The Applicator in Academia

Not too long ago, I mentioned to my wife, only partly joking, that because my career as a professor was in the applied science of marketing I was and am an applicator. I take ideas from the more fundamental disciplines and apply them in my teaching and writing.
 
I have come to accept the term as accurate and, in retrospect, have realized that my professors in both undergraduate and graduate school were applicators also.
 
Think of the person who installs new tile on your floor or shingles on your roof. The construction applicator takes what is on the shelf at the supply shop and lays it on your floor or roof. Professors do the same thing, in all fields of learning including philosophy. They take what’s on the shelf (of the more fundamental disciplines, the supply shop), apply it to their specific fields, then teach it to their students and write about it. The “shop” includes the discipline’s current and past literature that professors often accept too uncritically.
 
Philosophy is the most fundamental of the campus disciplines, so its “shelf” is the latest philosophy books and journal articles. Professors of philosophy—nearly all professors, actually—feel compelled to fit into the mold of that current context and teach and write in the same style as what they have read.*
 
What is on the shelf today for the business disciplines of marketing and management? The doctrine of pure and perfect competition and Keynesianism in economics and behaviorism (positivism more broadly) in psychology. The professors take these two doctrines as givens and, without question, spew them forth to their students and publication audiences.
 
If Austrian economics is acknowledged to exist at all, it is dismissed and disparaged. The same for any alternative in psychology. Cognitive psychology has been corrupted by behaviorism where it is now called “cognitive behavioral psychology” and “cognitive behavioral therapy.” Research and writing is entirely conducted in the older behaviorist mold. Studies must use statistics and probabilities (because there are no universals) and the “falsifiability” criterion of Karl Popper, rather than identification of the facts of reality and the formulation and clarification of universal concepts, are the fundamental methodologies. (Freud is also smeared and ignored, with the exception of specific training programs in psychoanalysis.)
 
Needless to say, Ayn Rand is still not taught, understood, or accepted in any way today in the academic world. (There are exceptions, but not many.) I am tempted to say that there is an “Ayn Rand derangement syndrome” operating in the minds of many academics. Nothing she said or wrote, as the attitude goes, could possibly be correct, interesting, or appropriate for a college classroom.
 
Neither Ayn Rand nor Ludwig von Mises are on the academic supply shelf.
 
This was true in the 1960s and ‘70s when I was in undergraduate and graduate school, and it seems to be the same today, perhaps worse, because of what is now available, namely the postmodern version of Marxism.
 
What did I do in graduate school (and somewhat as an undergraduate)? I called it my “double duty” education. In class and the textbooks, I reluctantly absorbed what was being taught me, but at home would go over the material to figure out what was wrong and what I thought was correct. It took extra time, but it was worth the effort.
 
Because so much bad epistemology was being taught to me in class—even marketing professors were trashing advertising—I began thinking about what became my first book In Defense of Advertising. I also quickly became aware that anything like that book could not be written or submitted as a PhD dissertation. It was not a “true [positivist] study.” My dissertation, consequently, was a study on perceived risk, which is a valid concept in psychology, but the results, to use Edith Packer’s word, were minutia.
 
The problem with the “applicators” of ideas is that everything on the shelf must be questioned and examined carefully for falsehoods, especially epistemological errors, then replaced with better ideas. Which means going away from the standard academic supply shop to find those better ideas, which is seldom done by today’s professors. It means a lot of rethinking of subjects from the ground up.
 
Schools of engineering and business are better than the “social” sciences and humanities, because the professors of engineering and business still rely on objective facts to teach their students how to build bridges and rockets and how properly to run a business for a profit. Engineering is better than business, as bad economics and psychology mentioned above taints the content of business courses. The so-called social sciences and the humanities are the worst.
 
Bad epistemology is everywhere in today’s academic world and it affects content. Good applicators, to conclude this metaphor, must know and use good epistemology—specifically, Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts—to analyze, review or reject, or expand and revise what is on the academic supply shelf before applying it for purposes of teaching and writing.
 
Better or improved tiles and shingles, or a totally new and creatively different covering, are what are needed in today’s academic world. This is how and why I call myself an applicator.
 
 
* See Brand Blanshard’s short book, On Philosophical Style, for a discussion of clarity in philosophical writing. All academics could learn from it.
 

“Men of Hard Science” and the Denial of Animal Emotions

In a previous post about psychiatry I put the phrase “men of hard science” in scare quotes to contrast these alleged experts with the more sensible and scientific kindness movement of nineteenth century mental health. In all fields, the “hard science” culture, which today of course includes some women, gospelizes philosophical materialism and the “if it’s not quantitative, it’s not scientific” approach to intellectual rigor.

It also preaches that ascribing human traits, such as consciousness, thoughts, or emotions, to the likes of dogs and cats is unscientific anthropomorphism, because materialism precludes the use of such terms when describing animal (or human) behavior. And “anthropomorphism” is used as a club to disparage anyone who uses such language.

Jeffrey Masson, Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst* turned bestselling author of books on the emotional life of animals, challenges the “hard science” approach to biology. Indeed, he points out in When Elephants Weep (p. 33) that women for many years were considered by their male colleagues to be too emotional, and therefore more likely to be anthropomorphic, to work directly with animals.

Yet none other than Charles Darwin and, more recently, Donald Griffin and Jane Goodall have championed the scientific study of animal consciousness and Goodall (Elephants, p. 3) has defended anecdotal evidence, that scorned lay technique “hard scientists” would never touch.**

The anthropomorphism charge stems from our alleged inability to know “with certainty” what goes on inside an animal mind. We don’t even know, the hard scientists say, if animals feel pain when they are being shocked or locked in isolation from all other animals and humans.

But it is an unjustified leap to conclude that we can know nothing about the contents of an animal’s consciousness and therefore require all descriptions of behavior to be mere responses to external stimuli. For example, if a lay person were to say that a dog is feeling left out and wants attention, the “proper” scientific jargon of hard science would be: the dog “is performing the submissive display of a low-ranking canid” (Elephants, p. 31).

Behavioristic reasoning such as this can be pushed to a solipsistic extreme by saying that all we can really know with certainty is the contents of our own mind, not that of other human beings or animals.  And torture of humans, which fortunately no hard scientist today would agree to, can be justified on grounds that no one can know with certainty whether the victim is really feeling pain when whipped and stretched on the rack (Elephants, p. 39).

The term “with certainty” above is in scare quotes because it is both a redundancy and an equivocation; probable knowledge, which we can obtain by observing and interacting with animals, is a percentage of certainty, so any knowledge we have is certain knowledge, just not one hundred percent certain. To know anything, even as a probability, is to know it with certainty.

And one of those interesting ironies of probable knowledge, Masson points out, is that animals may sometimes be zoomorphic in relation to their human companions, such as the cat that deposits a tasty morsel of gopher innard under the lady of the house’s desk (Elephants, p. 44).

The bottom line of the anthropomorphism argument is not that some people improperly ascribe human qualities to animals. It is the contradiction and hypocrisy of the “hard scientists” who use animals to test hypotheses about human pain and depression (Dogs Never Lie about Love, p. 20). And more significantly, but not surprising to those who work in the academic world, it is the cowardice of those scientists who secretly believe that animals have emotions, but will never say so in their published work and may even criticize those who do (Never Lie, p. 17). Courage and “hard science” do not necessarily go together.

The further contradiction of the hard scientists—and tragedy and disgrace—is their failure to examine and acknowledge the similarities the human animal shares with its lower brethren. It is this failure that allowed mad doctors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe the insane as wild beasts and, as a result, chain and beat them because animals were assumed not to feel pain.

Little progress, unfortunately, has been made today among the “men of hard science.”



* Masson became director of the Freud Archives in 1980. While in that position he discovered unpublished letters that shed light on Freud’s repudiation of his 1890’s seduction theory. Masson subsequently wrote The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory, arguing  that Freud lacked moral courage to stand up to professional indifference and cultural hostility to his claims of sexual abuse as the cause of patient hysteria. Children at the time were viewed as considerable distorters of the truth and respectable males, especially fathers, were beyond reproach. Masson’s payment for his courage and independence to publish these letters and his book was to be fired from his job and dismissed from all psychoanalytic societies.

** The validity of anecdotal evidence in science rests on the assumption that universals exist. A good scientist using sound epistemology needs only two or three observations, not a probabilistic sample of 500, to make a generalization. See In Defense of Advertising, pp. 153-58.