I just couldn’t stand al those pretentious students acting like they were better than everyone else.

But that’s just me.

There are obviously issues to be resolved here. Now, I’m not a philosopher of mind, but it strikes me that there is something in my experience that isn’t adequately accounted for by a purely mechanistic theory of mind, as it stands, and that’s intention. Although I form habits by doing things, because doing things strengthens the neural pathways that facilitate their doing, my intention to form a habit (by making sure I write some of my thesis every day, for instance) can be effective. That is to say, if I choose to form a mental habit, I’m more likely to form it than if I didn’t bother with the discipline. Maybe this is all an illusion…

But suppose I didn’t believe that it made any difference whether I intended to form a habit or not, that whether I finished my thesis or just slacked off until my scholarship ran out was already determined by the current state of my brain, which was in turn determined by my genetics, my upbringing, and so on. Then, if I was wrong, I would be likely just to leave everything up to my mechanistically determined destiny, and, failing to take action, I’d probably just slack off until my scholarship ran out.

This, I believe, is the kind of effect it has to teach people that they aren’t responsible for their actions. In short: they fail in life, and other people have to pick up the pieces of their shattered dreams. It’s lucky that most of us are impervious to “learning” that we aren’t responsible for what we do, and go on taking action regardless. Why do we do this? Because our experience tells us that it does make a difference what we intend.

Sure, in the absence of true scientific knowledge about whether free will exists or not, we can go on arguing about it. But in the absence of such knowledge, I’d say we ought to be pragmatic, and believe we are responsible for what we do. Because if we don’t, and we leave things to mechanistic destiny, we relinquish our ability to control our lives and achieve our goals. And that, I don’t need to tell you, would suck.

But the fact is, there’s a world out there, the qualities of which are largely independent of what you or I think they are (quantum uncertainty aside). When a thinker like Foucault, so beloved of our department, focuses on the way that knowledge is an effect of power, this tends to get ignored. The best way to investigate a piece of so-called “knowledge” is not to ask who put it forward, but to ask whether it is or is likely to be true. This means asking, of a statement or argument, things like:

• is it logical?
• do the conclusions follow from the evidence?
• when we test its claims against empirical observation, do they stand up?

not:

• what social class did the person who made the statement come from?
• what is their sexuality?
• what is their ethnicity?
• as what position in a chain of signifiers is their subjectivity articulated? (Note: although this is a question Jacques Lacan, whom the department loves and I despise, might have asked, I find it so ridiculous as to consider my putting it in the list a gesture of irony.)

and so on… This last set naturally leads us into the logical fallacy of the ad hominem argument (arguing for or against a position on the basis of its supporters’ personal qualities).

On another note, I think it’s kind of sad that if, indeed, there is a continuum in the department, that I would be at one end and someone like, say, Audrey (as an example), would be at the other. Because that’s actually a fairly narrow range of viewpoints. I personally would consider myself to be somewhere between Keith Windschuttle (on the issue of what intellectual traditions we ought to follow: I have no interest in what he has to say about Aborigines, and don’t even know whether I’d agree or disagree) and “the department.” But where are our Windschuttles or, on the issue of objectivity, our Ayn Rands? And where are our commie-hating, god-loving, Aristotle-reading conservatives? I disagree with many of the things that they might have to say, but our department is much poorer for our not having them around to argue with, and to ensure our students are exposed to a range of viewpoints.

I also really hate the way a ‘postmodern’ speaking position allows people to escape the moral and ethical dimensions of their own arguments, and lets people exist in a state of perpetual ironic detachment, never really believing in anything.

But while I champion responsibility, I am suspicious of claims to objectivity, and I think that a pragmatic kind of relativism (perhaps ‘skepticism’ would be a better word?) is valuable. I have found it useful to consider to what extent our subjectivities and actions are shaped by social forces larger than ourselves.