Sunday, October 16, 2016

Philosophy for PhD students


I keep thinking how no one seems to even know anything about philosophy of science. And I am talking about lecturers and doctoral students. Three years ago, I audited a series of research methods seminars at a certain university faculty where they literally laughed at the mention of epistemology. The consensus was that it is a nonsense concern. One student added, with everyone nodding to that, that - verbatim quote - "studying epistemology would undermine the very existence of our discipline". I wish I had filmed that moment, priceless.
 
Actually, there's not even a crash course in any basic philosophy for PhD (Doctor Philosophiae!!!) students that I know of! When I ask my fellow doctoral researchers, 'Who are your three favourite philosophers?' more often than not I get blank stares in response. And that is from students of social sciences, arts and humanities! Don't even get me started on natural scientists! Those guys just "believe" in science and their pop-prophets, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking, who all I bet never sat next to a philosophy textbook in  their lives.

I really think that if SOAS wants to up its game it needs to make training in philosophy and formal logic compulsory. And real proper methodology training too, like at LSE. I remember vividly  how an academic supervisor reacted to my including a methodology chapter in my thesis. Doesn't how we collect data  affect our research findings?

When I try to talk about it here, I usually get, 'You think too much'.

Isn't that what we are meant to do as academics, thinking too much?


Surely, thinking critically about how we think should not be such an esoteric concern for a scientist?

What do you think?

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P. S. Adjacent to this is why we need to teach social theory to even start discussing any social issues. At the same seminar that I mentioned above, I was ridiculed for suggesting just that. The lecturer who conducted the seminar was part of that too.

Thursday, October 13, 2016

What are social facts and why we need to bother

Social facts to society are like grammar to a language, a higher level of abstraction that is nonetheless real, as it governs the way things/words are ordered. You can speak a language without knowing anything about its grammar.  Perhaps, that may affect the higher level of your command but you should mostly get by.

It is possible to deny the existence of social facts because they are not real in the sense of how physical things are real. It is never having been told about that that enabled Margaret Thatcher to claim, with a beady-eyed aplomb, that "there is no such thing as society". (The same woman insisted that a country finance is just like someone's purse: a deliberate lie  or a misguided naiveté, we shall  never know.) Some professional academics I know told me, very seriously, that identity, values and post-liberalism do not exist. They doubtlessly live according with their middle-classes values and various identities (class, gender, race, religion, etc.) in a very Neo-Liberal reality of latter-day London, yet since they have not been taught the grammar of (their own) social existence, they cannot quite put their finger on it. There is no vocabulary to talk about it and therefore it exists not: out of mind, out of sight. It is just like some of my students, very bright and eloquent young adults, who do not know a subjunctive clause from a parenthesis, because someone long time ago decided that teaching grammar at school is a waste of time, innit.

Learning grammar and learning social theory can and often do open up people's mind to a realisation that there is more to reality than just what is visible to the naked eye. As Castaneda's Don Juan wisely said, 'The true essence of the tree is between its leaves.' Without such an insight, one won't be able to see, metaphorically, the forest for the trees. Which automatically should disqualify anyone from any discussion about social matters. Unfortunately, that is still not the case, particularly where it matters: in politics and academia. Hence, we end up taught and led by people whose ability for mental abstraction and educated discussion does not exceed that of your average teenager.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Historians and the present

Historians seem to need to wait for secondary sources before assessing current social reality. Thirty years, on the average.