The Joy of Dumb Questions: Knocking on the Door to Knowledge

I had been an assistant professor of philosophy for 5 years when, in 1985, I found myself on the job market because the college’s state-mandated tenure quota had been reached. I had loved teaching, was good at it, so, ouch.

Fortunately, and not entirely by accident, while teaching I had also been writing about computing for some mass market publications, which led to a job writing for Interleaf, a Cambridge, Mass., startup. That was incredibly lucky, for Interleaf was at least a decade ahead of its time. It had built an innovative document creation system designed for networked writers. Its document format anticipated HTML. It had an extension language that anticipated JavaScript.

I bring this up because of what it taught me and why it matters to KM.

Talking Philosophy

A few years in, a very bright new hire approached me at lunch. He was on fire to talk with someone with a background in philosophy, for he had come from an excellent grad school, where he had studied a philosophy-adjacent topic. He began to excitedly describe an idea he had come across recently. I don’t remember what it was, but I do remember that I acknowledged that I knew nothing about it, but he was persistent.

And then I had realization: I hate philosophical conversations. I ended the conversation by saying something like, “I can’t talk about philosophy anymore.”

I still feel bad about emotionally shutting down, although the new hire quickly became a respected and liked member of the community, including by me. But it also made me wonder why that innocent conversation triggered me to react so strongly. I think it was caused by the trauma of experiencing a quite common sort of dialogue with professional philosophers, which resembles two expert fencers with uncapped foils who look for every chance to draw blood in order to establish dominance …all with a twinkle in their eyes, as if philosophy were just a game.

In the least worst of these conversations, people play devil’s advocate, sometimes even telling you that that’s what they’re doing. In the most worst of them, they’re playing devil’s advocate as an excuse to be purely critical without any obligation to try to find ways to positively advance thought.

Of course, not all conversations among philosophers are like that. For example, my fellow grad students were a supportive community. There were very few jerks among them. Likewise for the quite large faculty there. Conversations were almost always healthy, not toxic.