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Academic (Inter)Disciplines and Firm Grasps on the Obvious
A certain species of fantastic fiction (I am thinking here of the subgenre to which Haruki Murakami’s newest novel at first seems to belong) seems to have emerged in relatively recent years, but I can’t think right now of how to write about that topic without engaging in spoilers. So instead I am going to write about how three types of academic investigation arise from having a firm grasp on the obvious (and annoying innocent interlocutors by wondering just why it is obvious).
Type One:
What happens when you let go of an egg?
—It falls and it breaks.
Why does that happen?
—What an idiotic question!
Type Two:
What happens when a widget repairman punishes an apprentice?
—The apprentice stands in the sun for a full day with his hands on the hot metal roof of the truck.
Why does that happen?
—What an idiotic question!
Type Three:
What happens when a Flying Spaghetti Monster wonderworker blesses a fruit tree?
—The Flying Spaghetti Monster makes the tree bear fruit in only two hours.
Why does that happen?
—What an idiotic question!
The three exchanges may appear identical, but obviously, they aren’t, except for grammarians or structural linguists. (Translators will already perceive a difference, because one example uses everyday terminology, the next uses a fictitious term that exists only in English, and the third uses a name with a specific history in hiply ironic English-speaking subcultures. It is already not all rock-and-roll to them.)
Type One questions are pretty much answered by the physical sciences, but first you have to understand the question, which could refer to different aspects of a very simple event. Is it about the law of gravity? Is it about the specific capacity of eggshells to withstand impacts? Is it about the reasonable assumption that, since the questioner is addressing “you,” the questioner means you as you are right this moment, not as you would be if both of you were aboard the International Space Station? But here we are already beginning to slide into other fields of inquiry….
Type Two questions are already multilayered questions. Since they are about all forms of social relations, they are first and foremost about why they elicit the same answer as a question about something as fundamental as the effects of gravity on eggs. (Spoiler: All three types are about asking the reasons behind self-evidently obvious events.) But is this particular question about how the apprentice can withstand fairly extreme discomfort, when many people couldn’t endure it? Or is it about the apprentice’s motivation, e.g., is it the wish to avoid being dismissed because being dismissed brings dishonor on the family, or because it brings loss of income, or because it is the custom in this society for widget repairman to have the right to murder apprentices who don’t accept their punishment? And whichever one of these very different reasons it is, isn’t it interesting that this way of doing things is accepted as though it were a law of Nature? In any case, we are navigating between the physiology of human behavior, the social structures that maintain habitual forms of behavior and how those structures are generated, and the different types of societies that generate those structures (and the types of language that maintain such societies, and yada yada yada, or blah blah blah if you belong to an older generation).
Type Three questions look like Type Two questions, except that it is easier to determine whether the widget repairman-and-apprentice relationship exists at all. (There is no such thing as a widget because the term is deliberately meaningless, but we understand that real bosses do real things to real employees, and we only have to determine whether the social relationship we are examining actually takes place…a simple-looking fact that sometimes can be as hard to determine as whether fruit trees can produce fruit in two hours’ time….)
It looks at first glance like Type Three is really just a subset of Types One and Two combined, and in a sense it is. Something happens in the world or it does not, and if it is a social relationship, it may have practical reasons for being, but it may be supported also by assumptions about the world that are both impractical and nonsensical. (“Why are we doing this/” “Because that’s how we roll! Now shut up!”)
But why do people believe so readily in things that against the laws of physics? In this example, we can assume the wonderworkers get some benefit out of doing the blessing, if only the satisfaction of knowing they have done a good deed. The people get fruit, or get the pleasing belief that they will get fruit in a couple of hours “unless” (unless the people were ritually impure without knowing it, unless the stars were wrong, etc.). We don’t know if the imaginary wonderworkers in our example get paid and thus engage in knowing fakery to earn a living, or if they engage in fakery purely to make people happier than they otherwise would be, or if they engage in fakery because they themselves believe they can make fruit trees bear fruit in two hours’ time. We take it on faith that they engage in fakery, because what they claim to do is ruled out by the laws established in Type One investigations.
Whatever the motivations for holding this false belief (a Type Two question), the fact that the belief is taken for granted is adequately explained by academic disciplines invoked in Type Two questions. The only variant would arise (and it is a significant variant) if a researcher wondered if there were underlying physical structures leading to self-deception and facilitating conscious deception (e.g., a species of tree that spontaneously accelerates fruiting, though not in only two hours, or that appears to bear fruit out of nowhere because of some hidden biological quirk of the growth process). There are real-life examples of this, and it is a matter of asking the right Type One question to explain the channels that enable the Type Two process to take place.
We would only get to a genuine Type Three level of discourse if the wonderworkers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster were to bless the researcher’s tree back home, and if the house sitters later informed the researcher that the thing bore fruit in two hours (only unfortunately the house sitters have no before-and-after pictures, or the house sitters were out all afternoon and when they came back, here was this fruit growing on the tree, and no, it didn’t look like there had been intruders, but then it never does with real professionals, now does it?).
I suppose there could be a Type Four example if the researcher were sitting at home and the fruit tree bore fruit in two hours’ time for no apparent reason, but I don’t think any sane researcher would ask anybody else, “Why did my fruit tree bear fruit in only two hours?”
But that only happens in novels, obviously.
A certain species of fantastic fiction (I am thinking here of the subgenre to which Haruki Murakami’s newest novel at first seems to belong) seems to have emerged in relatively recent years, but I can’t think right now of how to write about that topic without engaging in spoilers. So instead I am going to write about how three types of academic investigation arise from having a firm grasp on the obvious (and annoying innocent interlocutors by wondering just why it is obvious).
Type One:
What happens when you let go of an egg?
—It falls and it breaks.
Why does that happen?
—What an idiotic question!
Type Two:
What happens when a widget repairman punishes an apprentice?
—The apprentice stands in the sun for a full day with his hands on the hot metal roof of the truck.
Why does that happen?
—What an idiotic question!
Type Three:
What happens when a Flying Spaghetti Monster wonderworker blesses a fruit tree?
—The Flying Spaghetti Monster makes the tree bear fruit in only two hours.
Why does that happen?
—What an idiotic question!
The three exchanges may appear identical, but obviously, they aren’t, except for grammarians or structural linguists. (Translators will already perceive a difference, because one example uses everyday terminology, the next uses a fictitious term that exists only in English, and the third uses a name with a specific history in hiply ironic English-speaking subcultures. It is already not all rock-and-roll to them.)
Type One questions are pretty much answered by the physical sciences, but first you have to understand the question, which could refer to different aspects of a very simple event. Is it about the law of gravity? Is it about the specific capacity of eggshells to withstand impacts? Is it about the reasonable assumption that, since the questioner is addressing “you,” the questioner means you as you are right this moment, not as you would be if both of you were aboard the International Space Station? But here we are already beginning to slide into other fields of inquiry….
Type Two questions are already multilayered questions. Since they are about all forms of social relations, they are first and foremost about why they elicit the same answer as a question about something as fundamental as the effects of gravity on eggs. (Spoiler: All three types are about asking the reasons behind self-evidently obvious events.) But is this particular question about how the apprentice can withstand fairly extreme discomfort, when many people couldn’t endure it? Or is it about the apprentice’s motivation, e.g., is it the wish to avoid being dismissed because being dismissed brings dishonor on the family, or because it brings loss of income, or because it is the custom in this society for widget repairman to have the right to murder apprentices who don’t accept their punishment? And whichever one of these very different reasons it is, isn’t it interesting that this way of doing things is accepted as though it were a law of Nature? In any case, we are navigating between the physiology of human behavior, the social structures that maintain habitual forms of behavior and how those structures are generated, and the different types of societies that generate those structures (and the types of language that maintain such societies, and yada yada yada, or blah blah blah if you belong to an older generation).
Type Three questions look like Type Two questions, except that it is easier to determine whether the widget repairman-and-apprentice relationship exists at all. (There is no such thing as a widget because the term is deliberately meaningless, but we understand that real bosses do real things to real employees, and we only have to determine whether the social relationship we are examining actually takes place…a simple-looking fact that sometimes can be as hard to determine as whether fruit trees can produce fruit in two hours’ time….)
It looks at first glance like Type Three is really just a subset of Types One and Two combined, and in a sense it is. Something happens in the world or it does not, and if it is a social relationship, it may have practical reasons for being, but it may be supported also by assumptions about the world that are both impractical and nonsensical. (“Why are we doing this/” “Because that’s how we roll! Now shut up!”)
But why do people believe so readily in things that against the laws of physics? In this example, we can assume the wonderworkers get some benefit out of doing the blessing, if only the satisfaction of knowing they have done a good deed. The people get fruit, or get the pleasing belief that they will get fruit in a couple of hours “unless” (unless the people were ritually impure without knowing it, unless the stars were wrong, etc.). We don’t know if the imaginary wonderworkers in our example get paid and thus engage in knowing fakery to earn a living, or if they engage in fakery purely to make people happier than they otherwise would be, or if they engage in fakery because they themselves believe they can make fruit trees bear fruit in two hours’ time. We take it on faith that they engage in fakery, because what they claim to do is ruled out by the laws established in Type One investigations.
Whatever the motivations for holding this false belief (a Type Two question), the fact that the belief is taken for granted is adequately explained by academic disciplines invoked in Type Two questions. The only variant would arise (and it is a significant variant) if a researcher wondered if there were underlying physical structures leading to self-deception and facilitating conscious deception (e.g., a species of tree that spontaneously accelerates fruiting, though not in only two hours, or that appears to bear fruit out of nowhere because of some hidden biological quirk of the growth process). There are real-life examples of this, and it is a matter of asking the right Type One question to explain the channels that enable the Type Two process to take place.
We would only get to a genuine Type Three level of discourse if the wonderworkers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster were to bless the researcher’s tree back home, and if the house sitters later informed the researcher that the thing bore fruit in two hours (only unfortunately the house sitters have no before-and-after pictures, or the house sitters were out all afternoon and when they came back, here was this fruit growing on the tree, and no, it didn’t look like there had been intruders, but then it never does with real professionals, now does it?).
I suppose there could be a Type Four example if the researcher were sitting at home and the fruit tree bore fruit in two hours’ time for no apparent reason, but I don’t think any sane researcher would ask anybody else, “Why did my fruit tree bear fruit in only two hours?”
But that only happens in novels, obviously.
