admit those solid points, not
just change the discussion or something, but acknowledge when somebody has
made a good point. And even if you make a point, for example, but you know
where it came from, you might acknowledge your source. That's another kind of
norm sort of related to credit. So those are some of the norms that I might
support within a community who saw itself as trying to collectively know and
learn. Now, it's open to the question, what are we trying to know or learn?
Like, within all the space of things we could be trying to know or learn, what
are our priorities? And then I see a space for, like, we can be trying to
learn different things, but still work together. We don't all have to agree
necessarily about that. But I do think we often do agree substantially on many
kinds of priorities. And then we can use those shared priorities to critique,
say, the priorities of efforts, which kind of things getting more attention,
which kind of methods are used, which kind of resources go where. Is that how
as a...
Agnes:
OK. I have a bunch of questions going in a different direction. Let me just
start with, I do want to ask you about the relationship between this utopia
that you've described, and like the world that we live in, and – because I
think you do try to get purchase on the act that people will call themselves
intellectuals. But before I do that, I want to ask about just a little aside,
you made about how like, well, if you have an idea that you're putting forward
and then somebody else's put it up before, you'd give them a credit. And you
would acknowledge your source. That's it, you'd acknowledge your source. Now,
and you also said like, if somebody makes a good argument against you, you be
honest about that. And so the second thing being like, "Oh, here's an argument
against me. I could well see how that furthers the project of this community,
the soul lone project." Because you've just described it, which is trying to
learn a no, right? It furthers that project, if I'm like honest about
arguments against me, because that helps us all figure out whether or not I'm
right or wrong. But there's a question, how does it help for me to acknowledge
my source? If I give you an idea, but Aristotle said it before me. Or, Robin
said it before me and I'm talking to somebody else, right? And I don't give
you credit or I don't give Aristotle credit. So like I could see in certain
contexts, right, in publication, it will often be intellectually useful to
make references. You may want to read Robin on this because here are some
other interesting and relevant ideas. So like I get that right. But that's not
what we're talking about. We're talking about credits, specifically credit. It
seems to me that credit on your view, like, I would anticipate that you would
think it's important because it creates incentives. But it creates incentives
for people who care about credit. And I thought you said that this group of
people, what unifies them is that they want to know and learn. So, are you
saying these group of people, they want to know and learn and also they want
credit? And if that's true, couldn't we just define a slightly more utopian
group of intellectuals, the ones who actually just want to know and learn and
don't want credit? And don't we want to be in that other group? Once we're
being utopian, why not go all the way?
Robin:
So, we have to be opportunistic about the available communities to join. We
can't just define an ideal community and join it. It may have no members. So,
when we are trying to do things together with others, we have to ask which
others are willing to do what. And compromise in terms of finding people who
are the best combination of, they're close enough to what we want to do, and
they're able to do it with us. And even if that's not who we might choose if
we could create people, but we can't create people. So I would say, this is of
course larger true in the rest of society, right? We might say, "Well, we want
– in society in general, we want everybody to be happy and productive and
prosperous, et cetera. But we expect that while we all to some degree have
good feelings toward everybody else and want everybody else to prosper, we all
selfishly want things for ourselves more. And so part of the challenge of
designing social institutions, is to find ways to harness this collective
interest to create incentives so that we can then harness our private
interests in the promotion of our collective interests. That is, we typically
don't believe that most everybody merely wants to promote these collective
interests. We accept that most of the people available to us will primarily
have strong desires and personal goals that they would often be willing to
promote at the expense of collective interest, if that was a big enough gain.
And so we are trying to find ways to coordinate our incentives, so that the
net effect of each of us pursuing relatively selfish goals with a modest bit
of collective goals mixed in can together produce, you know, that we all
achieve our collective goals.
Agnes:
So you're very understanding about people who are like, "Look, this whole like
knowing and learning thing, that's not enough for me, I also need credit." And
you're like, "That's fine, I'm going to make sure you get some chance for some
credit, too." But what if I say to you, "Look, I like this knowing and
learning thing, but this whole being honest about when I'm wrong thing, that's
like, a little hard for me, I'm just a little bit selfish." And so like, are
you also going to be understanding in that case? And say, well – I mean, maybe
what you want to say is like, "Look, we can't expect people to actually admit
when they're wrong about stuff." Because that's just like asking to live to be
realistic, people aren't going to admit when they're wrong. And so instead, we
need to create some kind of complex structure where we kind of check each
other, we shame each other or whatever. Right? Like, is that how you'd want to
go with that? Or would you actually want these intellectuals to hold
themselves to this norm of admitting when you're wrong? And if you end if you
do want to hold your you do want to select the people who would hold
themselves to admitting when they're wrong, again, why not select the people
who don't care that much about credit and care about knowing and learning?
Robin:
You're right that in order for us to achieve these collective goals together,
we accept that we all have pretty strong selfish interests, and of a wide
range of sorts. And so we're looking to create institutions, including norms,
such that they not only when enforced, produce the better outcome, but that
are actually feasible to enforce. And that's a strong constraint on which
norms we should consider. But, for example, if you say present an idea, and
you give both positive and negative aspects of it. We might find that more
believable than if you only give positive aspects. We might, if you regularly
make a habit of saying, "Here's an idea." And I only see positives. And then
we can easily point out negatives to you that you probably should have been
able to see then we can start to perhaps mildly ridicule you for your
inability to see what the rest of us think you should be able to see, which is
a way of enforcing the norm that "Hey, acknowledge the negatives as well as
the positives." So that's an example of a norm that is, in fact, enforceable.
Agnes:
Right. I mean, like, I have to say that I think that nobody ever acknowledges
the negatives really, or it's extremely rare. Here's what they do that looks a
lot like that. And this is what I do. Suppose I give an argument, I'll be
like, "Now, here are the apparent counter arguments against me." But here's
how I respond to them. "And in the end, right? At the end, I'm always
winning." And...
Robin:
But that counts according to the norm.
Agnes:
That counts?
Robin:
Yeah, that counts.
Agnes:
Because like, all I've done, I haven't admitted that I was wrong. I've just
admitted that I might have appeared to be wrong. But actually, in the end, I'm
right.
Robin:
No. That's not what we're interested in.
Agnes:
I might be wrong. I mean I might actually be wrong.
Robin:
No, but what you're just interested in, instead of making us go find the
plausible counter arguments, we expect you to point them out to us. And so,
pointing them out and then giving responses to them is fine, because you've
done the work of pointing them out. So it is the collective...
Agnes:
I haven't done the done the work of putting out the ones I don't have a
response to.
Robin:
Well, to the extent we can see those and perhaps see that you didn't point
them out, then we can, in fact, ridicule you on that. So again, it's all going
to be a matter of difficulty of enforcement. But say, the way we enforce the
credit norm is that if we can find a source that seems to have, you know,
preceded your expression of an idea. And it seems to be one that you should
have been able to find, had you done the usual amount of searching that you
were supposed to do, then we can complain about that. So again, in general,
we'll have to define norms, and enforce them when we can see a process by
which it would be feasible to enforce it.
Agnes:
So it seems to me that these two norms are at a very – these two norms,
namely, like, be honest about counter arguments, and give credit are at a very
different level. Where the give credit one is a kind of concession to the fact
that people don't necessarily really want to be intellectuals. Whereas the be
honest one is just part of what it is to be an intellectual and give
counterarguments, right? So the closer parallel to the credit one would be
something like, shame people who don't give counter arguments or something.
Or, you know, they're – that would be like a concession to people who don't
have the sort of properly intellectual motive. But like caring about credit is
not a properly intellectual motive. That is caring about, like, if we could be
pure intellectuals, we wouldn't care about credit. I'm asserting you can you
can reply, if you think that's not true, right? That is – it doesn't have
anything to do with trying to learn and know to get credit. Just like caring
about being shown to be wrong is not, has nothing to do with being
intellectual. That is being averse to being shown to be wrong is not a proper
state of an intellectual, though we're human so we might be averse. And so
then we have to make these concessions, but there are – so there are norms,
like give credit and shame people who don't give counterarguments. But there
are different norms, like be honest and give counter arguments, where the
second set of norms are proper to intellectuals. They're part of what it is to
be not – to have intellectual goals. And I would want to distinguish those
things.
Robin:
I don't mind you're making those distinctions. I'm just not sure it's very
useful in the process of designing academic or intellectual institutions. So
that is, we have a variety of institutions we've seen in history, a variety of
arrangements, a variety even of community norms. And we have some sense of
which one seemed to have been more effective, and for what reasons. And that's
where most of the action is, I would think. And then picking among the various
options we can imagine for what the norm should be. You can give the different
norms different names according to their correspondence of some ideal person
who had no need for institutions to get them to do the best stuff. But that's
just almost never an option. So we don't think in those terms that much.
Agnes:
I think the way to think about it is just to think modally about like
different worlds with intellectuals in them. And I could just well imagine a
world with intellectuals where nobody cared about credit. In fact, I believe
such worlds have existed somewhere else. But they their incentives to
participate in intellectual life – they're still humans, so they still had
like, they needed to be selfishly compensated, but they just weren't
compensated that way. They were compensated in other ways. Whereas I can't
imagine a world of intellectuals where there's no concern with whether or not
you're honest or whether or not you give counterexamples, et cetera. And so
that's why these norms seem very different. Just like we might say, "Look, we
have a norm that intellectuals have certain buildings that they work in.
Right? And they're together in those buildings. That's true. But you could
just imagine a world in which that's not the case.
Robin:
Again, I don't mind you're making distinctions. But I mean, you're not making
a live proposal for what other sets of norms we should have instead that would
be more effective. So that's where I think the action is, is what, if you
don't like an existing set of norms, propose a different one set at ones. But
that's where we are.
Agnes:
Well, there's a – the reason I'm interested in that is I'm interested in the –
as I hinted early on with the Wikipedia definition, I'm interested in what I
take to be maybe a divide between being an intellectual and being an activist.
So let's just say an activist is somebody who seeks change. Trying to bring
about change in the world, and is going to want to do what it takes to bring
about such change. And they're not going to want to do what it takes,
obviously, if the cost of doing that is greater than the benefit to be
achieved by the change, right? So, suppose I'm an activist, and I want to like
create a hospital somewhere, but like in order to make the hospital have to,
like kill so many people that that's a greater number than the number that are
going to be saved by my hospital. I'm like, OK, don't make the hospital,
right? So the activist is – we're imagining a rational activist, right? Who
understand the trade-offs. But in principle, the activist will say, "Look, I
mean, like, oh, I'm going to do whatever is going to make the world a better
place." And sometimes that might involve lying to people and being untruthful.
In fact, it's rarely going to involve being 100% truthful about like
counterarguments to my proposal, because those counterarguments might sort of
distract people from the value of this proposal and stuff. And so it seems to
me that – I mean, someone could be both an intellectual and an activist, but
it seems to me those projects with somewhat pull them in different directions.
And they would pull them in different directions with respect to the norms
that are core to being intellectual, namely, the honesty one. By contrast, if
they only pulled them in a different direction, with respect to like, tertiary
norms, like give credit, you know, supposing act– suppose activists couldn't
give credit, I'd be like, "That's OK. You could be an activist intellectual
because giving credit is not that important of being intellectual." But being
honest is really important. So that's why that distinction is important to me,
and I want to hear your thoughts about...
Robin:
Well, I don't, I just don't...
Agnes:
Because I just think you think of yourself as an activist intellectual.
Robin:
You've made a distinction about why the credit norm is of a different
category. But that doesn't mean it's less important. You just made the claim
that it was less important so you'd be willing to let go, and I wouldn't
necessarily agree with it. I could still find it very important norm, even if
you've made a category distinction about it. So, if we just go back to basics,
if we say, you know, we have this collective project of knowing and learning.
And it seems to me that the most obvious natural reason why most people would
buy into that collective project is because knowing and learning is useful for
many things. So that's, of course, even a natural way to prioritize which
things we want to know and learn is the various uses they can be put to. So it
seems to be therefore, from that conception of the collective project, we of
course have to accept that there will be people concerned with how these
things get used. And that's perfectly acceptable as far as I'm concerned to be
part of the motives for being involved in this whole project. Nevertheless, we
do have some norms with respect to activism. So for example, in say, an
academic paper, it's completely acceptable, say in the introduction, to
explain why you're interested in a question you pose, because of its practical
applications to the world. But if it seems that your choice of an answer has
been influenced by your priorities, then that's important to disclose. That is
we are suspicious of and disapproving of hidden influences on conclusions of
posed questions based on people's differing, especially differing priorities.
So that is, it's OK to choose a question or topic based on what you care
about. But if you're doing say, a statistical analysis or a game theory model
or other sorts of things, once you make a sort of question that the question
itself doesn't embed priorities, then we expect you to do that in a neutral
way with respect to your priorities. You just find out the truth.
Agnes:
Don't you think there are hidden influences on all of our – everything we do,
but specifically all of our research that are going to shape what research
questions we ask and how we ask them?
Robin:
OK. But if we can find that you somewhat consciously chose, say, one
statistical method or one set of assumptions in order to get the answer that
you wanted with respect to your activism purpose and didn't disclose that, we
do disapprove of that. And that is actually enforced norm in many areas that
I've been involved in.
Agnes:
I mean, there are lots of things that people – we also disapprove of people
whose research treads on uncomfortable political territory and gives the
results we don't want. And that is an actually enforced norm in intellectual
circle. So...
Robin:
I'm arguing for this as a good norm, I'm saying it's a good norm.
Agnes:
OK. OK. So this is where we get back to, there was the pluralist Robin we
encountered briefly in the early part of this conversation where he, like all
intellectuals are, you know, you're kind of OK with all different
intellectuals. And now, you gave this – this little claim about like, well,
this project is going to be useful. And then it's like, of knowing and
learning is supposed to be useful, and we can prioritize by way of usefulness.
And just to flag like some of the people that you described, like the people
keeping old stuff alive, if you ask them, "Are you primarily doing this
because you see it as useful?" They would say, "No." That is, those aren't the
terms in which they think it's like important and valuable, and important and
valuable to know, and intrinsically improves your life. But there isn't some
other thing that you're supposed to use it for where like, usually, the idea
that knowledge is useful is meant to entail, it can be used by people who
don't have the knowledge, right? So the knowledge of how to build an x-ray
machine is useful to the patients who don't know how to build an x-ray
machine. And for many of these sorts of the kinds of intellectuals you were
initially pluralist about, there – they wouldn't say their knowledge is
useful. What they would mean by that is that it doesn't, it may not have much
value to the people who don't have the knowledge. So like, you're not just
saying like, "Here are some norms." You're saying, like, "Here's like, the
good norms, and the good kinds of intellectuals."
Robin:
But this is – these two groups have a common purpose in this case. So, this is
part of like my talking about compromises. You could have one group of people
whose main community purpose that they are interested in is the uses that the
learning and knowledge can be put to. And you can have other people whose main
interest in the community purpose is the personal enjoyment they will get out
of knowing particular things that the community will produce. These two groups
have a shared interest in policing and limiting the kinds of activist
influence on conclusions drawn. So they don't have to disagree about those
norms. And in fact, they share a lot of purposes, as in therefore can agree on
a lot of norms because their purposes are largely pretty well-aligned.
Agnes:
So, it seems to me that there are lots of influences on intellectual activity
that don't specifically track the project of knowing and learning. And one
example we gave his credit, right? And it may be that by seeking credit, or by
being careful to give credit, you make the project of knowing and learning
harder. For instance, you have to constantly be like making all these
references and have to remember "Oh wait, who said this? I better tell Robin
because he's going to be upset if I don't give credit."
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
Right? So credit can bog down the process – the credit giving can bog down the
process of knowing and learning, but maybe we need to accept that to cost,
right? But we have to be realistic, human beings don't just care about knowing
and learning, they also care about credit. So even if we know and learn less
than we would if we weren't getting credit, like from one point of view, like
you want to be like, "Actually, we're knowing and learning more on the whole
because we're using these incentives." And so, while it can't be activist the
same thing as like, "Look, it's true, my activism is going to mean that we
have some falsity in our story." But look, the project of knowing and learning
has to be fitted inside of society, that society is going to have values. And
the people in the society need to be like these intellectuals are good guys
and not on the bad guy team. And every once in a while we intellectuals need
to show that we're in the good guy team by like having some results that say,
"Here's what you wanted to hear. Look, I'm telling it to you." And that's
just, how to be realistic about the project of being an intellectual in a
world that has other goals is you need to sometimes have some false activism
results, just like you need to have sometimes you have to have some BS credit
getting that doesn't really have much to do with the project of knowing and
learning. How are these things different?
Robin:
Again, the fundamental choices between different sets of norms you could
define, the standard, more common sets of norms today, distinguish, again, the
purposes and reasons why you're motivated to do a particular research project,
and the conclusions you draw within that project. And using your activism to
choose which projects to do, but not using it to decide which conclusions you
draw, if we believe that you are, in fact following that norm that allows
people to believe the results of your research, and not be skeptical about it
on the basis of its source, and still allow you to prioritize things you care
about. But the more that we believe that you allowed your activist priorities
to influence the conclusions you drew, in a particular analysis, not just the
questions you ask, we are then no longer able to believe your answers. We
could, if we shared your activism, decide that we wanted to believe it, and
therefore would believe it for the same reason you wanted to get those
answers. But that's a somewhat different project. And if we encompass people
with different activist priorities, we are looking to sort of make peace among
us so that we can work together. And that would seem to be we would want to
distinguish, again, you know, who does what for what priority reasons, but not
what conclusions draw. Again, if we can each trust people with different
intellectual or different activist priorities, to still do each analysis in a
way that is at least trying to not be overtly directly influenced by those
activists priorities, then we can trust each other's work more. And so the
judgment that I share is that, that works better for us achieving our shared
community goals of knowing and learning.
Agnes:
So I think a lot of people think the way you can trust other people is if they
have the right values. And they think the reason to have this activistic
influence on research is to help us trust each other. So like, it could just
be that like, you're so disposed, that you give trust in different ways,
right? And they're like, "Look, trust is super important. And without trust,
we can't work together as an intellectual community." And part of how we
establish trust is that sometimes we give some results that maybe are not
perfect from the epistemic point of view, but show that we all have the right
values and that's how we know we're on the same page, and we can trust each
other. And yes, I'm going to grant that in terms of thinking about the project
of learning and knowing we're slightly making a little sacrifice there, right?
But we're also making sacrifices when we give credit. We're wasting time to
credit when we could be pursuing the project of learning and knowing. And so
yeah, you can trust my results, in a sense when I do this, because you can
trust that I'm like, a good person and I have the right values. Yeah.
Robin:
So the word trust applies to a bunch of different things. And, you know, I
just want to make a clear distinction here. There's, you have a paper, say,
and it says, "I'm going to attack this problem, and then it draws a particular
conclusion." And I meant, can I trust that conclusion to actually follow from
that problem presentation and assumptions. That's what I meant by being able
to trust you. When you say, if I acknowledge or support the proper activist
causes, you can trust me, that's a different thing you're trusting me about.
That's you're trusting me to be on your political side, but that's not
trusting the particular results. So, you know, you could trade one off against
the other and of course, people do. People are sometimes less accurate in
particular things they say in order to be trusted by a group. So for – you can
think of a religious community who agrees together to spout various strange
claims about supernatural events that happened in the past or even currently,
in order to trust each other as a community. But then they are, in some sense,
less able to trust the particular supernatural claims they make, but they can
more trust somebody say to help them in a car accident or if they were to be
disabled, et cetera, they can trust, some social bonding and support for each
other in that community. But that's different than trusting the particular
claims. And so, if our community is oriented around learning and knowing
that's the thing that we are doing together. Then when you pollute or taint
that for some other purpose, which is not learning and knowing together,
that's in some sense sacrificing the purpose of this community for some other
purpose.
Agnes:
Right. But I mean, you know, that was my argument with the credit thing, but
you're like, "Look, even the learning and knowing that's not the end all be
all, there's going to be more involved, there's going to be..." Right?
Robin:
I do not see credit as really a – I don't really see a sacrificing very much
to give a credit. I'm sorry, it's just, it takes a bit of mentioning something
that's not a large onerous cost. I don't see it as a large sacrifice that we
are paying large costs for that and we are getting large benefits. So it seems
like a relatively clear trade-off.
Agnes:
I have pointed out to you a number of times where I've said things like,
"Actually, Aristotle said this before you." And you know, they're, and they –
I could say to you, "Robin, you failed to do your due diligence to look at all
the possible people who might have come up with your ideas before you so that
you give them credit." That would be a massive project that you'd have to do
to learn like a lot more of intellectual history. Right? Maybe Leibniz came up
with some idea that you just came up with, before you did. In order to credit
people, you have to do certain kinds of work to figure out who might have said
what. So, yeah, I do think it's a big project. And it's a project that it
absolutely shackles academia. That is we're dragging these chains around us,
articles just filled with references, and crediting. So I disagree that like
that it is a small thing. It might just depend on sort of like your taste for
people – there's quite a lot of difference between people as to like how much
credit you need to give when. Here's a thing I've noticed. For many people, if
it was like a really long time ago, they don't care. They'll be really
offended if you don't refer to someone who wrote in the past 50 years, even if
they was somewhat obscure. But if you don't refer to somebody who wrote like,
2000 years ago, even if they're really famous, that's fine. Right? And because
it's a kind of jockeying for status, and we're somehow not jockeying with
Aristotle anymore. But anyway, all that's like really quite complicated and
hard to figure out when you're going to offend someone by not referring to
whom and the rules don't – they're more about some kind of social hierarchy
than they are about anything, like intellectual causation.
Robin:
I would just say that there's a continuum of where you would draw the line in
terms of what situations call for giving of credit, or, you know,
acknowledging sources. I think, just that, if you go all the way to one
extreme of saying nobody ever needs to acknowledge any credit, then I think we
can all see how that is a bad equilibrium. So, we've decided to go away from
that extreme, that is a question of how far to go? You know, I acknowledge
that basically, you know, so basically, if you just read someone's paper, and
then just copied it all and set it again, it was plagiarism, and a direct
plagiarism. We all agree that that's a pretty bad scenario. If everybody finds
that to be OK, we would be in a bad equilibrium. So we can all agree that we
want a norm against that. And now we're going down a spectrum. And as we move
down, we are looking at cases where it gets harder to search to find what
other people have done. Or where the mapping between how they express
something and how you express something then it becomes larger, and then it
becomes more a question of whether it really is the same thing. I can see
arguing about those issues. But the idea that we shouldn't even complain if
someone just completely whole hog plagiarizes what somebody else says and
takes credit for it themselves. It seems hard to argue that we are overly
burdening ourselves by disapproving of that.
Agnes:
I don't think we have any intellectual complaint against such person. We have
other kinds of complaints, because we're not merely intellectual creatures,
but as far as the project of learning and knowing goes, I think that's fine.
But can I – I want there's – we only have like a little bit of time left. And
I just want to ask you more about sort of intellectuals and I've so if somehow
let us get distracted on to this topic that we've already discussed about
credit. So I want to ask you more about activism. So one thing is like you
think it's sort of more OK if the activist chooses their topic by way of their
activism, but not if they choose their conclusions, right? And not if the
conclusions are like, say a foregone conclusion, right? And I want to talk to
you about whether you think that that's substantially different from what
happens in my field. Because in my field of ancient philosophy scholarship, I
wouldn't let you in on the secret, those conclusions are chosen in advance.
Here's how Plato and Aristotle have to turn out to be right about everything.
It's super weird. It's sort of creepy when you first enter the space, right?
But it's like I'm working on a passage, I'm going to interpret a passage
somewhere in Aristotle. And I can tell you in advance, if this is like a
scholar, they're going to come out – it's going to turn out that it was kind
of true. And they're going to keep working at it till they can find some kind
of good points, some kind of good truthful point that Aristotle is making. So
the moral of the story is going to be Aristotle was right, or Plato was right,
or Socrates was right. This is not a universal historical fact about the field
of ancient philosophy scholarship. So if you go back to like, I don't know,
1940, 1950, it's not true, but it's true now. So, from your point of view, is
this just like the worst kind of like, it's just as bad as activism? What they
would say is, "Look, we're being charitable." Right? We're trying to do
charitable interpretation. And so we're trying to – it's not that interesting
if Aristotle's wrong, we're going to figure out how he was right. And I just
wonder, yeah, how do you think about this as compared to activism?
Robin:
So there's a standard literature on lying, which says that, like, common
social lies are not harmful if everyone knows they’re common social lies, that
is, we all just reinterpret them and go on our way. So harmful lies, are the
lies, more harmful lies, the lies that we can't anticipate, and therefore
don't know necessarily are lies. So, if you told me that everybody who ever
reads these articles all knows this fact, then few people will be misled by
the fact that they all are constrained to draw the conclusion that Aristotle
and Plato were always right. And then you could still maybe learn something
from their best guess to try to figure out a way to make them right. But I
would guess that, in fact, some people reading things, these things don't know
this convention, because you told me it was a secret, which suggests that you
didn't know it always and took you a time to figure out, in which case...
Agnes:
Yeah, it took me a while to figure out.
Robin:
OK. In which case I think it would be just let...
Agnes:
I figured out the hard way by trying to argue that Aristotle is wrong about
something and people are like, what are you doing?
Robin:
Right, so...
Agnes:
So yeah.
Robin:
So that seems to me, you know, yes, reasonably criticizable as being, they're
being biased basically in a way that you can point out to them, and they
refuse to stop. So I mean, we can be more forgiving of people who find
themselves influenced by some activist agenda, but unknowingly, and when it's
pointed out to them will apologize and reverse. But if they insist on pursuing
it, then I think that's true. So I will give you another example in the field
of economics, we often see sort of arrangements of the world where we have
certain policies that look puzzling, like, say, blackmail. And say, for
example, the analysis of blackmail says that doesn't look like such a bad
policy. The simplest analysis says we should allow blackmail, and of course we
don't. And so the convention is, there must be a reason why the status quo is
a good thing. And so everybody struggles to find explanations to justify the
status quo, as opposed to perhaps recommending to change the status quo. And I
think that's also misleading, because many people who read these papers don't
realize that there is such a strong tendency to try to justify and explain the
status quo as opposed to critiquing it.
Agnes:
Good. I often do that in an argument with you. I'm trying to justify the
status quo.
Robin:
Indeed.
Agnes:
So if we think of activism, I mean so, one question about the activist is
just, at a certain point, if there was enough of it, like if it was sort of
really, really clear that anyone doing research on say, race or gender has to
like, get certain sorts of results, then you would no longer object to it.
Because everybody would know, it would be like the non harmful lies.
Robin:
Well, I might object to the waste of resources. That is, if you're going
through the motions, and you're going to get a certain conclusion anyway, why
bother to go through the motions, right? And we're still going to be wa–
because you must be doing that for some pretense. Somebody's being fooled,
somebody thinks that these motions could have led somewhere else. That's why
you're going through these motions. And so that suggests you are in fact
misleading people.
Agnes:
Well, no, I mean, it could just be like, there's a certain ritual that we all
get to go through to like, show that we trust each other. Like, just like the
credit, I think the credit thing is just a waste of resources that doesn't
contribute to the pursuit of knowledge, right? But clearly, people really like
it. And it helps them keep doing the thing. So OK, maybe we need to keep going
with it, even though it's been a waste of resources. So, you might end up in
that situation – and in fact, we're sort of close to that situation with
activism, right? We may be closer there and then with the Plato and Aristotle
scholarship.
Robin:
I can't – we should just distinguish scenarios that are worse or better. And
so the worst ones can be more worthy of criticism. The worst scenario is if
you allow your activist priorities to influence the conclusions in a way that
you don't acknowledge and that people mostly don't even know. And therefore,
you are fooling people or misleading them. If everyone knows that you're
leading to that conclusion then in some sense, that's an implicit assumption
of the analysis. Now, you're not fooling people, but you might be wasting
people's time. That's even less of a problem that is you might – it's
basically I'm assuming certain things that I'm going for. There are many kinds
of analysis make assumptions. So if you say, "I'm going to make the following
assumption, which is congenial to my ideology, or activism priorities and then
see where that goes”, the rest of us can see that, you know, we might trust
your conclusions conditional on that assumption. But maybe we'd be interested
in other assumptions. I think it's more problematic if you say nobody in this
field is allowed to ever make contrary assumptions. Because in all fields,
people have to make some judgments about what the most likely facts are and
most likely situation. They're mostly going to be making their analysis
conditional on what they accept as the most likely facts about the world, or
situations, but they should be open to other people trying out alternatives.
Agnes:
So, this is going to be a weird contrast, but I'm sometimes inclined to
contrast activism with pacifism? Where like, in effect, the activist sort of
thinks that on some level we're at war. They're very worked up about some
particular problem, right? And they just think a lot of other things need to
be sacrificed to the pursuit of this problem. Just like during a war, you
know, there may be a lot of stuff that you're not allowed to do that you're
usually allowed to do, right? And everyone needs to kind of be on the same
page. And we all need to show our loyalty because we're fighting the enemy.
Right? And I think of intellectuals as kind of as pacifists. And so the
intellectual and the activists are temperamentally, like, very different,
right? And it's not – it's sort of like the activist is more inclined to see
battle lines having been drawn, and more inclined to say, like, "Look, we
don't have the luxury for your... let me look for a different point of view on
this, right? At the moment, we're at war against, say, racism or something."
Right? And, you know, insofar as you're going to sort of bleed out the
intellectual project into doing useful things like "Well, we think knowing and
learning is useful." They might be like, "Yeah, knowing and learning is sort
of sometimes useful under some circumstances, right? But now is not the time
for your knowing and learning, or this area here, where we're fighting a war
is not the time and place. The way to do useful things in this area, is to get
with the program and fight the battle." And insofar as you're not willing to
create something like a kind of sacred space, a holy space, where like, "No,
our goals are knowing and learning, we don't have other goals. Other goals are
not OK in this space. You're not really allowed to care about credit. We can
make a concession, but we have to make a face while we make a concession,
because it's kind of dirty in our special holy purity." Unless you do that,
like why not sometimes promote useful lies, and when not, not only promote
useful lies, but have norms that say, "Praise people for having promoted the
useful lies, if they were actually useful."
Robin:
I would say, you know, it's completely reasonable to say that there are times
when certain sort of topics shouldn't be explored, or certain sort of topics,
who – the people who know about that shouldn't be telling other people what
they know. You might say, you know, knowing how to make nuclear weapons
cheaply, or other sorts of dangerous knowledge. But then I think you should
just say, "We're forbidding people from studying the following thing, or at
least talking in public about it." And then what you're doing is just reducing
the scope of this project of, "Let's know and learn things together." So,
there are many ways in the world that people know and learn things other than
this shared project of being intellectual or academic. This is one of the many
ways we know and learn things together. And you might say that this shared
project should at times be limited. But I would much rather it be limited than
polluted. That is, I'd much rather you said "We're not going to allow that for
now. We just need to stop this sort of inquiry here." But if you allow it to
appear to be knowing and learning but actually make it into activism without
acknowledging that then you are polluting our brand. So, as somebody with a
community with a brand which we are just trying to manage, I would rather you
just told us to stop doing the thing you acknowledge we can do well, if you
allow us, rather than messing with the thing we're doing and then complaining,
we don't do a good job.
Agnes:
So, like, I mean I think that the idea of pollution here is very – it's a very
helpful word, right, in thinking about, there's a– as a phrase you've use a
“sacred quest”, right? The intellectuals are on a sacred quest to know and
learn. And then, in some ways, their pursuit of those goals, is going to be
inhibited by the fact that they're just selfish humans. Right? And what I want
to know is, what is sort of the principle you use to say, well, certain forms
of I consider pollution, namely, doing this kind of credit allocation to
satisfy people's non-intellectual desires for status, right? That – we have to
accept that and you're not even going to counter this pollution, right?
Versus, "Look, we're going to have to do a bit of lying as intellectuals.
Humans lie, they lie all the time. It's just part of who we are." And like
some of the ways in which we lie, sometimes we'll pick our conclusions in
advance. And like, we're not 100%, you know, but like, we mostly, we're mostly
still doing this thing. But intellectuals, since forever, have probably done
some of picking their conclusions in advance so as to please the group, you
know, if you read Hobbes's Leviathan, many people think he's really an
atheist, but he's not going to come out and say that, because then he'll get
his head chopped off. And so he's going to give some conclusions to make the,
you know, to make his social life continue, and that intellectuals have always
been doing that. And they continue to do it. And they especially do it on
certain topics.
Robin:
So imagine that you and I were astrologers. And astrology worked, but it was
contested. Many people out there complained that astrology didn't work. And
so, you and I were struggling to sort of get the world to believe that we
could, in fact, be effective astrologers. And that it was possible to do that.
So we would be trying to create this brand. And when people came asked us
astrology questions, we tried to give them accurate answers and satisfied
customers. And you could imagine, say, the CIA comes to us privately and says,
"One of these customers is a foreign representative, and we want to screw
them. And we want you to help us screw them." And you can imagine, like two
different ways, they could ask us to do that. One way, they could say, "We
don't want you to help them." Like if you use your astrology to help China or
something, that's going to be hurting us. And so we just don't want you to
help them. And I think it would be more OK for us to say, "OK, we've decided
that even though we can do astrology, we won't use astrology to help the
Chinese." A different thing that CIA come to do is say, "Pretend to do
astrology for them, but just give them the wrong answers. And that will mess
with them." And I might think, "Yes, that might mess with them but that will
reduce our ability to convince the world that we actually have an effective
product here.” The more that you want us to go mess with, you know, our
reliable, useful product to make it look bad for some customers. So similarly,
like, you might say, if we had a restaurant, and we were trying to convince
people we had a good food, and you said, CIA comes and says, "Poison this
customer. Give this customer food poisoning." That would be risking our
reputation for having a restaurant where we don't poison our customers, and we
might be much more reluctant to help them out in that way than if the CIA
says, "Don't serve that customer. Those customers should not be allowed in
your restaurant." Because that wouldn't threaten our attempt to show that we
can do a thing and convince the world that we have this capacity. So that's
the sense in which I'm thinking of this intellectual community. I want this
community to be capable of knowing and learning, when allowed to do that
effectively. And I would rather that you just simply told us to stop in
certain cases or prevented us from applying our abilities, in some cases, than
that we mislead people and pretend like we're still doing that, but in fact,
not actually do it.
Agnes:
Good. I think that's a good analogy. Maybe I'll say one thing, and then you
can reply, and then we should stop. So I think that you can imagine two
different restaurants, right? One kind of restaurant is saying, "Look, all we
do is give you good food. We tried to give you good food." And like you take
it from there, whether you're going to – that's going to improve your life or
not improve your life, whether it's going to improve the political situation
of our country or not. Right? We're not interested in anything beyond the fact
that this is good food that we're putting before you, right? And that
restaurant with that brand, I would expect them to resist in just the way
you've described, where they're like, "No, we're not going to poison or like
give – we won't even give yucky food to those people because our brand is that
we give yummy food and we're going to give everyone yummy food regardless of
the consequences." But there'll be another restaurant and they say, "We are
the useful food restaurant, that is we don't just give you food. Here, the
food– the tastiness of the food is analogous to like truthfulness and honesty
and knowledge, right? What we try to do is we try to give you food and thereby
make the world a better place, right?" And now the government comes to that
restaurant, and they're like, "Look, we know you really care, you're really
committed to improving the world, and it's going to really improve the world
if you poison or give bad food to these people." I no longer know what your
argument is going to be back against that government. And that's why I'm
inclined to say that the intellectuals – it's more natural to think of them as
pacifist, as people who are fundamentally interested in learning and knowing
and not fundamentally interested in being useful.
Robin:
So I would say, it's a large world where people have to specialize. And we,
each kind of profession specialists needs a brand for what our product is. And
I think the fundamental purpose of specializing is best served by us having
very simple, easy to understand brands that people can directly check on. So I
would think that the best version of that for intellectuals is that when I
tell you – when I pick a problem, and then I produce an analysis on that, you
can trust that. And conditional on the assumptions I tell you about and the
problem I picked, I'm giving you sort of the most accurate, neutral answer
that I can. And that's what I do as an intellectual. And that should be
definitely core to our brand. Now, if you ask me a question about what's
important. And that's the question that you pose, then I shall speak about
what's actually important, because that's the brand on that topic. So because
intellectuals can be asked what's important, we should therefore use that same
sort of neutral honesty to answer that question as best we can. But the reason
why we all are in the world in our various specialties is mostly because we
each think the world is better off if our specialty, in fact, achieves its
brand promise. The people who work at restaurants think the world's better off
if they promise to have tasty food, and they do. And auto repair places, you
know, will want to promise that they repair autos, and they do. And
intellectuals are promising that, given a problem we tackle we are trying to
give the most honest, accurate answer that we can on that, and that's what we
should do there.
Agnes:
OK. I know I said you have the last thing, but I want to say one more thing,
and you can still respond. OK. So this idea that you think specialization is
important, and it's part of the creation of the brand, right? I wonder if
that's on intention with your idea of saying to people, what's the most
interesting question in your field? Because specialization is not just by
field, right? Most people specialize within subfields and even within sub
subfields. And so when – what you should really be asking them is what is the
most interesting question within your sub sub sub subfield that is most
narrowly construed? Are you working on that? And I think people that would
say, yes. So if you ask me, like my last academic paper that I wrote, it was
on a kind of controversy about Plato's Hippias Minor, OK. It's a short
dialogue not considered a super – it's not one of the top five Platonic
dialogues, right? But I'm interested in it, I like it. I've specialized a
little bit and learning about this dialogue, right? So even among Plato
specialists, I've specialized a bit. And then you're like, you know, "In your
paper that you wrote on the Hippias Minor, were you addressing the most
important and most interesting question about the Hippias Minor?" I would say,
"Absolutely, yes. That is what I did." Right. And I suspect that that's going
to be true of all the academics you talk to. They are addressing the most
important, most interesting question in their field. But by field, we now have
to understand that this has involved like a lot of different layers of
specialization.
Robin:
Right. So whenever a client and a professional have an interaction, the client
and the professional negotiate a scope of the interaction. So, if you have a
financial consultant, and you go to them and say, "I just got a bonus, where
should I invest it?", if that's the scope of your question, they can either
push back and say, "That's not the good question. I think we should address
this other larger question." But if they accept the scope of that question,
then they should do their best job within that scope. But if they have been
given a wide scope, then they're responsible for addressing the wide scope. If
you go to the financial consultants that says, "Please help me just manage my
finances." And all they tell you about is like which bank account to put your
savings in and they don't address lots of other big financial issues you have,
I might say they are failing to do their job. They're failing to look at the
most important thing within the scope that their client assigned them. So then
I might say, "What is the scope that our clients are assigning us as
intellectuals for the scope of our tasks and projects?" And I would say, any
one person, for example, who is a graduate student in particular department
taking a class, if they're assigned to do a research paper for that class,
they will have to do it within the scope of that class. But later, as their
career progresses, they are given wider scope for choosing projects and topics
and they are then responsible for choosing within that wider scope, the most
appropriate thing. If you take your car to an auto repair place, and they
focus on the headlight that could be slightly adjusted, and they miss the fact
that your brakes are broken, and that, you know, the air conditioning doesn't
work and a bunch of other things and they hand back it to you with the
headlight fixed. They're failing in their job, because you might have, if you
gave them the task of, "What's wrong with this car? And fix it." Then that's
the scope of their tasks. If they complained about your curtains in your
house, you would might say, "No, that wasn't the scope of your task you were
supposed to tell me about this car.” But I think we intellectuals are actually
typically given a pretty wide scope of task by our customers, our students,
our funders, et cetera, they typically ask us more widely to say, you know,
what's interesting? What's important? What should I know? And then we are
responsible for answering that question in that scope.
Agnes:
OK, I'm going to let it stop there.
Robin:
All right. Nice talking.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
Till we meet again.
