professionals as grizzled veterans or as reflective learners

Posted on December 7, 2021 by Peter

In stressful, front-line professions–such as teaching, military service, nursing, or policing–you may encounter the idea of a “professional” as someone who has done the job in one of its harder forms for a long time. People who merely study or teach the topic, or those who have had brief or sheltered experience on the job, are not true professionals.

An alternative sense of a “professional” is someone who has reflected deeply on the role from a variety of perspectives. For instance, reading and talking about the history and sociology of schools may contribute to a teacher’s professional development.

Of course, there are other senses of professionalism apart from these two. I like the idea of “democratic professionalism” developed by Albert Dzur and others: a professional as someone who works with citizens who hold other jobs and roles to strengthen democracy together. There is also a trustee ideal, in which the professional safeguards public values in return for the right to provide certain services.

But those are ideals. In almost any actual professional setting, you can find grizzled veterans telling the newbies how it’s really done, plus formal academic requirements and assessments. These two ways of thinking about professionalism constantly compete for legitimacy, while more idealistic conceptions remain somewhat hidden or marginal.

If veterancy and academic study are the main options, then I’d advocate for a mix of the two. Experience is valuable. It can impart practical wisdom drawn from numerous concrete examples (phronesis). People who have spent years in a job often (not always) deserve respect for their service. Thus there are benefits to hiring veteran professionals as teachers and professors, employing them as mentors, placing students in practical internships, etc.

Yet professionals should also hold a critical stance toward their own role and learn from the concepts and tools of other disciplines. For instance, a teacher is better off understanding the sociology of schools even if the authors of sociology articles would make bad K-12 teachers. Their value does not derive from direct personal experience. Phronesis is useful, but so are other forms of knowledge, including theory and empirical data.

In pretentious settings, such as highly selective college and universities, it can be necessary to fight for the legitimacy of experience and to make space for veteran practitioners. However, in places like police stations and some K-12 schools, it can be hard to make space for critique. Whether teaching professionals in an academic way will improve their practice is an empirical question; the answer will probably vary depending on who teaches what, to whom, and how. There is no guarantee it will work. However, if a profession is going to improve, then at least some people who hold the job must draw insights from outside their field, including from scholarship.

what would happen to race in a just world?

Posted on December 1, 2021 by Peter

What is Race? Four Philosophical Views (2019)* presents a debate among four sophisticated, current philosophers of race. All the authors are committed anti-racists who are eloquent about the evil histories of the use of race. They would take similar views on most political controversies involving race. All would reject what Kwame Anthony Appiah (quoted in Quayshawn Spencer’s chapter) called “racialism”: “the view that humans naturally divide into a small number of groups called ‘races’ in such a way that the members of each race share certain fundamental, inheritable, physical, moral, intellectual, and cultural characteristics with one another that they do not share with members of any other race.” They would all say that “racialism” is false and evil. Yet they disagree about metaphysical and methodological issues that arise when we ask what kind of a thing a race is, if it’s anything at all.

Their arguments are subtle and hard to summarize, but an example offers a way into the debate. Imagine a future state in which racial injustice is over. All implicit and explicit biases are gone. All structural inequities linked to race have been solved. All appropriate reparations have been fully paid. You can imagine this happening after many decades or centuries of political action in our real world, or as a result of a thought-experiment: aliens from another planet or divine forces have repaired things on earth. What then should happen to the word and the idea of race?

I think Sally Haslanger would say that race would then cease to exist, because it means subordination. To be a little more precise: the meaning of a social construct is the historical tradition of how it has been used in a society. Race has been used in several ways; it has multiple meanings. But one major way is as the basis for privilege and subordination in the USA. Emphasizing that aspect of the word is the right thing to do now because it “highlight[s]—in the relevant cases—how our racializing practices and identities contribute to injustice.” Once racial subordination is solved, there is no good reason to try to change the meaning of the word “race” and continue to use it. People will have races until justice prevails; after that, they will no longer have races. It can be valuable to preserve cultures, religions, and other groupings, but they should be voluntary and specific. Races don’t work like that and would no longer have any justification after the world is just. “I find problematic the idea that a just world is one in which cultural groups can restrict their membership on racial grounds. I embrace, instead, a model of multiple coexisting cultures that are mutable, flexible, and creatively tolerant around issues of ancestry and appearance.”

Chike Jeffers argues that although racial categories originated as a result of white supremacy, racial identities have developed valuable cultural significance for people of color—notably, people who identify as Black (as he does). “Everyday talk about black people, for example, is best understood as referring to a real group to which one can belong, even if such talk often involves false assumptions.” He envisions a world in which Blackness is preserved and developed even though white supremacy has been defeated. He argues that this is logically possible and also desirable. “Race as a social construction could live on past the death of racism, in my view, given that racial groups could continue to exist as cultural groups. … The continued existence of racial diversity as cultural diversity after the end of racism is therefore, in my view, something good. … [A]s someone of sub-Saharan African descent, I personally desire the indefinite persistence of black people as a cultural group.” (He argues, too, that pan-African solidarity reflects real cultural similarities across the continent before European imperialism and racism; it is not completely reactive.)

Quayshawn Spencer argues that the races currently counted by the US government refer to “human continental populations”: Africans, Eurasians, East Asians, Oceanians, and Native Americans. Races define distinctions that are useful empirically (mainly for medicine) although they could not possibly justify inequality. A “biologically real entity is an epistemically useful and justified entity in a well-ordered research program in biology.” Race meets this criterion. Thus “a Black person is a person with genomic ancestry from the African population. That’s it. … Furthermore, the degree to which a person is Black is equal to the proportion of her alleles that originated from the African population.” This would continue to be true under just conditions, although then all the associations between racial categories and health issues that result today from injustice would be gone.

Joshua Glasgow says that this situation would prove that race had always been false, and people had simply been racialized in a way that would no longer happen if the world became just. “Even if tomorrow all groups currently recognized as racial had equal power and participated equally in eating the world’s foods, dancing its forms of dance, playing its kinds of music, and so on—even in such a world, I do not think we’d say that on the ordinary concept of race Hillary Clinton somehow loses her whiteness or that Jeremy Lin stops being Asian because of those points of equality.” Therefore, the ordinary concept of race points to something independent of oppression and of culture, and as such, it is a wrong and false idea that should be rejected now. We should recognize and even emphasize racialized oppression but not concede the reality of race.

*Glasgow, Joshua; Haslanger, Sally; Jeffers, Chike; and Spencer, Quayshawn, What Is Race? Four Philosophical Views (Oxford University Press, 2019). See also: why social scientists should pay attention to metaphysics; how philosophy is supposed to work; is social science too anthropocentric?; social criticism as reading social forms;

civility as equality

Posted on November 22, 2021 by Peter

Nowadays, the word “civility” is often used to mean politeness or adherence to locally recognized norms that divide appropriate speech from inappropriate speech. You might, for example, be “uncivil” if you are too loud or too angry. Such norms can be helpful, but they risk suppressing authentic and justifiable emotions.

The word has a different origin, closely related to “citizen.” In republican political thought, it it can mean equal standing to participate in politics, rather like the classical Greek word isonomia (roughly: the right to look any fellow citizen in the eye and say what you think). Almost the opposite of etiquette, it connotes a kind of plain, direct, and honest speech.

As Renaissance Florence developed a full-blown ideology of republicanism, the city embraced norms, rules, and customs that were meant to convey the equal standing of all citizen men and to discourage distinctions of caste or power based on military might. Just as one example, no man raised his hat to another Florentine. Professional soldiers were led by paid foreigners, never by Florentines, and these mercenaries had to swear loyalty to the republic’s councilors. The plutocrat banker Cosimo de Medici was wise enough to honor republican norms and manipulated the city’s policies quietly through his networks, without seeking offices or titles or any special personal treatment.

The republic finally ended for good when Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, an heir of Cosimo’s vast fortune, got himself installed as a monarchical ruler and brutally suppressed dissent. A Florentine chronicler, Giovanni Cambi, noted that Lorenzo had been raised in monarchical Rome, where he had learned to expect deference. Lorenzo was surrounded by retainers who called him “padrone” and doffed their hats to him. This was evidence that he knew nothing of “civility”:

Guiliano de Medici, blood brother of Pope Leo X, who had ruled the city of Florence, was living in Rome, and deprived of the city government altogether. He awarded that government to his nephew Lorenzo. Because this Lorenzo had been a child when his father was expelled from Florence, when he returned to Florence he did not know a single citizen, and he was not used to civility (civilta), and instead he aspired to arms and to dominate; and he succeeded in that; for although most citizens were displeased, nevertheless in their ambitiousness and avarice, they pretended to rejoice.
Istorie di Giovanni Cambi cittadino fiorentino, p. 67 (my trans.)

We might assume that doffing hats and using titles exemplifies civility–for better or worse. But the opposite was true in Renaissance Italy. Courtly politeness was a symptom of domination, incompatible with civic virtue and “civility.”

[I am drawing on Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 1991. See also: civility: not too much, not too little; what to do about the guy behind the desk; civic republicanism in medieval Italy: the Lucignano council frescoes; what does the word civic mean?]

what to do about the guy behind the desk

Posted on November 17, 2021 by Peter

A guy sits at a desk, resolving people’s requests and issuing orders. Most people who encounter him think he’s making their lives worse. What do you assume is going on?

Maybe it’s capitalism and the profit-motive. The guy is probably corporate, and if he works for the government, that shows that it’s a “neoliberal state” (captured by capital.)
Maybe it’s state-backed coercion: a denial of free choice. The guy is probably a state bureaucrat. If he works in the private sector, he still reflects the power of the government, which flows from the mouth of the gun. If free individuals were left alone, they wouldn’t come into a room like this.
Maybe it’s colonialism. Rooms with desks arrived with Europeans and replaced other (presumably better) ways of relating that were indigenous and traditional. Even if the guy behind the desk descends from indigenous people, his behavior is colonial.
Maybe it’s patriarchy. I intentionally called him a “guy” to suggest that his behavior might be gendered.
Maybe it’s a bureaucracy in Weber’s sense, a technology for coordinating specialized labor, which is much more productive than unspecialized labor. It is an unavoidable price of progress.

There can surely be truth to each of these theories, but it interests me how many different kinds of people sit behind desks giving out orders: corporate executives, civil servants, military officers, monsignors, mullahs, associate deans, chiefs of pediatrics, union shop stewards, Soviet commissars, Confucian officials ….

A desk sounds somewhat culturally specific, but with a change of furniture, one might imagine the same behavior from a Sumerian temple scribe, an Aztec huecalpixque (regional tribute manager), an iyase from the Kingdom of Benin, or a Tibetan abbot. Considering the globe as whole, the person behind the desk is probably not white, and quite often, not a man.

I would avoid the kind of root-cause analysis that asks which underlying bad phenomenon explains all such cases. For one thing, that style often implies the possibility of an innocent condition, one without profits, rulers, settlers, or guns. But revolutionary and post-colonial systems often put new people behind the same desks. The myth of innocence can be a cover for new forms of tyranny. Besides–and I realize this is almost unprovable–I think that problems such as limited resources, conflicting interests, and cognitive biases are built into human interaction and cannot be wished away.

I would also avoid a blanket denunciation of everyone who sits at a desk making unpopular decisions. Maybe this is a hard-working, underpaid, front-line public servant, just doing her best.

Here’s a way of thinking about the problem without root-cause analysis. Human beings have a wide range of techniques for organizing complex interactions in the face of endemic problems like scarcity, conflict, and cognitive limitations. These techniques are the ingredients from which we make our social recipes. Examples include officials making discretionary decisions–that person behind the desk–but also secret-ballot votes, lotteries, auctions, exchanges, gifts, public deliberative assemblies, randomly-selected panels, turn-taking, adherence to precedent or original documents, obedience to unseen powers, inheritance, chance (e.g,., flipping a coin), blind peer review, randomized experiments, popularity scores, endurance challenges, romantic partnerships, kinship relations, teacher/pupil pairings, and many more. I have omitted the really awful forms and, of course, failed to list the many tools that have yet to be invented.

We can combine these forms in many ways. Before we assess the guy behind the desk, we should understand which other ingredients are involved in the whole recipe. Maybe he was randomly selected for a short term of service. Maybe he was appointed enthusiastically by a popular assembly. These facts would change our assessment.

The situation might involve domination: arbitrary control over another. That is the case if the guy behind the desk can choose at will and doesn’t have to give reasons or face an appeal. The situation might involve oppression, if the guy belongs to a social group that regularly treats a different group in ways that reduce their human flourishing. But it might involve only one of those things, or neither. The person behind the desk might belong to the same social group as those in front of it and might have no scope for arbitrary decisions.

Yet we shouldn’t be quick to accept a situation that–per the original story–makes most people unhappy. Many actual systems are very bad, and for very bad reasons. They emerged from conquest, subjugation, and cruelty. They manifest both domination and oppression. These systems now enjoy enormous status quo advantages. Organizing to replace them is very hard, especially in the face of powerful incumbents and elaborate justifications. They may inspire fear and awe. For an individual, compliance may be completely rational.

We must challenge domination and oppression and cook up better social recipes. The reason is not to combat capitalism, statism or colonialism, but to free people from oppression and from domination. That requires building better structures, which is as important as disrupting the bad ones. And it means addressing the endemic challenges of flawed creatures who are in (partial) conflict under conditions of scarcity.

Equity Research Symposium

Posted on November 15, 2021 by Peter

All are welcome to a webinar symposium presented by the Tufts Research Group on Equity in Health, Wealth, and Civic Engagement on Friday, November 19, 2021 from 10:00 am to noon ET. Register here.

Agenda

(10-11:15) Presentations of current research, moderated by Shikhar Shrestha:

Jennifer Allen, ScD, MPH, Parents’ Willingness to Vaccinate Children for COVID-19: Conspiracy Theories, Information Sources, and Perceived Responsibility.
Eden Shaveet, BA, Marissa Gallegos, BS, Catie Urquhart, Web-Based Health Information Seeking Methods and Time Since Provider Engagement: Reflections on Access Equity.
Wenhui Feng, PhD, Ideology and health behavior.
Megan Mueller, PhD, Equity and the “pet effect”: Complexities in understanding how pets support health outcomes.

(11:15-noon) Panel discussion: Examining our Definition of Equity

What is implicit conception of “equity” is represented on the website, with its data-visualization tool? How should people think about equity?

Peter Levine, PhD, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Tufts Johnathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life (moderator)
Lionel McPherson, PhD Tufts Department of Philosophy
Felipe Dias, PhD, Tufts Department of Sociology
Elizabeth Setren, PhD, Tufts Department of Economics

(The graphic above is a sample result from the tool on the homepage.)

Society is corrupt? Found a new college!

Posted on November 12, 2021 by Peter

I have all kinds of (unoriginal) doubts about the new venture called University of Austin. The promise to create a novel financial model sounds empty until they actually describe it. (Since more than 3,500 US colleges and universities compete today, I would guess that great ideas for saving money have already been tried.) At least in Bari Weiss’ version, the case for a new university rests on a damning portrait of the existing ones that doesn’t match what I observe. And, as someone who values freedom of expression and robust debate, I don’t see a serious effort to grapple with the challenges to freedom, such as directives by donors and foundations, state regulations, the decline of tenure, and shrinking liberal arts enrollments. (Liberal arts courses are the most natural homes of vibrant debate.)

On the other hand, there is nothing more traditional than a group of Americans issuing a jeremiad against their doomed and corrupt society and founding a new college as a solution. That describes Calvinist pilgrims, Jeffersonian democrats, Catholic immigrants, Midwestern progressives, formerly enslaved people, Mormons in Utah, boosters of new Western states, sixties idealists, fundamentalist revivalists, and more.

If anything, it is disappointing that the rate of founding new colleges and universities has slowed so much. Many of the new ones appear to be conventional branch-campuses of existing state systems–important for meeting demand but not necessarily innovations.

Fig 1, shows that the total number of colleges and universities rose rapidly from 1918 to 1998 but peaked around 2013 and has fallen since.

Data from Thomas D. Snyder, 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait, U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 1993 (to 1970) and NCES Digest of Education Statistics, 2019 (NCES 2021-009) after that date

That graph does not adjust for population growth. If we value choice and innovation, we might like to see more colleges and universities per capita, which would mean fewer people per existing colleges (shown in my second graph).

The nineteenth century actually exhibited a worsening of this measure, because population growth outpaced even the rapid formation of new institutions. Much of the 20th century saw improvement, although the number of new institutions could not quite keep up with the Baby Boom in the 1960s. Of late, we have seen more people per college.

Same data as fig. 1, with population adjustments by author

The total number of colleges and universities that are open in a given year doesn’t quite indicate the rate of foundings, because older institutions go out of business. Tewksbury (1932) estimated that four out of five antebellum colleges failed. I can’t find continuous data on new foundings for US history as a whole, but the third graph indicates a rapid increase in that measure from 1820-1860.

I would place University of Austin in that tradition. I am not enthusiastic about their diagnosis or plan, but I think it’s appropriate for disaffected people to start new institutions so that we (and they) can find out what their ideas would really mean in practice. That is how we got the array of colleges and universities that we see today, from Oberlin College to Liberty University, from UCF (with 66k students) to Deep Springs College (with fewer than 30), from Notre Dame to Naropa University in Boulder, CO. I’ve mentioned some outliers, but the overall trend is increasing similarity or “institutional isomorphism.” I’m for innovations that mix things up.

Enjoy the Flight

Posted on November 10, 2021 by Peter

You can’t track swans across the sky. No trace.
The air they’ve passed as clean as what they breathe.
This is because they never cling nor hoard,
Just stretch their necks and feet and beat their wings.
Or so it was said in a treasured verse:
Words uttered and echoed and inked and taught.
Yes, but what of those other travelers?
The ones who have stowed their treasures aboard?
The carpeted cabin is dimmed and hushed.
The engines that thrum and gently shake them
Churn and burn and scrawl a long vaporous line,
Orbiting the orb where swans swim in breeze.

(Weimar, Germany, Nov. 5-6)

the ROI for philosophy

Posted on November 3, 2021 by Peter

In Monday’s Washington Post, Jon Marcus writes that “one of the most basic measures of student success” is whether a degree in a particular subject “will provide [graduates] with the gainful employment they need to make it worth the price.” As an example of a bad outcome, he notes that “a philosophy degree from Oberlin costs $142,220 and graduates two years later make $18,154, on average.”

This fact comes from a study by the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREO), which “conclude[s] that more than a quarter of programs — including most of those in art, music, philosophy, religion and psychology — leave students financially worse off than if they’d never enrolled.” I’ll raise a few methodological questions later, but first–how should we think about the values at stake here?

Preston Cooper of FREO writes:

This isn’t to say that lower-earning majors are worthless. Society needs artists and musicians. But low incomes for these majors signal a supply-demand mismatch. Universities are producing too many art majors and too few engineering majors relative to the number of jobs available in each of these fields. As a result, employers bid up the wages of engineers while surplus artists flood the labor market. The answer is not to eliminate low-earning majors nationwide, but to reduce their scale.

Many (not all) art majors want to be artists, and if artists’ earnings are very low, that suggests a problem. One solution would be to reduce the number of art majors. Another would be to expand society’s demand for artists (which doesn’t necessarily imply government funding for arts, although that could be one strategy). A third response is to expect artists to tolerate low pay–as we have long done. Which solution we prefer depends on how important we think art is for the society as a whole.

Liberal arts majors are different. Few philosophy majors, for instance, ever enter the job market for philosophy. They end up as lawyers, k-12 educators, business people, founders of LinkedIn–and of course, the proverbial taxi drivers who can quote Kant. The purely economic question is not whether we are producing too many historians, philosophers, and literary critics, but whether a liberal arts education has sufficient value in the general job market.

If philosophy majors get good jobs, that is because employers value clear writing and good reading skills, or because completing a liberal arts degree signals “cultural capital” and membership in an elite.

If, on the other hand, the data show that fields like history and philosophy produce low wages, that suggests two significant problems. First, if majoring in these disciplines is financially costly, they will be luxury goods that only wealthy families can afford–which is bad for the disciplines and unfair to young people of other backgrounds. Second, if we assign most of the society’s work of historical and philosophical inquiry and art criticism (etc.), to professors of those subjects, and if the number of jobs for professors is affected by the number of majors in their disciplines, then these social functions will be limited. We won’t get a very impressive culture under those circumstances.

We need philosophical inquiry, historical depth, cross-cultural understanding, and aesthetic excellence. Those ideals would not, by themselves, justify liberal arts majors that turn out to be costly for individuals. After all, there are other ways for a society to inquire into philosophical questions than to educate a very small number of undergraduates as philosophy majors. I am especially interested in strengthening the liberal arts outside of academia. (See a way forward for high culture.) We could consider organizing undergraduate education in ways that did not depend on majors. However, as long as we are not actually implementing any alternative strategy for producing excellent forms of culture, then poor financial returns to liberal arts majors would be a problem.

But is the empirical finding correct? The lifetime returns for a philosophy degree vary enormously by institution. According to the FREO study, majoring in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania would net you a handsome $1,250,711 over your lifetime, but a philosophy degree from Loyola University Chicago would cost you $419,352 compared to not having a degree at all. From those two examples, one might hypothesize that philosophy pays at highly prestigious institutions, but if that’s a trend, it admits much variation. Philosophy majors from Illinois State do pretty well (ROI = $197,864), while graduates of the excellent NYU department are $259,265 worse off for having obtained a BA. This looks like noise.

One solution would be to combine the people with a given major from all universities. Apparently, 80% of philosophy & religious studies programs have negative returns if you remove financial aid and assume that students must pay the whole cost. But with a variance among philosophy programs of nearly $1.7 million–from very profitable to very costly–I am somewhat skeptical about the meaning of this aggregate statistic.

Also, the FREO study assumes (with some grounding in previous research) that 80% of the benefit of a graduate degree over a BA is attributable to the graduate degree. But it could be that majors in subjects like philosophy help students to obtain valuable professional degrees next. If that is true, the study underestimates their economic returns.

In any case, the economic question is not the only one to consider. To me, the really important question is how our society as a whole addresses ethical, interpretative, aesthetic, and conceptual matters. Offering liberal arts majors and using the revenue to fund scholarship in those disciplines is only one model. It may be a flawed one. But if it is flawed, we need better ways to accomplish the task.

a simulation to teach civic theory and practice

Posted on November 1, 2021 by Peter

My book entitled What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life will be released in April 2022. It summarizes the concepts and ideas that I believe are most useful for people who want to improve their communities and the world. It is based on many years of teaching undergraduates and advanced graduate students and seasoned practitioners, while studying and promoting civic education in K-12 schools.

Obviously, my list of concepts and how I think about them are completely debatable. But what if we wanted to teach many people some set of such concepts without explaining them all (as in a book or a series of lectures)? Could we teach these ideas experientially, so that students consulted manageable bites of theory as they worked together on civic problems? And could we make the learning scalable, so that students could experience it in many schools, colleges, and community settings?

I am thinking about an online simulation along these lines. …

The setting would be a fictional community–maybe a smallish US city with a declining industrial base and a diverse population. (Other versions could be built with different settings). Players could consult summary statistics about this community at any time, such as its unemployment rate, the ratio of arrests by race, or the number of people using its main park. Those statistics would be affected by the players’ choices and behavior–as well as by random factors beyond their control.

Each player would simulate a fictional character who would have personal characteristics, values, and goals; various roles (e.g., a parent of a child in the public schools; the mayor of the city); some money; and the ability to make menu-driven choices at any moment. These choices would sometimes be affected by other players’ actions. Examples might be expanding or contracting one’s own business, voting for various candidates in a mayoral election, or attending a protest, among others.

There would also be organizations: governmental agencies (such as the school board), private associations, and media platforms.* Players would have roles in these organizations, such as a member, a leader, or a subscriber. They would be able to start new associations and media platforms. Governmental agencies would be able to create new agencies under certain circumstances.

Each organization would be able to make choices, such as how to allocate its resources and govern its assets. It would have rules for making these choices, for determining who belongs and holds various roles, and for changing its own rules. For instance, the members of the school board might be elected, they might make decisions regarding the schools by majority vote, but only the city government could change these rules. Meanwhile, a private association might be structured so that anyone could join and might simply be a space for conversation, with hardly any rules.

Players would not be able to communicate with each other at will. True, in a real city, it might be possible for anyone to get any official’s email address and contact that person. But a senior official is unlikely to give a random person much attention–if any. To simulate the friction and inequality of communication in the real world, players would only be able to contact others through organizations, and each organization would have rules for interaction. For instance, members of the school board would be able to message each other freely. When they were together in a group chat, their messages would be open for anyone to read (simulating a public meeting). They could message all parents on a one-way basis. And they could maintain a message board where parents could post comments for them to read. A protest group or a newspaper would have different rules for communication. This means that if you wanted to influence the mayor, you might have to join an association in which the mayor is active, or persuade the newspaper to cover your issue and hope that the mayor reads messages from the newspaper.

The game would start with characters already holding memberships in organizations, and organizations already having rules. Characters might even have drafts of messages ready to send that would start the business of the community. (For instance, the editor of the newspaper would have almost everyone as a subscriber and would have a draft message ready to send to solicit news tips.) Once the game got underway, characters would begin to change their status in many ways and communicate with each other. As a result of all their choices, the community’s statistics would gradually shift.

Finally, each player would have a student page for work outside the game, such as short written assignments that could be graded. Here the student would also see links to accessible summaries of concepts relevant to current events in the game. For instance, if your character is dealing with a good (such as green space or public safety), you would see a link to a wiki-like entry on types of goods, drawn from Elinor Ostrom, that could inform your behavior and give you material to write about. If your character faces a conflict, you would see a short reading on negotiation. If your character is involved in a protest, you would see an entry on social movements.

I can also imagine a hybrid version, with face-to-face meetings of characters plus “meta-discussion” of issues that arise in the game occurring during class time.

*The organizations would not include for-profit firms or markets. My instinct is that fully simulating an economy would make the game too complex, even though the economy is certainly relevant. The focus would be civil society and the state, with the market somewhat to the side. However, individuals and organizations would have economic choices to make, and some characters would have disproportionate economic influence as business owners or investors. Getting them to make helpful individual choices would often be an important strategy for shifting the community’s outcomes.

three big questions relating to knowledge

Posted on October 29, 2021 by Peter

I know that the sky is dark and wet today because of input from my senses to my brain. But I know that the earth moves around the sun and that the earth is warming because people have taught me. My sources didn’t use their own senses to learn these things by themselves; they, too, were taught by people–usually mediated via texts or images. This communication often takes places in organized venues like classrooms, books, and newspaper articles. In short, most knowledge is the output of institutions. In turn, institutions are organized, funded, led, regulated, rewarded, interconnected, and governed or self-governed in various specific ways.

I am interested in the following big questions about the social aspect of knowledge:

Knowledge/Power: Because knowledge comes out of institutions, it is naive to think that we can know important truths without the influence of power. At the same time, it is possible to learn truths that are inconvenient to the powerful. Discoveries sometimes alter the distribution of power. And power is not necessarily bad: a democratic people exercises appropriate power when it decides to pour resources into a particular kind of medical research. We should be glad we have capacity to understand our world, and “capacity” is almost synonymous with power. Yet power is not innocent. How does it structure knowledge, and how should it be configured?
Facts/Values: The Logical Positivists held that there were facts, which could be demonstrated; and there were values, which were mere matters of opinion. This distinction is still widely taught and believed, even though it has been shredded by a century of criticism from various angles. The facts we know result from our choices about what to study, which are based in values. It is very hard even to state a factual claim without also making value-claims, if only because the names we use are often loaded. The domains of fact and value are so interconnected that it may be impossible to distinguish them, yet people mix them up in harmful ways, e.g., by claiming that pro- and anti-vaccination positions are equally valid (because they both reflect values), or that police shootings do not exhibit racism because Blacks are not more likely to be shot. What are good ways to bring facts and values together?
General/Particular: We cannot truly grasp the idea that the earth is warming without understanding abstract ideas like the carbon cycle and the greenhouse effect, not to mention more fundamental abstractions like temperature, change, and the idea that the earth is a sphere in space. At the same time, we cannot develop abstractions like the carbon cycle without lots of concrete data. Especially when we are studying human beings, generalities are problematic because they cover up individuality and particularity. But there are no particular facts without more general frameworks. How can we wisely combine the general and the particular?

Civic Studies

An intellectual community of researchers and practitioners dedicated to building the emerging field of civic studies

Author Archives: Peter