Ümit D. Yalçın

East Carolina University Department of Philosophy

Greenville, NC 27858-4353

yalcinu@ecu.edu

Humanities as Quality Control Education

1. What is it and what it does

The debate on the place and value of humanities education in the college curriculum

is not new. However, none of the recent discussions I am familiar with seem to focus

on one of the most essential features of humanities education: that overall, it

constitutes the best quality control mechanism for consumers in the marketplace of

ideas. This is the proposition I wish to support.

I do not consider demands for a vindication of humanities education to be

inappropriate. Cost control by the public, who funds universities either through

taxes or fees, is an essential and very welcome process that should be part of any

healthy economic and political structure. In fact, I also tend to pose similar

budgetary questions: Why should there be a Construction Management Department

in the university and why is it not better housed in a technical school? What

contribution does the 100% increase in administrative staff over the last 20 years

make to a university’s overall mission? Why should I pay for a program in

Leadership Studies when the whole notion of being led by accredited leaders sounds

antithetical to the democratic ideals of our society? Why is my son’s university

entitled to charge me higher fees, so it can put on picnics to advertise the institution

and feed me stringy barbecue? I do ask these questions, and expect rational

answers, and sometimes get them. In short, there is nothing wrong with asking

humanities education to justify itself and expect a satisfactory answer.

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Here is my answer to the question "what is a humanities education good for and

why should we include it in the university curriculum?”:

The Humanities develop and sharpen certain key skills without which it is

highly improbable to be a conscientious consumer in the marketplace of

ideas.

Let me expand and clarify a number of key points in this claim.

First we need to be clear that the skills I am talking about are not specialized skills

like being able to parse Sanskrit (mentioned in Stover 2017), or being able to tell the

difference between metalepsis and synecdoche. They are generic skills that have

wide-ranging application in almost all areas of life. These key skills are reading and

listening comprehension, conceptual analysis, critical and creative thinking,

and “range”. {other terms I have been considering instead of “range” are: general culture, ontology, factualness, depth-of-field [from a photographic analogy], world-wisdom} I will henceforth call them the “six

sigmas of the humanities” (SSH).

The terminology I use to denote these skills is sometimes also used to denote other

things. Given more time and space, I would take time to specify precisely what I

mean by each. For example, I use the expression generic “critical thinking” to denote

what is taught in critical thinking and logic classes, and widely used in the

humanities and elsewhere to analyze and evaluate discourse and argumentation. It

only partially overlaps with what is commonly known as Bloom's conception of

critical thinking. (Bloom 1956) It is also different from discipline-specific critical

thinking skills. However I need to give a more detailed explication of the last of

these, range, since the expression I use is unfamiliar and probably a coinage.

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Perhaps the expression “liberal education” is what comes closest in English to what I

denote with “range”. Nevertheless, I reject using the former expression for two

reasons: first, the unfortunate connotations that have come to be associated with

the word "liberal" in contemporary discourse; second, the fact that liberal education

covers and engenders more than the specific skill I have in mind. A better word

exists in German: “Allgemeinbildung”, which can be literally translated as “general

formation” or “general education”.1 Given that German Literature generated a new

name, “Bildungsroman” to cover literary works that focus on the growth and

development of the mental properties of a protagonist from early youth to early

adulthood, I suspect that contemporary usage of “education” as practical job training

does not cover the implications of “Bildung” in German. Maybe the meaning of these

two words were closer 50 years ago, but this does not seem to be the case at the

present. If I were to borrow from data science, I would call it “the ability to access

and utilize big and wide-ranging data in model construction".2 Let me explain:

We have all come to learn during the last decade the significance of big data coupled

with computerized data analysis techniques. Machine learning algorithms (MLA) are

capable of constructing complex models out of big data unmanageable by humans,

prompting some to suggest that such processes are nothing but instances of

scientific hypothesis formation and discovery (Kelly 1987, Freno 2009). The salient

point here is the interdependency of algorithm and big data: however excellent an

MLA might be, only coupling it with extensive and wide-ranging data will produce

interesting and potentially sound models. In a sound-byte, an algorithm without big

and wide data is myopic. 3

1 A word with very similar connotations also exists in Turkish: “genel kültür”, literally general culture.2 If one tries to seek a suitable word among the antonyms of “ignorant”, one will find such words as “educated”, “learned”, “well-informed”, “skilled” and “wise”.3 Statisticians often base their research on much smaller datasets, which are deemed adequate. I will not get involved in a discussion of the assumptions relative to which such adequacy claims are made; suffice it to say that adequacy is not necessarily being optimal.

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We need to remember that our minds operate in similar fashion. However much we

train our minds to comprehend written and verbal inputs, to analyze them, to spot

fallacies, and to make predictions, all of these capabilities are useless if they are not

supplied with wide-ranging and abundant data on which to operate, and build a

model of sufficient complexity. Conjoin this with the fact that we are not only

breadwinners but also parents, citizens, jurors, voters and many other things that

require us to make evaluations beyond those we make in our professional roles. The

apparently inescapable conclusion is that we need to feed our minds with data

beyond that which enables us to earn our daily bread. We will succeed in building

sufficiently complex models that are useful in fulfilling these variegated roles only

by absorbing adequate data relevant to all these roles. This is part of what the

humanities education does, i.e., supply the mind with historical social, political,

economic, artistic and philosophical inputs by means of which one can build a

world-model to evaluate products relevant to all aspects of life in the marketplace of

ideas. The possession, consciousness and hence the ability to utilize such data to

synthesize complex world models is what I denote by “range”.4 I will have more to

say about this skill after I finish preliminary clarifications.

While formulating the SSH, I called these skills generic as opposed to specialized.

Perhaps the following analogy with the sciences will help clarify that distinction.

Being able to prepare a slide for a microscope, to change the belt of a dryer or to

generate a bunch of questionnaire items for marketing research are specialized

4 I talk blithely of the data and inputs of the disciplines of the Humanities, but is this kosher? Let us try to ignore Critical Theory, the Hermeneutic tradition and other European currents in philosophy; even then, how can we circumvent the “fact” that even key figures in 20th century Analytical Philosophy (Hanson 1958, Kuhn 1962, Goodman 1978, to name a few) seem to suggest that there are no theory-neutral data? Worse, is this not true especially about the ideology-laden “facts” of history? All I can say is that I leave it up to the reader to apply the SSH to all of these products in the marketplace of ideas. Without any hint at sarcasm or rancor, I welcome the possibility that those with better aptitude to use the SSH (especially those with better range) will find quality control mechanisms that will supplant the SSH. I consider the meta-critical potential of the SSH as one of its epistemic virtues.

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skills. But these skills have little to do either with becoming a scientist or being able

to tell good science apart from bad science. The skills that enable one to do so are

the wide-ranging skills taught in methodology classes in the sciences. These are the

classes that teach how to set up a well-designed laboratory test, to factor analyze

one’s data or how to set up and interpret an MTMM matrix, thereby enabling the

student to attain more sophisticated and wide-ranging skills than what can be fitted

in a technical manual. If one is interested, pursuing this line of though might also

enable us to distinguish technical or vocational schools from the university.

Analogously, the generic skills mentioned in my defense of the humanities carry the

student well beyond the mastery of narrowly focused skills and techniques. They

enable her to comprehend and critically evaluate material outside of her narrow

expertise. They arm both the ITCS student who has the specialized skill to tweak the

tolerance parameter of a gradient-descent algorithm, and the philosophy student

who has the specialized skill to construct a derivation in modal logic, with the ability

to listen to and understand a speech in political economy, and to evaluate it.

Second, the claim I make about the role of humanities in education is a probabilistic

claim which takes into account the fact that there could always be exceptional

individuals who already have these skills prior to a humanities education. Such

outliers always exist, but do not diminish the significance of a statistical claim. It is

also consistent with the sad fact that some individuals will not develop these skills

despite undergoing such education.

Third, the claim does not suggest that the humanities education is the only way

such skills can be attained or sharpened. Once again, I grant that there are

exceptional individuals who have the requisite meta-skills and attitudes to sharpen

SSH on their own and perhaps outperform most university graduates. Nevertheless,

in this day and age, a humanities education is still the most effective and efficient

manner in which these skills can be attained by statistically normal people.

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Fourth, the claim is intended merely to furnish an instrumental defense of

humanities education. I do believe in the inherent value of the humanities in

particular, and of searching for truth, in general. For example, finding the truth

about the best way to deploy one’s pieces in a chess game is inherently valuable.

However, I would not expect anyone to fund me to excavate such truths unless

doing so had instrumental value for these people, where such value is measured in

terms of what they consider currency (viewing enjoyment, aesthetic value, national

pride, etc.). Consequently, my claim focuses on the instrumental value of humanities

education without negating its inherent value. Below, we will discuss the nature of

the currency in further detail.

The current defense differs from other instrumental defenses of the humanities

(such as the Harvard Committee report (1945) and the President’s Commission on

Higher Education report (1947) highlighted in Musil 2015) in that no assumption is

made that humanities education is only valuable for the pursuit of democracy. The

quality control mechanism works across the board: the SSH are neutral to the

mental products on which they can be brought to bear.

Fifth and last, I will explicate what I mean by the expression "the marketplace of

ideas". Perhaps some will consider this as no more than belaboring the obvious.

Nevertheless, given that we live in an era of accelerated communication which often

results in rapid semantic shifts even in commonly used expressions, I would prefer

to clearly express what I have in mind.

The world is full of people who wish us to believe, think, and hence act in certain

ways.5 Some of these folks are quite generous: they offer us products that tell us

how to live our lives for free, by passing out pamphlets or posting on YouTube.

Others are willing to sell us life-saving manuals for meager compensation, or for a

substantial fee; one can find thousands of such products on the shelves of major

5 At the same time, there are those who would wish us to believe, think and act differently than they do because this would serve to further their aims.

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booksellers and libraries, as well as the labyrinths of the internet. You can find these

people in newspapers, on TV, in religious temples and yes, even in university

classrooms. I summarize this ubiquitous “commerce” as follows: all these folks are

offering us mental products intending that we consume and internalize them to a

greater or lesser degree. They expect us to "buy" their ideas even when they do not

ask for compensation. This is the marketplace of ideas.

I emphasize that in this discussion, I do not speculate about the motives of these

vendors. Some might be trying to save us, others might be trying to manipulate us,

and yet others might be doing what they do because they have nothing else to do.

Some might believe in what they're selling, others might not. At the same time, I

emphasize that the quality of the product they offer is quite independent from their

motives. A very well-intentioned producer of ideas might unfortunately end up

producing bad ideas, while a self-serving manipulator might be producing high-

quality ideas. In short, using the terminology of the humanities, I wish to emphasize

that I am not about to commit the ad hominem fallacy.

You might be wondering why I talk about a marketplace of ideas and not of

ideological battles and equally lofty strifes. {This word is spelled correctly despite what the spellchecker says} Partly because not all competition is

warfare. More importantly, to emphasize the mundaneness of this commercial

activity. These mental products are part and parcel of our daily consumption, as

much as the products that surround us in our local supermarkets and their

contemporary electronic analogues. One might think of engaging in ideological

battles as a career choice, a lifestyle, in short, as a supererogatory act of free will.

However, it is hard to see shopping in the marketplace of ideas as anything but a

mundane necessity when one considers that thought is food for action. Intentional,

free action of any kind is predicated on having beliefs, ideas, representations of our

environment, and also on having goals, desires and motives. Only when we have

both components are we in a position to say "I am currently at point A, I intend to

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reach point B, but not by route C (I do not wish to get mud on my shoes); I will take

route D.” We must act, so we must think, and it pays to think well.

Yes, we have a store of these ideas in our mental pantry, thanks to which we

navigate in life, for better or worse. But the pantry is in a constant state of flux.

Internal reasons, such as curiosity and dissatisfaction with current conditions, and

external reasons such as putative changes in the environment (new boss, new baby,

newly discovered “fact” that Turks eat babies, etc.) and advertising (these glasses

make you see better, this filtering method really cleans up the junk in your mental

pantry, and this is what you should use to fill up the newly created space) , ensure

this dynamism.

Unfortunately, we are all too familiar with the paving stones of hell-alley. No matter

how well intentioned idea-vendors might be, a significant number of their products

are defective. If you are not convinced of this and you believe that I'm spewing

pessimism, consider this platitude: since so many of these products offer us

mutually incompatible maps of our environment, and mutually exclusive “correct”

targets, we have to conclude that most of them are defective.6

Let me recapitulate my claim in defense of the humanities after these clarifications:

Everyone needs to shop in the marketplace of ideas. Many of the products one will

find in this market are defective. To avoid such defective products, one needs

knowledge, skills and techniques for quality control. These are what I called the SSH.

They enable us to keep our nose above water and survive. Unless one is an outlier,

the most effective and efficient way to appropriate the SSH is through a humanities

education in an institution of tertiary learning.

6 If one is a relativist who believes that apparently mutually incompatible mental products can be all true in some relativized sense , one might not have this problem.

Also, please note that “defective” does not necessarily mean “completely false”. It just means that one should not buy the complete product, the “package”, unless the defect is somehow fixed. I thank Alexander Yalçın for bringing the need to emphazize this caveat to may attention.

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2. How it works

So far, this is just a claim. I have not provided one shred of evidence to support it,

and the support I will provide below will be minimal. My main purpose here and

now has been to pinpoint, highlight and explicate what I consider to be a crucial but

neglected claim for an instrumental defense of humanities’ place in the college

curriculum.

Before offering any evidence in support of this claim, let me make two things very

clear. From a highly abstract perspective, the claim on the table is that certain

generic skills bring you certain benefits. First, it pays to be clear about the nature of

these benefits, and the perspective from which we recognize them as “benefits”.

What kind of benefit accrues from “being able to detect defective products in the

marketplace of ideas”? Probably not always things such as longevity, higher salaries,

or lower incarceration rates that are relatively easy to operationalize and monetize

(but see the discussion of (6) below). This is hardly surprising when one considers

that many of the things we cite as the guiding beacons of our lives as individuals and

as a society are moral and non-moral values, such as freedom, justice, happiness and

truth. When Plato used the Ring of Gyges myth to pose the question: “Why be

moral?” (or even more widely, “Why seek the truth about morality?”), he was not

looking for an answer in terms of higher employment rates and salaries. He was

writing the Republic, no less, and his point was that there is so much more to being

human and a citizen of a human community than employment and income. We need

to consider all these other values also as coinage, even if they are not minted in

metal.

The second point I wish to bring to light is related to the first. Of course, wishing not

to buy defective ideas reflects a value, as much as wishing not to buy rotten apples.

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Some call it “the pursuit of truth”.7 However it is possible that other values might

trump this particular value. Perhaps truth is bitter and some prefer sweeter fare.

Hence, just for the sake of this discussion, we could also say that how you wish to

shop is also a matter of lifestyle-choice. Some shoppers might strive for best value,

others to maximize spending (“consume conspicuously”, as defined in Veblen 1898);

and there are many other alternatives. In that case, consider what I have said and

will say as addressed to those who give priority to this particular value, i.e., the

pursuit of truth. This is the value to be maximized in the marketplace of ideas,

whether we are shopping in the Physics or the Sociology aisle.

I have to face an important objection at this point:

“Yes, we are interested in the pursuit of truth in technological fields; that is why we emphasize the importance of STEM education. And we grant that some of the skills you highlight are useful for this endeavor. But others are not. Specifically, what you call “range” is totally useless. What does college education have to do with supplying students with so-called “data” about being citizens, parents, voters, etc.? All this is already done by other institutions in our society. Further discussion of these in the college would only confuse students and weaken their will.”

I will not answer this objection at this point for two reasons. First, I think the

objection does a pretty good job of answering itself. Second, I believe that the

demonstrative application of the SSH below will, to a large extent, also serve to

answer this objection .

Now to the minimal evidence I promised, which will be presented “in practice”. In

other words, what I will do is analogous to a soccer coach saying: “Instead of giving

you a vindication of the 4-1-4-1 formation using theoretical arguments and past

examples, I will play it against one of the strongest contemporary teams. You judge

the merits of the system.”

7 I am talking here about the generic pursuit of truth, as opposed to the pursuit of truth in a specialized area such as “the best way to defend against the Sokolsky Opening in chess”.

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Like many of my readers, I believe in the value of democracy. Put aside the question

of how and why I bought this mental product. Once having bought it, I am

interested in buying other mental products on how to sustain and empower the

democratic structure in which I live. While shopping for such ancillary products, I

see in display the following by a team of well-respected vendors:

“Intellectuals are, as Schumpeter put it "people who wield the power of the spoken and the written word, and one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs”. In some measure, the advanced industrial societies have spawned a stratum of value-oriented intellectuals who often devote themselves to the derogation of leadership, the challenging of authority, and the unmasking and delegitimization of established institutions, their behavior contrasting with that of the also increasing numbers of technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals. In an age of widespread secondary school and university education, the pervasiveness of the mass media, and the displacement of manual labour by clerical and professional employees, this development constitutes a challenge to democratic government which is, potentially, at least, as serious as those posed in the past by the aristocratic cliques, fascist movements, and communist parties” (Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki 1975, p. 7. Bolding by author.) 8

The passage seems to say:

(1) Intellectuals are people who can write or speak well, and they are not directly

responsible for practical affairs.

8 Actually, Schumpeter (1947) gives up on providing a verbal definition of “intellectual”; he settles on a “definition by enumeration” that alludes to 5th century BC:

Let us give up trying to define by words and instead define “epideiktically”: in the Greek museum we can see the object, nicely labeled. The sophists, philosophers and rhetors—however strongly they objected to being thrown together, they were all of the same genus—of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. illustrate ideally what I mean. That practically all of them were teachers does not destroy the value of the illustration. (p. 147)

Nevertheless, this does not stop others, including Nobel laureate Hayek (1948) to proceed as if Schumpeter had offered a verbal definition.

Of course, this does not mean that Schumpeter’s “epideiktic” definition would have been more illuminating when one considers that the terms “sophist” , “rhetor” and yes, even “philosopher” are as much in need of clarification as “intellectual”!

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(2) There are two groups of intellectuals.

(3) One group (group A) gives priority to values (parsing “value-oriented”)

(4) Group A derogates leaders, challenges authority.

(5) They also unmask established institutions and undermine their legitimacy.

(6) The other group (group B) gives priority to technical pursuits (parsing

“technocratic”)

(7) Group B does not exhibit the actions and attitudes of Group A , they do what they

are told by those who make the policies designed to govern their actions (parsing

“policy-oriented”).

(8) Group A poses a very serious challenge to the governments of democratic

countries. In fact, if one goes by the examples they are compared with, they wish to

replace democratic governments by something else.

What we have is a product comprised of at least eight parts some of which might be

independent from each other while others might be related to each other. I will

investigate each in turn.

(1) The product gives, at best, a partial definition of one of its key terms,

"intellectual". But even as a partial definition, it suffers from a number of problems.

First, certain key terms used by the definition are themselves quite vague. What are

practical affairs; do they include construction, education, news reporting,

entertainment, legislation? How direct is direct responsibility? Take a small sample:

Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Dr. King, Rev. Jerry Falwell and Churchill. They are all

eloquent speakers and writers and they are all directly involved in what can be

construed as practical affairs (killing people, emancipating slaves, saving souls, etc.).

Are they intellectuals? I cannot decide whether I am one or not, or whether I want

to be one… How about the vendors of the product I am evaluating? They certainly

appear to be value-oriented and they seem to have the power of the written word.

Yet, some of them are also directly involved in practical affairs (as much as any of

the names mentioned above)!

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Ambiguity and vagueness paves the way to meaning shifts (a.k.a., equivocation) in

mid-argument. In fact, see how this plays out in (5) and (6) below.

(2) Love it or leave it. Patriots and traitors. White hats and black hats. Whenever

some piece of discourse begins by enumerating the number of alternatives I should

consider, the warning light starts to blink. The informal fallacy most often called

false dilemma or false dichotomy is very commonly used to control the thinking of

one's audience. When used with ill intention, it is a disinformation technique that

represents the situation at hand differently than it is. It ignores, and hopes that the

audience will ignore, alternatives that are not presented by the “author”. Of course,

one might not commit the false dilemma intentionally; it might emerge from the

limited vision of the producer. In either case, one cracks the false dilemma by

noticing it thanks to one’s critical thinking skills, and utilizing one’s range and

creative thinking to unearth the suppressed alternatives. Three elements of the SSH

play a crucial role in this process.

Are we confronted with a false dilemma here? Are we being told that there are only

two kinds of intellectuals, or is the discourse focusing only on two while allowing

that there might be others? We will mark the potential trap and proceed.

(3) If my parsing of "value oriented" is correct I see no danger in buying this claim.

Since a significant majority of the US and world population believes in a God given

system of moral values, and strives to abide by these, I should not think that it

would be difficult to find a group of intellectuals who share values and structure

their lives around these values.

(4) I will not buy this part of the product as it stands. I know freedom loving

intellectuals derogated King George and risked their lives and those of others to

challenge imperial authority (Boston Tea Party). I know how God-fearing Rush

Limbaugh derogated the president of the United States and challenged presidential

authority. People still talk (often with admiration) about Yeshua ben Yosef who

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derogated religious leaders and challenged their authority. So yes, some value-

driven intellectuals tend to do such things. But I will not buy the sweeping

generalization of the product, because history shows that there are roughly as many

value-oriented intellectuals who are apologists for the social and political

institutions that promulgate the values they hold dear. Just consider the editorial

pieces that abound in the press about the value of Capitalism and Democracy in

contemporary America, and similar editorials in favor of Fascism and Socialism

during the Fascist and Socialist societies of yore. 9

(5) I wish I knew what "unmasking established institutions" means. Soviet

intellectual dissidents like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn said or wrote copiously to

unmask what they saw as the corruption of the Soviet Oligarchy. Authors like Le

Carré, Kerr and Furst have written much to lay bare the methods and machinations

of various Eastern and Western intelligence services. Is this “unmasking of

institutions”? Or is the focus intended to be events such as the Watergate Affair, the

Whitewater Affair and the Lockheed scandal in which presidents, prime ministers

and princes were accused of crimes and occasionally found guilty? Ambiguity again.

I also have one other concern which can be displayed with a minimum amount of

conceptual analysis. If someone who occupies a social or political role acts in a way

that does not fit the legal or social demands of that role, they undermine their own

legitimacy. The perpetrator of the misdeed does the damage, not the “police” who

catches the “perp”! People who call out the venality of public servants do not

undermine the legitimacy of these offices; they just expose a hidden crime. They

thereby help us strengthen these institutions by appointing more worthy public

servants or installing better quality-control mechanisms. If I engage in sexual

9 Of course, this assumes that journalists are intellectuals. Given the vagueness of the definition, my assumption can be challenged. But this only serves to highlight the irreparable damage done by a vague definition: it allows the “author” to sling mud, and at the same time apparently slip away at will. I emphasize the use of “allow” in my previous sentence: I do not imply the authors of the passage we are analyzing are engaging in such practices.

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harassment in my workplace, and get called for my crime, my accusers have not

damaged my office, I am responsible for the damage. I can justifiably complain that

my accusers are maliciously trying to damage my office and institution only in the

case of a false accusation (mud-slinging).

But let us not be naïve; once again history teaches us that all kinds of people, from

peasants to presidents, have filed false accusations to undermine the legitimacy of

their opponents, or the institutions they dislike. So let me formulate what I can buy

here: in the name of the values they hold dear, some intellectuals have exposed the

wrongdoing of some social and political actors who were undermining the

legitimacy of the institutions they served and represented. Some other intellectuals

have made false and malicious accusations of this sort while paying lip service to

“serving higher values” (e.g., the libelous press campaign that drove the French

Minister of the Interior Roger Salengro to suicide in 1936).

(6) This is highly puzzling. Does someone who "gives priority to technical pursuits"

write and speak well? Do they have the power of speech and writing? If not, in what

sense are they intellectuals? If they do, why don't they use these skills? Is it implied

that they don't care about values? Or is it that they do, but they are willing to trump

their values because they just prefer producing new marketing and genetic

engineering techniques, new food-preservatives, selfie-sticks, F-22s and MIG-35s?

In short, the description of these individuals is very unclear, and it is hard to see

how Schumpeter’s partial definition of “intellectual” fits them.

However, whether one calls them this or that (technocrat, technical intellectual), I

know that this kind of individual exists, and I also know that they produce

innovations utilized by other people (who may or may not share their values).

The technician/engineer Orban (Urban) , probably a Transylvanian, cast mega-

guns for the siege of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Some believe

that these played a significant role in the fall of the city.

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Bruno Tesch perfected and supplied Zyklon-B gas to his government knowing how it

was intended to be used in Auschwitz. He was a member of the Nazi Party. He was

executed in Hamelin Prison in 1946. (It is interesting that his executioner was also a

famous technician, Albert Pierrepoint, who then tried his hand at being a “value-

oriented intellectual”: he wrote a book in which he argued that capital punishment

is not a deterrent.)

Wernher von Braun produced V2 rockets for Germany during WW2 and later

helped contribute to the US space program as the director of Marshall Space Flight

Center. Von Braun was awarded military decorations as he rose to the rank of major

in the SS (1933-1945) He surrendered to the Allies in 1945. After getting

transferred to the US, he received many civilian decorations for his contributions to

the space program, including the prestigious NASA Distinguished Service Medal in

1969.

Ten Nobel Laureates (ranging from technical fields like Physics, to Philosophy and

including Albert Einstein and Max Born) signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto,

calling governments to pay heed to the dangers posed by weapons of mass

destruction. One of the most remembered and quoted sentences from that

manifesto is “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”

Which, if any, one of these fit the second category of “intellectuals” the product

describes?

(7) Yet another part of the product I cannot buy “as is”. If my interpretation of

"policy driven" is correct, then I have to say that there are a vast number of

counterexamples. Just a few that come to mind: Paul Revere who set up a spy

network against his official government; thousands of German citizens, a significant

number of them technically oriented, who did not just do what they were told by

their National Socialist government (sadly, most of them ended up in concentration

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camps); military technicians all around the world, famous for issuing “Non Serviam”

messages to their governments, and staging coups. Hence, I can buy the qualified

claim that some “technocratic intellectuals” just do what they are told, but cannot go

along with the suggestion that this is a “defining characteristic”.

Time to pause before the final and crowning portion of this product, and take stock.

I am trying to assess the product of individuals who seem to have “the power of the

written word”. I already have good reason to reject their product because of the

conceptual confusions and the fallacies involved. At the same time, we know that

what came so far was only a preamble to a significant conclusion. Let us see now

whether that conclusion follows from what has been laid out so far.

(8) In a nutshell, the conclusion of the product is:

Type A intellectuals pose a threat to the governments of democratic societies.

How can we evaluate a claim like this without having a clear grasp of what kind of

beast a Type A intellectual is? Is the paradigm instance the philosopher Joseph

Goebbels, who made a career of mud-slinging against all opponents (including

democratic governments) of the National Socialist oligarchy? Maybe the target is

Nelson Mandela who worked to unmask apartheid and undermine its legitimacy.

Maybe Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are the paradigms, who, to all

appearances, helped strengthen democracy by uncovering the truth about high-

ranked public servants who were corrupting democratic institutions and trying to

gravitate towards an oligarchy? No way to tell. To utilize the “marketplace of ideas”

analogy, I find myself in the position of someone who is trying to decide whether he

should buy a processed food product in a supermarket without being able to tell its

ingredients. There is something like a list of ingredients on the package, but the

writing is blurred.

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However, if (and this is a big if) the vendors would accept the likes of Mandela,

Woodward and Bernstein as value-oriented intellectuals, it is highly debatable that

their conclusion is warranted. On the contrary, these are exactly the kind of

individuals who can foster democratic institutions and militate against their

corruption.

Hence, as a would-be consumer in the marketplace of ideas, I will reject this product

for at least two related reasons: the key concepts it utilizes are very unclear, thereby

robbing the main conclusion it offers of any logical support.

Other individuals who have been trained in SSH might find problems with the

"consumerist" reasoning I presented here to reject the product under consideration.

Maybe I have been too quick and careless, or lack the requisite level of intelligence

to apply these skills. I might not have had a good training in these skills, or I might

be ideologically blinded and biased to apply them properly. I acquiesce to all these

possibilities, although the truth of some would sadden and disquiet me. However,

putting my potential demise aside, let us focus on the salient fact: the ability of my

hypothetical detractors to critically expose my shortcomings is predicated on the

possession of the same set of skills I have been trying to sell.

Please distinguish critically exposing from rejecting, deriding, ignoring, disagreeing

or disliking. There is no empirical evidence I know of , according to which any of

these latter techniques qualify as quality control techniques in the marketplace of

ideas.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the students who take my first and

second-year classes in philosophy, logic and critical thinking are not even capable to

start evaluating what I have written. Without a rigorous training in humanities

courses, most of them will never be in the fortunate position of my hypothetical

detractors. They lack training in the SSH: they have low reading and listening

comprehension, they cannot analyze a complex concept, they cannot spot an

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obvious reasoning fallacy, they think creative thinking is expressing their ideas in

pictures and games, and quite frequently, they think that I am just making up the

factual examples I present in class. If we fail to arm them with these skills, they will

probably end up buying defective products in the marketplace of ideas, perhaps

including mine.

References:

Belfiore, E. (2015) ‘Impact’, ‘value’ and ‘bad economics’: Making sense of the

problem of value in the arts and humanities. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education

14(1) 95–110.

Bloom, B.S. (Ed.). Engelhart, M.D., Furst, E.J., Hill, W.H., Krathwohl, D.R. (1956).

Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain. New York:

David McKay Co Inc.

Goodman, N. (1978): Ways of Worldmaking. New York, Hackett Publishing Company.

Hanson, N. R. (1958): Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science. Cambridge University Press.

Habermas, Jürgen (1988). On the Logic of the Social Sciences. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jerry A. Stark. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.

Harvard Committee (1945) General Education in a Free Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hayek, F. A. (1948) ‘The Intellectuals and Socialism’, The University of Chicago Law Review 16, pp. 417–433.

Kelly, K. T. (1987): ” The Logic of Discovery”. Philosophy of Science, Vol. 54, No. 3, pp. 435-452

Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.

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President’s Commission on Higher Education (1947) Higher Education for American Democracy, Vol. I, Establishing the Goals. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Stover, J. (2017): There is no Case for the Humanities. American Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 210-224.

Schumpeter, Joseph A. [1942].  Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (5th. ed.). London and New York: Routledge.

Veblen, T. (1898): The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. New York: Macmillan.

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