The Elephant

I've been thinking a lot lately about epistemology. How we know things. How we know that we know things. And most important for the Masters candidate, how we tell people what we know so that they know that we know it.

Academia survives on the premise that we can know things and communicate what we know. How else would we publish articles and write books and present things at conferences? Logical Positivism wasn't taken very seriously for very long in the philosophical world- its internal inconsistencies quickly discounted it as a logical system. But in Academia it is alive and well.

Postmodernism, however, is no longer just a fringe argument of feminists and angst-ridden existentialists. Postmodernism, and its acknowledgement of the subjectivity of learning, communication and understanding, is firmly embedded in our cultural psyche.

So what happens when a bunch of Logical Positivists, who only believe in what they can see and can report, walk into a room with an elephant called Postmodernism standing in the middle? They hem and haw and grumble, but they can't deny that there is in fact an elephant in the middle of the room, but it is very inconvenient because this particular elephant might get in the way of their arguments about "reliability" and "objectivity" and "generalization"- which they need to publish. We can't have journals filling with articles about elephants!!!!

So they create a system of rules and procedures that allows us to have objectivity and reliability even though the elephant is clearly telling us that we can't. "Yes, there is an elephant. And yes, it is very large and we can all see it. But let's pretend for a few minutes that the elephant is actually just a picture of an elephant, and if you follow our rules you can manage to still acknowledge the elephant and at the same time deny that it weighs several tons and is preventing us from seeing each other across the room." And if everyone agrees to follow these rules, then we don't have a problem!

Because knowledge may be subjective, but we still have to agree to pretend that it isn't, or else what kind of research could we do?

I was pretty sure all along that I wanted to live in Academia because it sure seems to beat getting a real job. Now I'm not so sure. I like elephants. I like talking about them. I don't mind how big they are. And I don't think I'm interested in spending my career pretending that I don't know what I can see right in front of me.