September 24, 1998
Dear Norman,
Thanks for your piece on philosophical bloodletting. I confess to being
something of an addict to criticism myself. I was initially attracted to
philosophy in the first place by Karl Popper and his characterization of
science as an interwoven process of bold conjectures and refutations. At
Berkeley and Indiana my skills at analytic refutation were developed and
reinforced. When I ended up doing an interlude in industry these critical
skills were both useful and harmful: I was rather good at reviewing other
people's work and exposing errors before they gave rise to problems; I was
rather bad at communicating these criticisms gracefully. I still am rather bad
at that, but after my head being bashed a certain number of times I am a bit
more restrained (perhaps some who know me now will not believe that!). My
excuses: the philosophical training being complained about here; a personal
nature given to analysis; my belief that one of the ways to finding the truth
is to burn away what is false, and in particular to assert boldly what may be
faulty in order to provoke others to identify those faults. This last is
certainly a dangerous game, very easily misunderstood (e.g., as arrogance).
Philosophy as a discipline is surely the most prone to encouraging abusive and
obnoxious criticism. But I do not agree that it stands quite alone in this. I
have observed extraordinary abuses in other settings. For example, the fear and
loathing that some neo-behaviorists had for anyone who took the concept of
consciousness as a serious matter for scientific investigation has often led to
grossly insulting treatment of those few who dared think about it publicly.
Other examples can be found in artificial intelligence, particularly where
large-scale ideologies have run up against each other, such as symbolicism
versus connectionism. Probably, the same is true throughout the sciences when
similar circumstances arise, that is, when science most resembles religion.
Your basic tenet is surely right, though: philosophy and philosophers would
benefit from the introduction of the concept of civility into the teaching of
philosophical method.
Regards,
Kevin
Dr. Kevin Korb, Editor
Psyche
School of Computer Science and Software Engineering
Monash University
Clayton, Victoria 3168
Australia
email: korb@cs.monash.edu.au
Psyche web site: http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/
Personal web site: http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/~korb/
phone: +61 (3) 9905-5198
fax: +61 (3) 9905-5146
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