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Dec

2011

Sam's thoughts: Kenneth Paul Tan's "Against Uncritical Pragmatism"

I have argued that pragmatism can serve us well in a diverse, multicultural, and globalized world. I have also argued that pragmatism can easily degenerate into an unthinking mindset, more dogmatic than any ideology it pretends to distance itself from. Uncritical pragmatism engenders the doer who will not think beyond the most narrowly technical and profitable; the doer who is incapable of moral reasoning, critical thinking, creativity, and imagination; the doer who despises such things as naïve, time-wasting, or troublesome. The doer-who-will-not-think engenders and imprisons in a stereotypical ivory tower its opposite, the thinker-who-will-not-do. I have argued that universities must, now more than ever, break down these barriers between thinking and doing. They must resist the temptation to appear superficially practical and useful to the powerful doers-who-will-not-think, if this will mean compromising their mission to educate people more holistically so that they will have the philosophical capacity, the moral courage, and the imaginative vision to understand what it really means to be in the service of humanity.

thinkingbetterthinkingmeta.blogspot.com/...l-tans-against-uncritical.html

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Pragmatism Ideology Singapore Empiricism Rationality University Education

In Singapore, pragmatism is held up as a pillar of governance and a cultural reason for the nation’s widely acknowledged success, achieved, it is commonly argued, through policies whose overriding objective is to ensure continuous economic growth. The right thing to do in order to achieve this continuous economic growth will depend on the context and is, in fact, whatever works best in that context at that point of time. For instance, when the government needed to strengthen its moral authority, it adamantly refused to allow casinos to operate in Singapore. But when it became clear that a flagging tourism sector needed a boost, the government abandoned its more moralistic language for a hard economic justification for building not one but two casinos in global-city Singapore.
The pragmatist seizes opportunities and manoeuvres nimbly around threats, so focused on finding technical solutions for achieving the overriding goals that these goals practically disappear beyond the horizon of critical consciousnes
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- Pragmatism, initially an open-minded attitude, can therefore degenerate easily into an uncritical focus on technical mastery directed solely towards the achievement of a narrow and limited set of human aspirations, obscured and shielded from philosophical reflection, moral reasoning, and critique. Ironically, uncritical pragmatism can become a new dogma.
- The focus on ‘how to’ without thinking about ‘why’ encourages an ‘anything goes’ attitude that disregards the larger implications of one’s choices and actions.
- To prevent pragmatism from degenerating into yet another dogma that shoves into the blind spot the larger and less tangible consequences of our actions, we need to ensure that pragmatic decision-making must happen not in an intellectual vacuum. Pragmatists must not act in ignorance, but be deeply informed by a rationality that can expand beyond the narrowly technical and into the moral-political and the aesthetic. This will require a critical understanding of the significant ideas and values that have shaped the world.
- Can universities genuinely exceed the limited and limiting expectation that they must, first and foremost, serve the purpose of economic growth? Furthermore, it is not easy for a neoliberal university to maintain genuine autonomy in a world where universities compete fiercely in a global market for talent and resources. In this context, success can so easily degenerate into an uncritically pragmatic question of technique, with universities devoting their efforts and resources towards mastering the techniques for scoring top marks in the international ranking exercises.
- Traditionally, universities are perceived as spaces that provide a temporary life of contemplation in preparation for a ‘real’ life of action in the world: The use of the word ‘commencement’ to describe graduation ceremonies reflects some of this thinking. The pejorative reference to universities as ivory towers is a clear sign that this traditional model is inadequate. Thinking and doing must not be artificially separated and associated with student life and work life respectively, with the former subordinated to the apparent needs of the latter. The university experience should not be reduced to a stage in life that one has to put up with in order to obtain the right qualifications to get ahead in real life. Universities must graduate people who are more than excellent technical problem-solvers with little capacity for moral reasoning, critical thinking, and the imagination of alternative realms of possibility. Doers must also be thinkers; and, for higher education to be able to facilitate this, thinkers should also be doers.
- What we need is an educational approach that opposes uncritical pragmatism.
- I have argued that pragmatism can serve us well in a diverse, multicultural, and globalized world. I have also argued that pragmatism can easily degenerate into an unthinking mindset, more dogmatic than any ideology it pretends to distance itself from. Uncritical pragmatism engenders the doer who will not think beyond the most narrowly technical and profitable; the doer who is incapable of moral reasoning, critical thinking, creativity, and imagination; the doer who despises such things as naïve, time-wasting, or troublesome. The doer-who-will-not-think engenders and imprisons in a stereotypical ivory tower its opposite, the thinker-who-will-not-do. I have argued that universities must, now more than ever, break down these barriers between thinking and doing. They must resist the temptation to appear superficially practical and useful to the powerful doers-who-will-not-think, if this will mean compromising their mission to educate people more holistically so that they will have the philosophical capacity, the moral courage, and the imaginative vision to understand what it really means to be in the service of humanity.

Aug

2011

Rationally Speaking: Why you should hold your beliefs at arm’s length

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...ould-hold-your-beliefs-at.html

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Ideology Opinion Identity Communication Fragmentation

To begin with, by thinking of this opinion as a characteristic of his person, he is ensuring that criticisms of that opinion will feel like malicious personal attacks on him. I have experienced this from the inside (in my youth as an armchair Trotskyite), and seen similar tendencies in many true believers I’m acquainted with. Eventually, criticism of the idea comes to have a nasty emotional impact similar to criticism of, say, personal appearance.
Relatedly, by committing to this view in public, Carl is ensuring that changing his mind will be maximally difficult and embarrassing. We change our minds less often than we think, and part of the reas
(As an aside, this has huge implications for effective communication between people who disagree. For example, try to treat both your own beliefs and those of others as external to the person altogether. A simple change of phrasing from “I think you’re incorrect” to “I think this idea is incorrect” may make the difference between defensiveness and honest appraisal. On a personal level, I find it useful to think of beliefs as maps that I take out of an imaginary glove compartment.)
6 more annotation(s)...
- The third reason that Carl is wrong to call himself a monarchist (and why I think people oughtn’t to call themselves liberals, conservatives, libertarians, environmentalists or whatever) is that human brains are very leaky contraptions, and one corollary of this is that initially descriptive ideas tend to drift in the direction of prescriptivity (hence, inter alia, the naturalistic fallacy). Let’s say you notice, as a fact about yourself, that you favor low taxes and a generally small government on ethical and practical grounds. You look in a dictionary and, lo and behold, that is a big part of the definition of “conservative.” Out come the phonemes: “I am a conservative.” Aren’t words great?
  What you will probably not notice, however, is that increasingly when you don’t know what you think about some issue yet (say, your country’s stance on foreign affairs), you will take your cue from other self-identified conservatives, as opposed to thinking it through yourself and then describing your conclusion in political terminology. The normative self-definition has staged its coup d’etat. Whatever “conservatives” think, that is going to be your opinion. Of course, when I put it that way, it looks ridiculous. But from the inside, this process feels perfectly rational — like wisely throwing your lot in with a really smart group of people.
- I suggest we should take a piecemeal approach to political issues, avoiding an excessive focus on their historical relations with each other.
- The problem with calling yourself an “atheist” is not that the proposition itself is wrong. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a proposition more overdetermined by philosophical and scientific lines of evidence than this one: that all the creator beings humans have ever dreamt up are laughably improbable (if they even rise to the level of being coherent).
  Rather, the problems with such a self-definition are as follows:
  (1) You will probably develop “person with a hammer” syndrome, wherein every problem you see looks like a nail, or in this case a jihadi. Realistically, although religious belief is a big problem, it is not anything remotely like the biggest problem. If you flipped a switch and everybody on earth became an atheist, we would still retain most of our problems.
  (Arguably, a mass deconversion could actually be a bad or at least neutral thing, if there were no concomitant understanding of rationality in general, or of how ethics, meaning, emotion and subjectivity are supposed to fit into a determined and purely physical universe. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing — just ask the atheists who are now nihilists as well, or the people who think Young’s double-slit experiment proves that We Are All One Consciousness, Man.)
- Also, (2) Why do we care? What interesting thing does this tell us about you, other than your stance on one rather silly proposition? What DO you actually believe in, apart from not being a theist?
  It would be different if you had said “I’m a rationalist” or “I’m a mysterian” or whatever. These refer to interesting tendencies in philosophical thought — tendencies whose consequences are far-reaching indeed. As an aside, note that although being a rationalist should (I claim) result in very low subjective probabilities for creator beings, the term refers to the process by which such claims are to be considered — it doesn’t hard-code specific claims into its definition. Thank goodness.
- (3) In general, it’s bad practice to allow propositions — even very certain ones — into your self-definition. Reasons for this were discussed above: among other things, it makes changing your mind nearly impossible, as well as socially costly. Yes yes, I know you won’t need to change your mind on this question. But are you really so good at judging which propositions are near-certain, and which aren’t? If you say “odds of 99:1 against” on 100 separate occasions, you won’t be wrong more than once or twice... right?
- (4) It’s (probably) nothing to be proud of. If you grew up in a truly religious household or community, with unapologetic brainwashing and social seclusion along religious lines, then yes, you should be proud to have found your way through all those obstacles to the truth. If, however (like me) your parents gave you a measure of intellectual freedom, and your society does too, then you should be no more proud of your atheism than a middle-class westerner should be proud of a high-school diploma. Above all, in general, beliefs are for predicting future experiences, not for feeling proud.
  Just as a probability distribution is not an accomplishment, a policy preference is not a part of who you are.