We are all potential anthropologists of our own professional tribes: embedded for years or decades, studying the unwritten rules, observing the curious customs of the tribesfolk. Does anyone ever go native to the point that they cannot step back and sense the peculiarity of their tribe’s distinctive praxis—as Horace Miner memorably did in “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” which is not just about American relationships with bodily appearance, but a commentary on anthropological method.
Why is "Why is this topic interesting or important?" considered obnoxious? Is asking that seem as insinuating they might not be doing interesting or important work? But my being there to attend the talk suggests I find the topic interesting.
Also, maybe a topic for a future essay : what do you think of philosopher John Searle's ideas about AI and consciousness?
But surely part of the speaker's role is to supply some answer to "why is this interesting or important?" Usually they do this at the beginning of the talk. Or at the end.
In that case, asking the question (at least, in the very general sense suggested here, perhaps I am being uncharitable in taking that sense literally - if so, sorry! I will mend my ways) would indeed be rather rude and, further, suggest one was not paying attention to the very beginning of the talk. Or the very end. Both seem like poor behavior on the audience's part.
A more specific version of the question would be fine, in principle, since it would engage the content of the talk rather than ask the speaker to repeat work they've already done or imply they have failed to do their job.
I don't think I agree about questions 1 and 2 being (de facto, culturally) forbidden.
I agree 1 can be fraught for all the reasons mentioned already, but I heard versions of it asked in grad school (as "what are the rules of the game?" in this debate), and I still hear versions of it asked today. In general, while I think the people asking this question don't always do as much as they could to blunt the implication that the speaker's talk was uninteresting/unmotivated, I'm still almost always grateful the question is asked, and eager to hear how it's answered. A specific version I hear runs roughly as follows. In a historical talk in which the central thesis is interpretive/exegetical, a version of this question will attempt to get the speaker to motivate the interest of the talk to non-historical audience. Is such-and-such historical figure's view on the topic of the talk independently defensible? Does he draw some distinction we can accept and find useful independently of the rest of his framework? Does the way he navigated some objection have lessons for some similar debate today? I know historians of philosophy differ on how much emphasis questions like this should get, but as a non-historian, I find it easier to get into a historical talk if I think questions like these have good answers.
On 2, I suspect part of the reason this isn't asked much is because of the sorts of dynamics you were attributing to the "old days". Even today, want to use their questions not only to provoke interesting discussion, but also to demonstrate their own intellectual prowess in the process. General purpose questions that can be asked of any talk don't do that. So while I agree that I almost never hear 2 asked at a talk, I'm less confident that's because it's not *allowed*.
And more generally on the distinction between the old days and now, while I completely agree about the shift in tone, I don't see that the new tone is deeply incompatible with the old (putative) purpose. In particular, I don't think things have changed so much that we can't still see part of the point of Q&A as probing just how robust some philosophical project is. People still offer powerful objections to talks, and pursue those lines of objection far enough that it's clear to (some of?) the audience when a project isn't particularly promising. But I think they just do it more politely, and are less likely to keep beating a dead horse when it's clear the speaker doesn't have a good response.
A quote from a former department chair at my grad program about the Q&A: "If you don't have anything not nice to say, don't say it at all".
But it almost never got around to personal attacks or insults. Hard, pointed, you're probably wrong about this, questions., but fair ones. Indeed, a personal attack would have been ridiculed by the audience. It's not why we were there.
It is so helpful to see someone think about this from a different discipline, because I think about the related questions in history all the time. Those questions being, I guess, 1. what is a talk/q&a for, 2. how might it be more usefully organized, the meta question of 3. why don’t we do it in a more useful way, and I guess also the meta-meta question of 4. why colleagues don’t ask the first three more often.
Except, and I do not say this in the Samuel Johnson humblebrag way, I think it’s all kind of worse in history. That’s because historians tend to frame our claims in such specific and local ways, and we are allergic to making broader claims. It’s not even all that common for someone to frame their work as “this other interpretation is wrong.” The intended relation of a given talk or paper to others about the same subject is therefore unclear, let alone to people in different subfields. With very rare exceptions we don’t have access to the evidence a presenter is using, and in fact part of the performance is to show how you've found and used some previously-obscure source. So the questions are usually of the "I'm curious, can you say more about that?" variety, with a few of "based on what you said, maybe there's a different interpretation" sprinkled in.
The result is that even within a subfield, unless a speaker’s work directly ties in with yours, their presentation is unlikely to have any meaningful influence on your aork, other than perhaps to add as a footnote somewhere. And for most of the people in the audience, the overall effect is even more limited, a perfectly pleasant "huh, interesting."
I'd like to think we can aim higher. But part of that would mean almost deeper retraining, so that historians make more ambitious and generalized claims in talks or papers, even at the risk of being shot down.
Thank you for the pointer to the Nacirema paper—that’s going right into my American Studies syllabus. Do you know “An anthropologist among the historians” by Bernard Cohn? From 1962, but still hilarious and devastating.
Why is "Why is this topic interesting or important?" considered obnoxious? Is asking that seem as insinuating they might not be doing interesting or important work? But my being there to attend the talk suggests I find the topic interesting.
Also, maybe a topic for a future essay : what do you think of philosopher John Searle's ideas about AI and consciousness?
But surely part of the speaker's role is to supply some answer to "why is this interesting or important?" Usually they do this at the beginning of the talk. Or at the end.
In that case, asking the question (at least, in the very general sense suggested here, perhaps I am being uncharitable in taking that sense literally - if so, sorry! I will mend my ways) would indeed be rather rude and, further, suggest one was not paying attention to the very beginning of the talk. Or the very end. Both seem like poor behavior on the audience's part.
A more specific version of the question would be fine, in principle, since it would engage the content of the talk rather than ask the speaker to repeat work they've already done or imply they have failed to do their job.
I don't think I agree about questions 1 and 2 being (de facto, culturally) forbidden.
I agree 1 can be fraught for all the reasons mentioned already, but I heard versions of it asked in grad school (as "what are the rules of the game?" in this debate), and I still hear versions of it asked today. In general, while I think the people asking this question don't always do as much as they could to blunt the implication that the speaker's talk was uninteresting/unmotivated, I'm still almost always grateful the question is asked, and eager to hear how it's answered. A specific version I hear runs roughly as follows. In a historical talk in which the central thesis is interpretive/exegetical, a version of this question will attempt to get the speaker to motivate the interest of the talk to non-historical audience. Is such-and-such historical figure's view on the topic of the talk independently defensible? Does he draw some distinction we can accept and find useful independently of the rest of his framework? Does the way he navigated some objection have lessons for some similar debate today? I know historians of philosophy differ on how much emphasis questions like this should get, but as a non-historian, I find it easier to get into a historical talk if I think questions like these have good answers.
On 2, I suspect part of the reason this isn't asked much is because of the sorts of dynamics you were attributing to the "old days". Even today, want to use their questions not only to provoke interesting discussion, but also to demonstrate their own intellectual prowess in the process. General purpose questions that can be asked of any talk don't do that. So while I agree that I almost never hear 2 asked at a talk, I'm less confident that's because it's not *allowed*.
And more generally on the distinction between the old days and now, while I completely agree about the shift in tone, I don't see that the new tone is deeply incompatible with the old (putative) purpose. In particular, I don't think things have changed so much that we can't still see part of the point of Q&A as probing just how robust some philosophical project is. People still offer powerful objections to talks, and pursue those lines of objection far enough that it's clear to (some of?) the audience when a project isn't particularly promising. But I think they just do it more politely, and are less likely to keep beating a dead horse when it's clear the speaker doesn't have a good response.
A quote from a former department chair at my grad program about the Q&A: "If you don't have anything not nice to say, don't say it at all".
But it almost never got around to personal attacks or insults. Hard, pointed, you're probably wrong about this, questions., but fair ones. Indeed, a personal attack would have been ridiculed by the audience. It's not why we were there.
It is so helpful to see someone think about this from a different discipline, because I think about the related questions in history all the time. Those questions being, I guess, 1. what is a talk/q&a for, 2. how might it be more usefully organized, the meta question of 3. why don’t we do it in a more useful way, and I guess also the meta-meta question of 4. why colleagues don’t ask the first three more often.
Except, and I do not say this in the Samuel Johnson humblebrag way, I think it’s all kind of worse in history. That’s because historians tend to frame our claims in such specific and local ways, and we are allergic to making broader claims. It’s not even all that common for someone to frame their work as “this other interpretation is wrong.” The intended relation of a given talk or paper to others about the same subject is therefore unclear, let alone to people in different subfields. With very rare exceptions we don’t have access to the evidence a presenter is using, and in fact part of the performance is to show how you've found and used some previously-obscure source. So the questions are usually of the "I'm curious, can you say more about that?" variety, with a few of "based on what you said, maybe there's a different interpretation" sprinkled in.
The result is that even within a subfield, unless a speaker’s work directly ties in with yours, their presentation is unlikely to have any meaningful influence on your aork, other than perhaps to add as a footnote somewhere. And for most of the people in the audience, the overall effect is even more limited, a perfectly pleasant "huh, interesting."
I'd like to think we can aim higher. But part of that would mean almost deeper retraining, so that historians make more ambitious and generalized claims in talks or papers, even at the risk of being shot down.
Thank you for the pointer to the Nacirema paper—that’s going right into my American Studies syllabus. Do you know “An anthropologist among the historians” by Bernard Cohn? From 1962, but still hilarious and devastating.