mullins: I remember that Guts in a…
mullins: Remember that Gus and I can't see everybody, we can see part of you, so raise your hand or make the signal with the machine when we get to the discussion, and we will try to get people in order, but that may be a little harder.
mullins: So we're delighted, to have, Donovan Schaefer. I think everybody, knows that he has written a very interesting book that makes some use of Michael Polanya, and Donovan's gonna start off with a few comments.
mullins: And, following that, we're going to have, A few, opening… comments from,
mullins: Damon, and then we'll just go from there. So, go ahead, Donovan?
Donovan Schaefer: Sure, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you all for having me. It is a pleasure and an honor to be here. I am not an expert in Polani. I'm somebody who discovered Polani in the process of creating this project, and
Donovan Schaefer: reached the conclusion very quickly that he was an indispensable keystone to what I wanted to do. So I am tremendously excited to be talking to all of you, to, get the wisdom of some Polani experts. You can tell me if I've given Polani a fair shake.
Donovan Schaefer: If, if I've misunderstood something or misinterpreted something, but mostly I'm just really interested in learning from all of you about, how, how Polani fits into this conversation that we're, that we're all so fascinated by.
Donovan Schaefer: So, thank you, Phil, for mentioning the book. This is something that I worked on for many years, and had a very long kind of prehistory, so I wanted to give you a little bit of background about me and how I came to this project in the first place, and then I'll get a little bit into the details.
Donovan Schaefer: I'm sort of an unusual scholar. I think of myself as fundamentally a kind of philosopher slash theory person who has spent all of my career in religious studies departments. So, much of the work that I do when I'm facing religious studies is sort of theoretical work in religious studies, meta-questions, meta-conversations in religious studies.
Donovan Schaefer: That, all have a kind of theoretical, conceptual, flavor to them.
Donovan Schaefer: That, I would say, has been my sort of my kind of home base, but I really see myself as somebody who is in conversation with a range of theoretical and philosophical fields and subfields all across the humanities, the social sciences, and to an extent, the natural sciences as well.
Donovan Schaefer: The unifying feature of all of the work that I've done has been an interest in emotion. So, the first book that I wrote, was called Religious Affects.
Donovan Schaefer: And that book was an argument for reasserting the centrality of,
Donovan Schaefer: Thinking about emotion as the primary driving factor in religion, rather than understanding religion as fundamentally about propositional belief, what you do or do not take to be true.
Donovan Schaefer: And it was funny, after I published this book, I had these… people would come up to me with, like, reactions to the book, and there were two kinds of people who loved the book.
Donovan Schaefer: both of whom I thought had totally misinterpreted it. So, there were some people who came up to me and they would say, I love your book.
Donovan Schaefer: you have figured it out. Religion is just emotion. It's fundamentally irrational. Why would anybody believe this stuff? It's obviously ridiculous. This was this kind of, like, New Atheist take, where they sort of locked on… they glommed on to this idea that religion was just emotion.
Donovan Schaefer: And therefore, it was something that could be trivialized and discarded. And then there was another category of people who would come up to me, and they would be like, you have figured it out, you've got it exactly right, religion is emotion.
Donovan Schaefer: And that's what makes it so important. Religion helps us get away from disenchantment, or secularism, or modernity, or what have you. Religion is our escape hatch from all of these traps of the modern era.
Donovan Schaefer: And, both of those responses just utterly baffled and horrified me. I was like, oh no.
Donovan Schaefer: I can't believe that you walked away from my book thinking that.
Donovan Schaefer: So, what I set out to do was, to…
Donovan Schaefer: come up with what I thought of as a kind of complementary project that would fill in the gaps around the relationship between emotion and everything else that was not religion.
Donovan Schaefer: So, I fundamentally set out to write a book about the emotional texture of science.
Donovan Schaefer: And, to an extent, about the emotional texture of atheism.
Donovan Schaefer: And in the process of assembling this project, I,
Donovan Schaefer: came to believe that there was a more fundamental intellectual structure, which was what I was actually putting my shoulder against. And that intellectual structure was what I came to think of as the thinking-feeling binary as such. The very idea
Donovan Schaefer: that thinking, cognition, and feeling, however you want to define it, are fundamentally separate processes. That they're just different tracks that maybe occasionally overlap on certain rare, special instances converge, but are fundamentally different things.
Donovan Schaefer: And my approach to emotion, in general, or feeling affect, we can get into the complexity of defining those things, but I'm just going to use feeling affect emotion as interchangeable for the time being.
Donovan Schaefer: My approach to emotion is that everything we do as human beings is fundamentally guided by emotion.
Donovan Schaefer: And I would include all of our cognitive processes in that, including everything that we would think of as rationality, everything that we would think of as scientific rationality. I think all of those processes are determined on a fundamental level by emotion. And so, in setting out to write this book.
Donovan Schaefer: I realized that there was this deep structure of common sense, the thinking-feeling binary, that dictated
Donovan Schaefer: That cognition and rationality and all of these other modalities of thought, higher thought, quote-unquote, needed to be separated from feeling, on a kind of base categorical level.
Donovan Schaefer: And that was what I wrote, the book that I wrote, in order to destabilize. I wanted to dismantle that structure of common sense that says that thinking and feeling are fundamentally separate processes. So…
Donovan Schaefer: That's the book. Some of you have, maybe gotten a chance to spend a bit of time with it, very interested to hear your thoughts. This was where Polanyi stepped on the scene for me.
Donovan Schaefer: I had never read Polani before. I knew of Polani, I knew of Polani in the,
Donovan Schaefer: you know, sort of what I now think of as very lazy, sort of casual way that Polanyi is a sort of footnote to Kuhn. That, that Polanyi kind of,
Donovan Schaefer: is, you know, a sort of chronological predecessor of Kuhn, but that it's really Kuhn who comes along and kind of, you know, smashes the reset button on logical positivism and, like, re… reorients the conversation away from this sort of tradition of positivism.
Donovan Schaefer: But I also… I don't even remember how it happened. At some point, it just… in the process of… a big part of what I was doing with this book was gathering
Donovan Schaefer: gathering allies, and trying to figure out who was already saying that the thinking-feeling binary was flawed and needed to be taken apart, and I found lots of them. There are so many conversations happening in so many fields. One of the things that I realized was there's actually this whole latent network
Donovan Schaefer: across all of these different disciplines and sub-disciplines, where you have these little pockets, and the little pockets are all starting, or in many cases, have well-developed traditions, but small traditions, of trying to
Donovan Schaefer: Disassemble the thinking-feeling binary.
Donovan Schaefer: And part of my goal with the book was to assemble all of these pockets into a network, and to show that they were all part of a single conversation.
Donovan Schaefer: that was all oriented towards this overarching task of trying to dissolve the thinking-feeling binary. So I found lots of allies, and as part of this kind of, like, you know.
Donovan Schaefer: sort of, like, scanning the seas for allies, I found Palung. Don't even remember exactly how he came into my hands. And when I read Personal Knowledge for the first time, I realized that this wasn't just another ally, this was somebody who was actually central to the,
Donovan Schaefer: the sort of vision that I had for what I wanted to do with this book, that Polanyi, I did not intend for Polani to be the hero of the introduction of this book, but that was the way that it ended up playing out.
Donovan Schaefer: In part because…
Donovan Schaefer: I realized that Polanyi has an extraordinary vision of how to think about the emotional dimension of science. Extraordinary.
Donovan Schaefer: And totally understudied, totally undersung. The extent to which people don't talk about this as a central feature of Polanyi's thought just really startled me.
Donovan Schaefer: unheralded, kind of… I came to think of him as a sort of genius who had kind of, like, pre-saged this, and was sort of this voice crying in the wilderness, thinking about, intellectual passions. And I'll talk a bit more about what I found valuable about that. So it was partly because I found Polani himself so valuable.
Donovan Schaefer: But it was also the counterpoint with coup.
Donovan Schaefer: So, of course, in a field that I am well acquainted with, science studies, science-technology studies, however you want to call it, I came to think of it as a sort of, like, history and philosophy of science slash science and technology studies, HPSTS.
Donovan Schaefer: within this field, Coombe has a kind of starring role. Like, if you're reading an introduction to the field of science and technology studies, there's a very good chance that there's going to be an entire chapter on Kuhn. He's that important, he's that central in terms of telling the story of how we
Donovan Schaefer: critically approach science today. How we think of science in a kind of fundamentally non-positivist way.
Donovan Schaefer: But the thing about Kuhn was, I think Kuhn's got some important insights, some great ideas, but I also came to see him as sort of an enemy over the course of this project, because I think Kuhn
Donovan Schaefer: really struggles with emotion, and just has this kind of very deeply embedded obliviousness to the emotional dimensions of science, which were exactly what I wanted to bring onto the stage. And so I came to see Kuhn as sort of the root of a lot of the obliviousness to emotion in HPSTS, in
Donovan Schaefer: the 21st century. Kuhn just created this intellectual framework where it's just very hard to talk about emotion. And this is related, I would say, to the complexities of the debates around realism and relativism.
Donovan Schaefer: And the way that Kuhn gets read as somebody who is a deep relativist, which I tend to think is the strongest reading of Kuhn, although I think Kuhn is complicated and contradicts himself a lot. But the extent to which Kuhn embeds this deep relativism in HPSTS, I think a lot of it.
Donovan Schaefer: Comes down to his obliviousness to emotion.
Donovan Schaefer: So, in studying the Polani-Kun relationship, I did a sort of, like, kind of a… I started, like, wading into the literature on the Polani-Kun relationship.
Donovan Schaefer: And one of the things that I discovered is that, as I'm sure some of you know, there's a lot of… there's a… there's a tradition, especially outside Polanyi studies, of seeing Polanyi and Kuhn as kind of, like, sort of welded together. And Polanyi is a caboose, like, who kind of gets trailed along behind Kuhn's comet.
Donovan Schaefer: That was what I came to think of as, like, the core problem of the way that we're assessing Polani. We're looking at Polanyi through a kind of coon-colored prism, and that's making certain things that are very interesting and very important about Polani invisible.
Donovan Schaefer: And so, in the literature that I was exploring, I discovered that, historically.
Donovan Schaefer: What starts out as an alliance between Kuhn and Polani eventually dissolves, and they come to, as near as I can tell, have actually a lot of antipathy towards each other on a personal level.
Donovan Schaefer: Because, you know, they were… they were too close to each other, and then the… the differences between them, the real differences between them, started, it seems to me, to see very… it seemed very kind of glaring and painful to both of them, and so they… they broke.
Donovan Schaefer: But as near as I can tell, one of the fundamental issues that they broke over was precisely this question of emotion. And the way that this question of emotion transacted
Donovan Schaefer: With the debates about realism and relativism.
Donovan Schaefer: Because Kuhn is oblivious to emotion.
Donovan Schaefer: one of the things I've become very confident of in just thinking about emotion in sustained ways for the course of my career is that some people are kind of emotion blind. Like, it's just not something that they can really see.
Donovan Schaefer: as a meaningful object of critical inquiry, and that's where Kuhn is. Kuhn just cannot see emotion. So, Kuhn, at some point, says about Polanyi.
Donovan Schaefer: Polanyi has a version of realism, scientific realism, because he believes in something like ESP.
Donovan Schaefer: And what is that? It's emotion. It's the very fact that Polanyi believes that we have these intellectual passions that connect us
Donovan Schaefer: to real scientific processes, and to the real world around us. And when Kuhn reads that, he's just like, what is this? This is nothing. This is… this is just completely made up.
Donovan Schaefer: And so, he classifies it as
Donovan Schaefer: ESP. He classifies it as something that just doesn't even exist, and that's that emotion blindness. So, I came to see,
Donovan Schaefer: Polanyi as an extraordinarily important ally in writing this project, which is not to say I ever became a Polani expert, but I gave him pride of place in the introduction that was a choice that I made in the writing process, because I found him so important for displacing the structure of common sense that I think has been embedded in HPSTS, this obliviousness to emotion.
Donovan Schaefer: So, let me talk briefly about what it is that I found in Polani that I think is so extraordinarily valuable for the project, and then I'm really interested to hear Damon's take on this as well.
Donovan Schaefer: So, reading personal knowledge,
Donovan Schaefer: My reading of personal knowledge is this, and I want to hear everybody's take on this. You can tell me how far off base I am with this.
Donovan Schaefer: I think that Polanyi is invested in
Donovan Schaefer: 20th century, like, first half of the 20th century epistemological philosophy of science questions.
Donovan Schaefer: About the relationship between theory and data.
Donovan Schaefer: Why do we choose the theory that we choose? What is a theory? Why do we jump ship from one theory to another theory?
Donovan Schaefer: How do particular pieces of data become relevant to us?
Donovan Schaefer: in choosing a theory. This is where I think Kuhn does really important work, because I think Kuhn spells out the idea of the theory dependence of data, the idea that data are something that don't really come into visibility without a sort of
Donovan Schaefer: symbiotic, like, kind of dialectical relationship with theory. You don't just have a theory and that tells you what your data are. The data inform the theory, make the theory possible, and at exactly the same time, the theory tells you what data are meaningful for a particular thing.
Donovan Schaefer: That's… that's the sort of swirling conversation that Polanyi enters into. That's what I think is motivating personal knowledge. He's thinking about these questions about the… the conceptual relationship between theory and data.
Donovan Schaefer: My reading, of personal knowledge, because I'm an emotions guy, is that Polanyi is fundamentally answering this question by referring to emotion.
Donovan Schaefer: He is saying, of course, there is no logical, like, kind of symbol-processing reason why Copernicus
Donovan Schaefer: chooses, heliocentrism over geocentrism in the 16th century. There's no reason for that beyond the fact that, on some level, it's saying out to him.
Donovan Schaefer: there was an emotional core to this. So, I love this passage, this is on page 2 of Personal Knowledge.
Donovan Schaefer: What is the true lesson of the Copernican Revolution?
Donovan Schaefer: Why did Copernicus exchange his actual terrestrial station for an imaginary solar standpoint?
Donovan Schaefer: The only justification for this lay.
Donovan Schaefer: in the greater intellectual satisfaction he derived from the celestial panorama as seen from the sun instead of the Earth.
Donovan Schaefer: Copernicus gave preference to man's delight in abstract theory.
Donovan Schaefer: at the price of rejecting the evidence of our senses, which present us with the irresistible fact of the sun, the moon, and the stars rising daily in the east to travel across the sky towards their setting in the west.
Donovan Schaefer: In a literal sense, therefore, the New Copernican system was as anthropocentric as the Ptolemaic view, the difference being merely that it preferred to satisfy a different human affection.
Donovan Schaefer: So, already on page 2 of the book, Polanyi is talking about theory choice, and he's talking about it in terms of emotion.
Donovan Schaefer: Now, somebody might come along and hear this passage, And they might say.
Donovan Schaefer: If you knew nothing else about Polanyi, and knew nothing else about Copernicus, You might say.
Donovan Schaefer: Polanyi is throwing Copernicus under the bus.
Donovan Schaefer: The deep structure of common sense that says that when feeling enters into science, it becomes illegitimate, dictates that a paragraph like that means that
Donovan Schaefer: Copernicus is nonsense. Copernicus is enmeshed in feeling and affection, rather than in the more meaningful hard work of science. But we know that's not what happens. We know Copernicus is right, Polani knows Copernicus is right, and more importantly, we know that Copernicus is.
ebeira: false.
Donovan Schaefer: Sure.
ebeira: It was the only bash case for the…
Donovan Schaefer: we know that, Copernicus is exactly
Donovan Schaefer: whom Polani is holding up as the quintessential scientist. And he's doing it by spotlighting the way that Copernicus connected to particular emotions. So, this is what I found incredibly valuable about Polanyi, is that he's affirming the importance of emotions for science.
Donovan Schaefer: And he's doing it with what I take to.
ebeira: those fields.
Donovan Schaefer: An overall realist gesture.
Donovan Schaefer: Can somebody mute E. Berra? Thank you. He's doing it with an overall realist gesture. He's saying, the emotions bring us into contact with the natural world in a way that makes good, real science possible. And that's his fundamental divergence from Coombe, as I saw it.
Donovan Schaefer: So, what I found particularly valuable about Pulani was the way that he reasserted the necessity of emotion for cognition, including for all forms of scientific rationality. He has this kind of Darwinian take.
Donovan Schaefer: He says, all organisms in the history of organismic life, and let's talk about animal life as a specific branch of organismic life.
Donovan Schaefer: All organisms have these kind of intellectual affects. There's a sort of phylogenetic argument where he says, even at the most basic level, organisms are aversive or attractive toward objects in their environment. And animals have this
Donovan Schaefer: tendency to explore. And he says that is already an intellectual affect.
Donovan Schaefer: What we have as humans is a hyper-complexified, scaled-up version of that core, organismic intellectual affect. And he makes an ontogenetic argument as well. He says, we see this in babies.
Donovan Schaefer: Babies have these core intellectual affects, these elementary curiosities, and it's the scaling up
Donovan Schaefer: of those core intellectual affects on an ontogenetic level that eventually leads to the intellectual affects that we think of as scientific rationality. So this is where he gets this deep sense that there is no escape from emotion in cognitive processes, let alone in scientific processes.
Donovan Schaefer: And, last point I'll make.
Donovan Schaefer: The other thing that I found tremendously valuable about Polani is that he sees
Donovan Schaefer: Intellectual Passions, that's the title of Chapter 6, Intellectual Passions with an S.
Donovan Schaefer: It's plural.
Donovan Schaefer: There's not just one intellectual emotion. There's not just one scientific emotion. There are multiple scientific emotions. So he talks about intuition, he talks about the heuristic passion, he talks about persuasion, the need to persuasion, to persuade other people. He talks about the feeling of making contact with reality, as he calls it.
Donovan Schaefer: There's a plurality of intellectual passions, they all infuse
Donovan Schaefer: this thing that we call, as a composite, scientific rationality. But it's not a unity, it's made up of all of these different intellectual passions.
Donovan Schaefer: And this, I will say, is something that I tried to thematize over the course of the book, but also realized that I just did not have the space for. And so, to me, like, one of the follow-on conversations that I'm very excited to see developed
Donovan Schaefer: Is to keep… is to… to develop
Donovan Schaefer: our deep sense of the plurality of intellectual passions. What are they? What are their ontologies? Where do they come from? What do they do? How do they work together? The multiplicity of intellectual passions seems to me to be this extremely important horizon that I did not have the space to do justice to in the book, but that I'm very eager to talk about.
Donovan Schaefer: Okay, that's, my kind of overview. Very interested to hear from all of you about how wrong I've gotten, Polanyi. Damon, I gather you're, you're talking next?
Damon Kutzin: Yeah.
Damon Kutzin: Yeah, thank you.
Damon Kutzin: Thanks to Phil and Gus for bringing this together, as always, and it's nice to meet with you in person… well, not quite in person, but close enough, Donovan, after emailing back and forth.
Damon Kutzin: Yeah, I just want to say I was very grateful to have the opportunity to engage with this book through a review for the Polani Society, and many of the ideas in it I wouldn't have… I certainly wouldn't have come across otherwise in my philosophy of science background, and Donovan brings together all these approaches
Damon Kutzin: in such a clear way, that, yeah, I just found it very valuable. So…
Damon Kutzin: So, I have an opening comment, sort of relating the material in the book to Polanyi, sort of my take on it, and then a sort of broad opening question, which we can… which would be like an invitation to dialogue for everyone and orient the discussion.
Damon Kutzin: So, I think this book can be very valuable to Polani scholars and those interested in Polani, both because of this core kinship of Schaefer's thesis with Polani's, which we've been discussing, that the thinking feeling binary is false, that feeling
Damon Kutzin: pervades and propels science, but also because they have a slight difference in emphasis. So as I said in my review, Polani tends to focus on very positive
Damon Kutzin: epistemic functions of emotion in science. He highlights how beauty, simplicity, and excitement are fallible but truth-bearing passions. And he is primarily concerned to accredit their epistemic role. He also talks about their negative roles, but much less. I think his rhetorical project is different.
Damon Kutzin: And Donovan is on board with this positive function, I think. But in the book, there's more concern with the sort of negative roles that the persuasive function of emotions can have on the production and reception of scientific ideas in society. And here I'm thinking about the sort of contrast between the cool, collected, affective profile of Darwin and the more frantic.
Damon Kutzin: Huxley and Mencken and the Scopes trial.
Damon Kutzin: or also discussion of how reason can get affectively racialized to support various race science or conspiracy theory, and so on. So in other words, there's a lot of discussion about how beauty, joy, and excitement can be highly misleading.
Damon Kutzin: If your affective landscape is systematically out of touch to begin with.
Damon Kutzin: So on my reading, these are complementary approaches, not contradictory. And, you know, as Donovan says in the book, his theory is meant to explain both good and bad knowledge production, so we would expect these passions to play multiple roles.
Damon Kutzin: And further, I think Polanyi could be plausibly critiqued in some way, using partially the resources in this book as having quite an over-optimistic view of the role of passion in science. And I would be interested to hear what members have to say about that later.
Damon Kutzin: But now my opening question to Donovan is quite broad, and so you're under no obligation to answer it fully right away, but it's basically my attempt to bring in the larger theme about the relation of this thinking-feeling binary to the social order.
Damon Kutzin: And so it's this, it's that one of Polanyi's overarching narratives in explaining modernity is that a false conception of science, one that's positivist, Laplacian, mechanical, objectivist, has served as the model for knowledge in general.
Damon Kutzin: And, owing to the undeniable success of science in generating knowledge,
Damon Kutzin: So this is one aspect of what Polanyi calls moral inversion.
Damon Kutzin: which is discussed in the Jaeger paper that was attached to the discussion for today. But basically, he claims that, this false view of science has set up a standard for knowledge which hardly any domain can claim to reach, which has led to the denigration or misunderstanding of the humanities, including morality, politics, and religion.
Damon Kutzin: As well as science.
Damon Kutzin: And more specifically, it leads to the idea that moral political truths can either be established with a kind of mechanical objectivity.
Damon Kutzin: Or that there are no such truths to be found, and might makes right. And I thought it interesting that you mentioned in your opening comments, how your previous book on emotion and religion led to this reaction that
Damon Kutzin: You know, either, oh yes, it's just religion that's emotion, or because religion is emotion, it's silly,
Damon Kutzin: And it seems to be…
Damon Kutzin: that seems like it could be symptomatic of the kind of inversion Polanyi is talking about, that people… this false conception of science, right, has led.
Damon Kutzin: people to evaluate every other discipline in this way. So, my opening question is sort of, what do you think about this narrative in general? Do you see your inquiry into the role of affect in science as offering a similar kind of remedy to this problem of this false conception of science and its effect on wider society?
mullins: Okay, before we open it up, let's give Donovan just a minute to comment, and then we'll open it up. Donovan?
Donovan Schaefer: Thank you. Yeah, that's great. I feel like I've talked a lot, so let me, let me be brief.
Donovan Schaefer: You know, it's super interesting, Damon. I'd love to get more of your take. Maybe you know more of the kind of history of the philosophy of science in the 20th century, and why Polani is so primarily concerned with building
Donovan Schaefer: a kind of infrastructure for realism, like, that authorizes science with reference to emotion, and spends less time talking about, like, I talk a lot about pseudoscience, or conspiracy theory, or that kind of thing. I mean.
Donovan Schaefer: Polanyi had pseudosciences available to him that he could have talked about. He could have talked about eugenics. He was, you know, a Hungarian Jew who fled, who fled the Nazi invasion. Could have talked about eugenics, could have talked about race science, but for whatever reason, kind of, you know.
Donovan Schaefer: he's like Kuhn in that he stays closer to chemistry and physics as… and math as kind of, like, sort of type cases of what the sciences are, and doesn't get into… like, I was much more interested in thinking about Darwin and the legacy of Darwin, and so that brought me closer into, you know, eugenics, race science, that kind of thing. I will say, though.
Donovan Schaefer: it's… one of the things that I found most interesting about your review, and you mentioned it here, was that you really picked up on the idea that this is,
Donovan Schaefer: that this zeroes in on critical lenses to science. And one of the things I would say is that that has not been how most of the reviewers have responded to it.
Donovan Schaefer: I find much more often, I am talking to reviewers who say I give too much credit to science. They say I have an overly sunny view of science, an overly optimistic view of science. And it's very interesting to me how different domains of the humanities
Donovan Schaefer: assess science in these very different ways. I feel like I encounter a lot of science skepticism from certain quarters when I talk about this book. There have been, like, multiple journal special issues on the book, and in each one of those journal special issues, there's been at least one article
Donovan Schaefer: by one of the respondents. These are all friends of mine, like, these are not people who are, like, having a go at me. But there's been at least one article in each of them that has said, this book is way too soft on science, way too nice about science. And to them, I've had to remind them what you just said, which is that I also spend lots of time talking about conspiracy theory and eugenics and race science, and these defective modes of
Donovan Schaefer: scientific passions.
Donovan Schaefer: But for some reason, it's very hard
Donovan Schaefer: I find for a lot of reviewers to bring what I see as the whole of it into view, which is that it is both an account of how science works and of how what we might think of as, like, modes of scientific rationality fail and do not work. And that's just very interesting to me, and I think you're right to say that there's a kind of social-political aspect to that as well.
Donovan Schaefer: Because this question of whether you see,
Donovan Schaefer: political rationality as something that is or should be devoid of emotion is another iteration of the thinking-feeling binary that I think has extraordinary political effects. We have this in the U.S. all the time, where people will say, don't use your… don't use your feelings to do politics.
Donovan Schaefer: But of course, that's always a disingenuous point, because the speaker, the person saying that, is probably using their feelings
Donovan Schaefer: to do politics. They're just calling their feelings reasons, and your feelings feelings, and dismissing them on that basis. So I think you're absolutely right to say that they're very clear kind of handholds to these social-political questions.
mullins: Okay, the floor is now open.
Damon Kutzin: Yeah, I'll just say very briefly in response, I think that is interesting, because in my field, in philosophy of science, I think it would… like, the sort of idea that science might have a similar structure to conspiracy theory would be kind of fighting words right away.
Damon Kutzin: Interesting. And so I, yeah, I find that very interesting. I think also interesting is how… I think Polanyi inhabits a similarly ambiguous role as you, where on the one hand, his work was… and Mary Jo Nai talks about this in her book, on Polani's generation, but on the one hand, his work was picked up by a lot of sociologists and social constructivists, but on the other, Polanyi has these attitud
Damon Kutzin: towards science, which seem very naive to more sophisticated.
Damon Kutzin: subsequent generations of science studies people, like, he seems to… he doesn't question his realism too much, he has a kind of Whiggish view of the progress of science. So, it's interesting how there… you both might have these,
Damon Kutzin: Attacks from both sides of the aisle.
Donovan Schaefer: Fascinating, yeah.
mullins: Let's see, Dwayne's got his hand up.
mullins: Dwayne?
Duane Lookingbill: Yeah, just a quick one while the rest of you are thinking of more important…
Duane Lookingbill: questions are… so, I, I'd like to hear more,
Duane Lookingbill: What is the unity that the binary…
Duane Lookingbill: Thinking feeling is derived of… from.
Duane Lookingbill: What do you call the unity that…
Donovan Schaefer: I'm not sure I follow.
Duane Lookingbill: Well, it… You have reason, emotion, intellect.
Duane Lookingbill: And you say you're primarily in the humanities and religion.
Duane Lookingbill: What is… what is it that unites us? What is our unity? What is the unity you're working from?
Duane Lookingbill: Or thinking from, or feeling from.
Donovan Schaefer: If I understand you right, I would say the core unity is feeling.
Donovan Schaefer: I think that what makes us what we are, as subjects, is a basic operating system of feeling.
Donovan Schaefer: And I think that that flies in the face of a certain conventional wisdom that says the core of what we are is cognizing. The core of what we are is some form of symbol processing that sort of tries to reason its way through, reason its way through the world.
Duane Lookingbill: And the way that I…
Donovan Schaefer: Who in a traditional… go ahead.
Donovan Schaefer: the way I read Polanyi is that Palami is overturning that. This is where the kind of, like, ontogenetic, phylogenetic story comes in. He's saying, at the level of basic animal organisms, we already see something like an intellectual passion, and at the level of babies, we already see something like an intellectual passion.
Donovan Schaefer: That's the taproot.
Donovan Schaefer: Everything comes out of that. Everything that we think of as cognition is fruit of that tree.
Donovan Schaefer: But the feeling is primary, and the cognition is fruit of the tree, but it's really actually more like a branch of the tree. It's never actually gotten away from it. But somehow, we've developed this narrative that thinking and feeling are fundamentally separate.
Donovan Schaefer: Is that getting your questions?
Duane Lookingbill: Yeah, yeah, so what I'm getting at is, so, like, how do we talk about feeling? I mean, you know, we say we're sensuous beings, is that talking about feeling? We say we have the five senses, or six senses, or…
Duane Lookingbill: But my… I guess what I'm getting at is, isn't that how the tradition has…
Duane Lookingbill: Has used other words, like Reason, not just cognition, or…
Duane Lookingbill: what… what is our nature? I mean… so… so I just… I just wanted to kind of make that…
Duane Lookingbill: But I'm with you on unity, and I think you're very fruitful.
Duane Lookingbill: And very, more than fruitful, you're, you're, you're, you're making something of…
Duane Lookingbill: This in a very important way when you say, What you've just said.
Donovan Schaefer: Okay.
mullins: Dick, or maybe it's Mary, I don't know which one, and then Ellen?
mullins: You got it, you're muted, Dig.
richard moodey: Okay, yes, one of the things that…
richard moodey: I do a lot of is that I use…
richard moodey: The notion of an ideal type and an anti-ideal type as conceptual tools to think about…
richard moodey: Texts and lectures and things like that, and it seems to me that The joyful seeker of truth.
richard moodey: Is an ideal type.
richard moodey: It isn't a description.
richard moodey: Of any actual person, but it's rather a mental construct That we use to evaluate.
richard moodey: actual persons.
richard moodey: Are they joyful seekers of truth?
richard moodey: And if they are, you know, the more they fit this image.
richard moodey: The more we think of them as being good.
richard moodey: An anti-ideal type, one of my anti-ideal types, would be the psychopath.
richard moodey: I think one of Polandi's anti-ideal types is the moral invert, you know, the person who is morally inverted.
richard moodey: One of,
richard moodey: Donovan's ideal… anti-ideal type seems to be the conspiracy theorist, who is, you know, an anti-ideal type of inquirer, as opposed to the joyful
richard moodey: Seeker of truth
richard moodey: The interesting thing to me is, is that from the viewpoint of a psychopath, a joyful thinker of truth is a fool.
richard moodey: Because… he's going after… The wrong kinds of things, because the psychopath gets his kicks not from
richard moodey: Seeking and discovering truth, or not from loving and being loved, but from controlling others.
richard moodey: And the joyful seeker of truth is somebody who is a fool because the psychopath can easily control them.
Donovan Schaefer: Yeah, that's super interesting.
Donovan Schaefer: So, one of the things that I would say,
Donovan Schaefer: on this idea of the joyful seeker of truth as a type. So, one of the kind of sub-arguments that I make in this book, and this relates to this idea of a multiplicity of intellectual passions, is I think
Donovan Schaefer: the ideal type.
Donovan Schaefer: For me, is actually…
Donovan Schaefer: a scientific modality that balances different intellectual emotions. And those intellectual emotions include not just what we might think of as kind of like sunny, bubbly emotions like joy, but also things like anxiety, or,
Donovan Schaefer: shame, like, a kind of worry that you're going to say the wrong thing. Like, if you… you know, when I, like,
Donovan Schaefer: if I, like, publish a journal article or something, and I, like, become… and then I have this, like, sense that it's going to be critiqued, and, like, I might have said something in the journal article that I can't really back up, I feel like this very deep anxiety around it. And I think that that anxiety is a very important part of the scientific process.
Donovan Schaefer: So, one of the things I talk about in the book is the idea that we can often see, with scientific processes, a kind of, like, checks and balances system.
Donovan Schaefer: Where there's an emotional excitement that goes along with discovery, that's the joyful secret of truth, but there's also this, like.
Donovan Schaefer: checking mechanism that comes in and says, not so fast, let's slow things down, let's check our work, and there's… there's an anxiety in it. Like, there's… there's a worry in it, and it's a negative emotion.
Donovan Schaefer: And I actually make the argument that it's the tension between those two things, the productive tension between them, that leads to effective science. So this is how I hold up Darwin.
Donovan Schaefer: Because Darwin.
Donovan Schaefer: talks a lot, we've got this great wealth of writings from Darwin, talks a lot about the emotional exhilaration that he feels with science, but also talks a lot about his anxiety and about his worry that the science that he's doing does not work. And so I actually hold that up as the ideal type.
Donovan Schaefer: The joyful seeker of truth, in some ways, is really like the conspiracy theorist. The conspiracy theorist is somebody who has no checks and balances, and is basically always looking for these ways to kind of keep
Donovan Schaefer: building this sort of grand narrative of discovery that they are producing through the production of conspiracy theories. And I think of that as being much closer, in some ways, to the kind of archetype of the joyful seeker of truth. It's somebody who,
Donovan Schaefer: has no sort of back and forth, and is just constantly adding through the sheer exhilaration of discovery to what they're doing. So that would be my tweak to what you're saying, but I otherwise really like this idea of working on this through, ideal types.
mullins: Alan?
mullins: I think you… you may be muted, Alan.
Allen Dyer: Yep, thank you.
Allen Dyer: I'm very much appreciative of this, speaking both as a moral philosopher, educated in ethics in the Department of Religion, but also as a psychiatrist, on the balance of emotion and reason.
Allen Dyer: And I'm very sympathetic and appreciative to what you're saying about the unity of those things, because I think one discounts the other in ways that Apollany identifies as moral inversion, but also very basic to his
Allen Dyer: Epistemology is the idea of, what is reality, and that objectivity is a false ideal.
Allen Dyer: Which he sees in moral inversion. So, I'm very concerned that at the political… at this current moment in history, the very idea of
Allen Dyer: Reality is being challenged in a way that it hasn't been, perhaps, since
Allen Dyer: the Copernican Revolution, so I was excited to see that brought forward in this. I'll just mention very briefly that I've tried to take this on
Allen Dyer: In a book that hopefully will be read not only by philosophers, but by
Allen Dyer: conspiracy theorists and others, and I'll talk more about this on another occasion, madness and the political divide, but there's an issue
Allen Dyer: I think in epistemology, and in terms of the history of the philosophy of science that you're talking about.
Allen Dyer: Polanyi, as most of you probably appreciate, was not well, accepted at Oxford.
Allen Dyer: And Isaiah Berlin
Allen Dyer: famously said of Polanyi, why would someone give up the possibility of a Nobel Prize, which Polanyi was on the threshold of for his work in crystallography, to do mediocre philosophy?
Allen Dyer: And Isaiah Berlin's, and I'll just read a little bit of a section of this, there's a picture of Polanyi.
Allen Dyer: His comment was at once appreciative, but at the same time dismissive. What he actually said was, those Hungarians are a crazy lot, as if those Hungarians were so similar that they could be bunched together in a sweeping generalization.
Allen Dyer: And further, the kind of philosophy that held sway at Oxford, Logical Positivism, the belief that a statement could only be considered objectively true if it could be empirically verified, was precisely the view which Polanyi considered misguided. And of course, all of the things that we've been talking about today
Allen Dyer: And among those of us that appreciate Polanyi so much is the idea that
Allen Dyer: Ethics, values, aesthetics, belief in, in, in…
Allen Dyer: In some faith, are the very things that
Allen Dyer: Polanyi thought were important to clear the decks for.
Donovan Schaefer: Yeah, I find that really compelling. I mean, I think,
Donovan Schaefer: just to sort of respond to your initial point, which I think is vital, Bruno Latour talks about this in We Have Never Been Modern. He says the
Donovan Schaefer: One of the core problems that we have is that we've moved on from objectivism, logical positivism, let's call it a species of objectivism.
Donovan Schaefer: And… It's very difficult For us to think outside of.
Donovan Schaefer: A basic binary of two epistemological choices, which are either total relativism, Or total objectivism.
Donovan Schaefer: It's very hard for us to live in the middle range between those two things. But that's where he wants to plant his flag. He wants to say, let's come up with a form of empiricism, which is neither radically objectivist nor radically relativist, and let's build in that… let's build on that terrain.
Donovan Schaefer: I see Polanyi as doing something similar. I think Poloni is also interested in this idea that we can be empiricists, and good empiricists who really do, like, learn about the truth of the world.
Donovan Schaefer: Without being objectivists, without being logical positivists. I had never heard that passage from Berlin. That's really interesting to hear just how.
Donovan Schaefer: just how sort of scathing they were of Polani's project. I think that that kind of speaks to exactly this, like, this difficulty of mapping people who are trying to create epistemologies that are neither radically relativist or radically objectivist.
Donovan Schaefer: Thank you.
mullins: burn up.
Donovan Schaefer: Dr. Bernal, I'm so sorry for this…
Gus Breytspraak: We are… we're unable to… Even though you're unmuted, you must have your mic turned off or something.
mullins: Let's go on to John…
Gus Breytspraak: Yeah. Let's go on to John Hess, and Ellen, you work on your microphone, okay?
Donovan Schaefer: Or maybe just type something into the chat if you can't get your microphone working.
mullins: John, you're muted, too. John Hess.
Donovan Schaefer: Oof.
John Hess: Okay, thank you very much for your…
John Hess: your, comments, I found them…
John Hess: Interesting. I have a question. Why did you choose the word emotions?
John Hess: I see Polanya using the word passions, and I think passions has got a volitional aspect in it, as well as a feeling aspect in it.
Donovan Schaefer: I'm open to that,
Donovan Schaefer: So, I've thought a lot about this question because one of the traditions that I work in a lot of affect theory speculates a lot about the difference between affect and emotion.
Donovan Schaefer: And you might know within psychology of emotions, there's also this kind of constant proliferation of typologies, where people are trying to figure out, like, okay, what's an affect, what's an emotion, what's a feeling, what's a mood, what's a passion? How do we define these things? There's no consensus. Like, nothing has ever really been settled.
Donovan Schaefer: And my standard line on this is that at this stage of the conversation, which is not to say it won't get to a different stage, but I think at this stage of the conversation, we actually don't understand emotions well enough
Donovan Schaefer: to sit down and start creating precise typologies around what these different terms mean. I just… I'm…
Donovan Schaefer: I'm very optimistic about the future. I think that there's a lot of interesting work being done, but I'm actually kind of pessimistic about the present. I don't think that we have good reckonings of what emotion is, and ways of sort of creating these taxonomies around the category of emotion, that,
Donovan Schaefer: that I think it's…
Donovan Schaefer: necessary at this stage to invest in these taxonomies. But, all of that said, I agree with you, inasmuch as my understanding of emotion is always something that is, as you, as you put it well, volitional. Emotion is propulsive to me. Emotion is something that, is just sort of constantly…
Donovan Schaefer: actively pressing us to engage with the world around us. I think that there's an interesting conversation to be had here about Heidegger, who talks about boredom as essentially a condition that is, produced when you're kind of propulsive
Donovan Schaefer: he doesn't use the word emotion, but, like, your kind of propulsive connection with the world around you is frustrated in some way. Then you experience boredom.
Donovan Schaefer: So I would say, I agree with you in that I think there's a lot of value in emphasizing the volitional quality of emotions, and if somebody wanted to come along and say, when you're talking about emotions, there's value to rephrasing that as passions, I'm open to that. I think that's a conversation worth having.
John Hess: Thank you.
Donovan Schaefer: Thank you.
Damon Kutzin: Could I just briefly also add something to that? I think there's an interesting approach Polani has to this question of classification of emotions, where he doesn't… he doesn't so much as define
Damon Kutzin: emotions according to some taxonomy, but according to their function in various ways. So there's the selective function.
Damon Kutzin: where some emotions pick out certain things as significant, or there's the heuristic function, which propel, propel discovery or problem solving, and the persuasive function. And I… so I wonder if that's… that could be a more fruitful way to get at this
Damon Kutzin: distinction, rather than saying, like, what's an emotion, or an affect, or a, or a mood, let's just talk about the function these feelings have in inquiry.
Donovan Schaefer: Yeah, I find that compelling.
Donovan Schaefer: I see Dr. Bernal has put a question in the chat, can we go to that?
Gus Breytspraak: Yes.
mullins: Nice.
Gus Breytspraak: I don't know if… why don't you read it, for all of us? I'm not sure everybody can see the chat.
Donovan Schaefer: Sure. So it says, Donovan, I'm interested in your discussion of simplex systems. You say on page 8, quote, if reason feels, then it is susceptible rather than immune to the other emotions swirling around it, unquote. I assume you don't want to say that it is only emotion that causes error. As you read, Copernicus's theory was revised, but not merely because of emotion. Polanyi does talk similarly about moral inversion, but he also talks about other
Donovan Schaefer: ways we can be wrong, false frameworks, etc. So question one, how do we break out of a false belief system? And question two, is it only feeling that makes a theory wrong?
Donovan Schaefer: I would say… To start with 2.
Donovan Schaefer: It is only feeling that makes a theory wrong. It is also only feeling that makes a theory right.
Donovan Schaefer: This is my understanding of what I think Polanyi is saying about, intellectual emotions. We only know the world around us through feeling. There's no separate framework.
Donovan Schaefer: feeling is that comprehensive. That's the way I read him. I might be putting words in his mouth, I'm open to that accusation, but the way that I understand Polani, he is saying that all scientific rationality is ultimately encompassed by the feeling of feel… by the field of feeling.
Donovan Schaefer: And so, when we make good knowledge about the world, we are doing it from feeling, but also when we make bad knowledge about the world, we are doing it from feeling. So, what I would say to this question about breaking out of a false belief system is that
Donovan Schaefer: it is, on a core level, if we, like Copernicus, move from the wrong belief system to the right belief system, even if he didn't have all the particulars worked out.
Donovan Schaefer: As Polanyi says, it's ultimately about feeling. It's ultimately a kind of affective preference. And he's got this very interesting take in the passage that I read, where he says, you have to have a kind of feeling for theory.
Donovan Schaefer: that allows you to override the basic evidence of your senses, which tells you that the sun is moving around the Earth, rather than the other way around.
Donovan Schaefer: What I would say is that when new information emerges, we may well feel our way to a better way of understanding the world, but we also can double down.
Donovan Schaefer: And I think we see this a lot. This comes back to the point that was made earlier, you know, we live in this age where truth is under siege, in part because people are believing what they want to believe.
Donovan Schaefer: And this is the way that I understand it, is that you can have a kind of passion to learn more about the world, and to, Polanyi calls it, the feeling of making contact with reality. That can be your overriding emotional impulse, or you can go through the world.
Donovan Schaefer: being like, I'm only going to believe the things that make me feel good.
Donovan Schaefer: And those are competing emotional impulses. So what I would say is I think one of the things that, someone like me, if I'm doing my job well as a professor.
Donovan Schaefer: One of the things that I hope that I'm doing is teaching my students to tune themselves in to how to feel their way to a better understanding of reality, and how to get out of that sort of selfish mentality of, like, if I don't like this, it must be wrong.
Donovan Schaefer: But I think that those… those forces are always in tension with us, and I think we're always navigating these contending emotional impulses. So I would say, rather than being about the emotional and the non-emotional, it's different emotional priorities that are in tension with each other. That's… that's the way I would answer them.
Gus Breytspraak: John, you've had your hand up a while.
Jon Fennell: Yes, I'm really struck by a number of things, so let me just mention one.
Jon Fennell: Polanyi, in the introduction to his chapter on the intellectual passions.
Jon Fennell: Points out that it might be thought that he is saying that the passions are kind of added on to science.
Jon Fennell: But he says, that's not what I'm saying. He's saying the intellectual passions are logically a component of science. In other words, science is inconceivable without acknowledging the role of these passions.
Jon Fennell: Questions?
Donovan Schaefer: Right.
Jon Fennell: what I… what I see Donovan doing here is highlighting something that's implicit in Polani's discussion.
Jon Fennell: Just like science is inconceivable without acknowledgement of the intellectual passions.
Jon Fennell: I think Donovan and Polani are saying that
Jon Fennell: The… the very concept of human being is… is…
Jon Fennell: lacking, it's incomplete, without acknowledging the indispensable role played by passions or emotions. So, What's your…
Jon Fennell: One of your contributions here, Donovan, and I'm happy to see it, you are basically making explicit the philosophical anthropology that's implicit in Polani. In other words, you're making clear the underlying assertion about the very character of what it is to be a human being.
Jon Fennell: if we… if we accept this view of the human being, we got a whole lot of new problems to deal with. And you were getting at that a minute ago in relation to Ellen's question.
Jon Fennell: If we, as human beings, have no choice but to be passionate, or emotional, emotionally driven.
Jon Fennell: then… Especially for pedagogy, there are profound implications here.
Jon Fennell: If you want a peaceful world.
Donovan Schaefer: Couldn't agree more. Yeah, everything that you just said is kind of exactly where I feel like I landed with this. Can I ask you, individually and collectively, a question? Because I'm really interested in what you were saying about how you see this as
Donovan Schaefer: implicit in Polani, and you said that the book is sort of making it explicit. I am very interested to hear if,
Donovan Schaefer: the reading that I've offered of Polani is something that just feels very obvious to everyone, or if this is, I don't know, kind of like…
Donovan Schaefer: if it's drawing on something that is maybe secondary in Polani, or is not talked about that much with Polani, it's interesting to me that you described it as implicit, and said that what I'm doing is making it explicit. Is this something that is in the foreground of how people talk and think about Polani, or is it something that is secondary?
Jon Fennell: Well, let me welcome you to the world of Polanyi.
Allen Dyer: I can comment on that, because, Poteet and Langford, in their book, Intellect and Hope, I think the first thing they say about it is that,
Allen Dyer: Polanyi's personal knowledge is a very exasperating book, and it's exasperating for two different reasons, which you just alluded to. One, it's either so obvious, why would you even bother to say it? And one, the other is that it's so objectionable because it goes against the grain, that it's, it creates a resistance.
mullins: Back to John.
Jon Fennell: Yeah, yeah, what I wanted to say to Donovan is that
Jon Fennell: You're asking a very good question, and I think most of us who are in this group today recognize that there is a lack of unanimity in interpretation.
Donovan Schaefer: That's true.
Jon Fennell: So,
Jon Fennell: My comment grows out of my understanding of Polandi and personal knowledge. I have discovered over the years that not everybody shares my view of the book and what's up in…
Jon Fennell: What's going on there?
Jon Fennell: So,
Jon Fennell: Yeah, I think others answered the question that you posed. I think you're… I think you're bringing out something that's at the very center of Polani, and I'm happy to see it, but not everybody agrees with me about the center of Polani.
Donovan Schaefer: That's fascinating. And just to say, as well, Alan,
Donovan Schaefer: I get a version of that a lot. I get people who will say to me.
Donovan Schaefer: Sometimes in the same paragraph, critics of the book
Donovan Schaefer: This is both blindingly obvious and obviously wrong.
Donovan Schaefer: I get that all the time. This, like, this incompatible, like, sort of double evaluation of, like.
Donovan Schaefer: why would anybody think this? And yet, also, somehow, at the same time, it's obvious. And it's always puzzled me, so it's very interesting to hear you say that, Polanyi was getting a similar reaction.
mullins: Ron? Ron Hall?
Ron: Yes, thank you. It's been enjoyable listening to you. I couldn't help but, think of,
Ron: Martha Nussbaum's book.
Ron: The emotions, and I certainly know that. The subtitle of that book is The Intelligence of Emotions.
Ron: I'm wondering whether you,
Ron: Find yourself agreeing with that idea of the intelligence of emotions, or do you see any dangers in it?
Donovan Schaefer: Yeah, thank you, great question. Nussbaum was, like, one of the allies that I found as I was sort of, like, scanning the seas, like, looking for friendly harbors for this project.
Donovan Schaefer: Nussbaum, as I understand her, she's coming out of a kind of analytic philosophy of emotions tradition. I mean, she's rooted in ancient philosophy, which is sort of where she gets what she's getting, but she's using a kind of paradigm, as I see it, of analytic philosophy of emotions, which goes to this question of whether emotions have cognitive content.
Donovan Schaefer: And I agree with…
Donovan Schaefer: that core element, but my framing is different, because I'm not actually interested in whether emotions have cognitive content. I'm interested in asserting that cognitions irrevocably have emotional content.
Donovan Schaefer: So my kind of, like, angle is different from hers. But I think, I mean, her core idea that, like, emotion and cognition are interrelated processes is something I'm very sympathetic to.
Donovan Schaefer: In terms of thinking about emotions as intelligent.
Donovan Schaefer: This is where I want to hang on to that… that kind of, like, double… that, like, double… that double analysis, which is to say, our emotions lead us to better knowledge about the world, and our emotions lead us into error.
Donovan Schaefer: All of our knowledge, everything that we think of as belief, true or false, is all grounded
Donovan Schaefer: in emotional… emotionally saturated cognitive processes. And so, it's just not the syntax that I would use to say emotions either are or are not intelligent. They're just… they're so deeply interwoven into cognitive processes that we can't get any of our beliefs true or false without them.
Donovan Schaefer: Is that good at your question?
Ron: Yeah, one thing that worries me about Nussbaum is that, she ends up
Ron: Sort of making emotions forms of thinking and knowing.
Ron: And I wonder if that's to betray something important. Clearly, knowing in an epistemological sense is different from knowing someone, and that's very second person, which is a lot being made of these days about knowing someone as opposed to knowing things. But I'm just wondering.
Ron: Would you say, Would you be inclined to say.
Ron: Feeling is a mode of knowing something.
Donovan Schaefer: No, I wouldn't. And I think, if I'm understanding you right, I think we're on the same page in that. If I'm understanding you right, I would phrase it as this.
Donovan Schaefer: An emotion is…
Donovan Schaefer: can carry what we would call cognitive content, but, like, that move that some corners of analytic philosophy will make to
Donovan Schaefer: Kind of shear off.
Donovan Schaefer: all of the stuff that is not cognitive content in theorizing the cognitive content of emotion, and to miss the phenomenological specificity of emotion, what I would think of as, like, what it feels like to have an emotion, that, I think is cutting out something that's important.
Donovan Schaefer: Which I think is what you're saying as well.
Donovan Schaefer: Thank you. Dr. Casper has had his hand up for a while.
mullins: I believe you're muted.
David Kasper: Chris, there we go.
David Kasper: Yes, thank you, Donovan. That's a great, great story. Would you put the name of your… I've lost your introduction from the email. Put the name of your book in the chat?
Donovan Schaefer: For reference?
David Kasper: Great.
Donovan Schaefer: And I'll say the introduction is freely available, on the University Press website, so I'll just give you that.
Donovan Schaefer: Oh, okay. We'll just drop the link to that, and then there's a… there's a link in this link.
Donovan Schaefer: to the introduction itself, which they published free. It's a nice thing that Duke does with their books.
David Kasper: Okay, great.
David Kasper: Great, yes, and yes, I'm, I'm just joining this group, just joining, and
David Kasper: great awareness of Polani.
David Kasper: have read… I've read through, or skimmed through, I must admit, his, personal knowledge. Now I'm starting to read it through in detail. I really enjoy his very first chapter. Of course, first I enjoy the, his introduction, as well as the preface from,
David Kasper: Nye from, oh gosh, what's… what's her first name?
mullins: Mary Jo.
Gus Breytspraak: Very joke.
David Kasper: Yeah, Mary Jo Nye, and then the first paragraph of Polani, I thought, yes, I'm gonna like, studying this guy, because his first paragraph is very interesting.
David Kasper: kind of almost tongue-in-cheek, it seemed like to me, but that may just be the… what I… the take I take on everything, because I must admit, I'm a… now a science fiction writer, and that's how I got into this philosophy.
David Kasper: is I am, deciding to write a… I'm working on a science fiction book about how we deal with AI,
David Kasper: And that's why I have my strange background. I'm using it with seven inner aliens that live within our brains that help us understand the 7 different types of intelligences.
David Kasper: from… that are evolutionary intelligence, as I say, that we're taking ourselves to, to number 6,
David Kasper: as machine intelligence, And, I believe there'll be a multiverse of Intelligence as the seventh
David Kasper: That is designed by machine intelligence. And, so based on those crazy ideals, I'm trying to bring it home to philosophy and science by studying about 500 books I have on my wish list now.
David Kasper: And the… the main thing is there is that, just to make a point that… and how you could relate to this, Donovan, on…
David Kasper: Intelligence is considered my second intelligence. It's, it's quantum to emotional to natural, to human.
David Kasper: to machine, and to multiverse.
David Kasper: And spiritual is in there as well, as well as, right after human.
David Kasper: I actually have emotional before human.
David Kasper: And even before natural, because I feel that emotional, from a standpoint of even quantum.
David Kasper: intelligence is… did exist, to keep the, planets, the sun to create a solar system, and the planets from running into each other. This isn't just laws of physics.
mullins: I encourage you to bring this to a close. We've got a bunch of hands up.
David Kasper: Okay, yeah, so that's my background, and sorry for the big story there, but my question then is that how do you see this as emotional, as being actually an intelligence of itself?
Donovan Schaefer: Yeah, I mean… I think I would say… There is no…
Donovan Schaefer: Animal-organismic intelligence that is not emotional.
Donovan Schaefer: That doesn't mean that there aren't other forms of intelligence, but I would say anything that we're doing as animals that we might think of as intelligence, I would say is ultimately grounded in emotion. That would be the argument that I would make.
mullins: Alright, thank you.
mullins: Duke Moody, is your hand up again, or is your… is that just from the previous time?
richard moodey: That was… Mary had something to say.
mullins: Mary, okay, good. Mary?
richard moodey: I'm going to bumble my way through this question, Donovan.
richard moodey: But in listening to all of these ideas presented.
richard moodey: And thinking about your introduction being… you're being immersed in religious studies, You know, throughout your career.
richard moodey: I can't help but feel there's an elephant in the room.
richard moodey: with Apostle Paul, and the influence that Plato separating
richard moodey: reason from Passion and Apostle Paul making a big distinction between the body and the spirit, that somehow
richard moodey: What you're working on is… Really trying to…
richard moodey: push your way into something that is so much a part of Western thought, that, it's not…
richard moodey: It's a struggle to present these ideas Without having to overturn these big…
richard moodey: traditions in Western culture and thinking.
Donovan Schaefer: Thank you. Yeah, it's such a fascinating question.
richard moodey: Oh.
Donovan Schaefer: One of my kind of sub-ambitions while I was writing this book was that I wanted to…
Donovan Schaefer: I wanted to point the finger, and, like, come up with a culprit, and be like, this is the moment that the thinking-feeling binary really, like, gets its claws, like, into our kind of Western epistemology.
Donovan Schaefer: And there's no smoking gun. It's so weird, because the thing is that, like, I've talked about this project in various contexts, and, like.
Donovan Schaefer: Everywhere I go, people come up to me with their figures.
Donovan Schaefer: And they're like, so-and-so would agree with you. Everybody agrees with me, on some level. Like, all of these historical figures agree with me. And they're all, like, kind of held up.
Donovan Schaefer: as not actually susceptible to the thinking-feeling binary. So, I'm not an expert on ancient philosophy, but I've had people say to me, like, Plato and Aristotle
Donovan Schaefer: are both figures that, if you read deeply enough into them, start to complicate the idea of a thinking-feeling binary. And obviously, like, the kind of early Christian movement's absorption of that, like, has its own kind of version of that. One of my colleagues is an expert in Aquinas.
Donovan Schaefer: And he was like, you know, Aquinas really agrees with you. I was like, really? Aquinas? Aquinas agrees with me? And he's like, absolutely, because it goes back to Aristotle. Aristotle is also saying, like, all men have a desire to know. So, like, there's also this disruption of the thinking-feeling binary there. Descartes. One of my doctoral students, like, wrote an entire dissertation on the French Enlightenment, starts with Descartes.
Donovan Schaefer: And says… reminds us that Descartes has a whole book called The Passions of the Soul.
Donovan Schaefer: Which includes attention to intellectual passions. So, why…
Donovan Schaefer: do we hold up Descartes' confessions, which seems much more like a kind of thinking-feeling binary, why is that the Descartes book that is definitive, rather than this other Descartes book? Why didn't we take the left path rather than the right path? Like, there's no actual intrinsic reason why it had to be this version of Descartes that we hold up now. Kant. I gave a talk at Princeton, and my buddy who was organizing it
Donovan Schaefer: was a Kant specialist, and he was like, thanks for not throwing Kant under the bus, because Kant agrees with you. And I was like, no way. No way does Kant agree with me. And he was like, absolutely. And he gave me, like, chapter and verse on how Kant is also somebody who doesn't buy the thinking-feeling binary on a core level. And so, it actually turned into, like.
Donovan Schaefer: this… like, incredibly sprawling mystery for me. How, at some point, we
Donovan Schaefer: decided that the Western tradition is the thinking-feeling binary.
Donovan Schaefer: As a separate question from the obvious fact that we do have the thinking-feeling binary, but nobody can actually pinpoint where it comes from, how it, like, entered into our discourse as, like, the specimen of common sense.
Donovan Schaefer: And there's even this, like, retrospective sorting operation, where, like, we look at Descartes, and we're like, okay, the Descartes that we're going to elevate is this particular Descartes that consolidates the thinking-feeling binary.
Donovan Schaefer: And not this other Descartes that disrupts the thinking-feeling binary. And, like, that sorting operation has been performed on the whole history of Western philosophy, of, like, what's… what's central and what's peripheral, like, what's canon and what's fringe.
Donovan Schaefer: And nobody can actually explain where… how this sorting operation happened. So I'd actually be very interested in hearing your thoughts on that, if you have any. I definitely think Plato is, like, a good culprit, but, like, why is it the particular interpretation of Plato that we have? Because there are so many Plato's.
Donovan Schaefer: Anyway, just, yeah, amazing question, something I'm thinking about all the time.
richard moodey: And I have one other, response when you said what you try to get your students to think about, in your lectures.
richard moodey: And when I was teaching, Discipline-based arts and education.
Donovan Schaefer: One of the things we would have the students do.
richard moodey: As first respond to a work of art, Or music, whatever, aesthetically.
richard moodey: And from their feelings.
richard moodey: then move into the whys, and the how did you get that way? And I started this with children as young as 3rd grade.
Donovan Schaefer: And it's really…
richard moodey: really opened
richard moodey: their minds, but I would also say their heart into approaching different disciplines, because I use that in all subject areas.
richard moodey: I mean, I used it in college as well.
richard moodey: But I did it as young as 3rd grade.
Donovan Schaefer: That just seems incredibly valuable to me. I mean, I think this is what we need to be doing all the time, is getting people to tune in to their initial response to something. People…
Donovan Schaefer: this was one of the, like, sort of subplots that I developed in the book, is,
Donovan Schaefer: I have this chapter on the mere exposure effect in psychology. So this is this very well-documented, well-studied phenomenon in psychology, the mere exposure effect. Once you have been exposed to a particular piece of information the first time, you
Donovan Schaefer: develop a kind of preference for it, and then you… you prefer that same piece of information subsequent times. So it basically says, like, the mere exposure effect. So it basically says you… you become kind of like…
Donovan Schaefer: attuned to something just through the accident of the fact that you encountered that first. So, when you're exposing… when you're talking to students, and you put an idea in front of them that contradicts their starting point.
Donovan Schaefer: They almost always have at least some initial reaction where they're like, this is…
Donovan Schaefer: obnoxious. Like, they're repelled by it, and that's that near exposure effect kicking in. And I think asking students to reflect on how information, new ideas, make them feel is an incredibly valuable way of just, like, attuning them to that reaction formation that just gives them a kind of allergy to anything new being put in front of them.
Donovan Schaefer: that's… we're speaking in very broad brushstrokes here, but the basic point about attunement to how you feel about a piece of information, I think, is just crucially important.
mullins: I'd like.
richard moodey: I'm sure you have a lot of questions from other people, but thank you.
Donovan Schaefer: Thank you.
mullins: I'd like to ask a… I'm not sure this is a question, but in Polanya, there's, of course, quite a bit of discussion about intellectual passions, and how those are developed in human beings, and how they operate in science, and how they…
mullins: seem to be a part even of worms and amoebas and things like that. There also is quite a bit of discussion about what he calls moral passions, and as Jaeger points out in her article.
mullins: It's not always quite clear how these two fit together, whether… it's pretty clear that moral passions have gotten diverted, and some terrible things in the modern world. Totalitarianism is related to, sort of, scientism and moral passion.
mullins: What do you make, or do you make any distinctions between moral passions and intellectual passions, or moral emotions and intellectual emotions?
Donovan Schaefer: That's a great question.
Donovan Schaefer: It's interesting, too, because, I mean, this is Hume as well.
Donovan Schaefer: Hume is also deeply invested in this idea that morality stems from emotion, and my reading of Hume is that he's also very invested in this idea that science and philosophy come from emotion as well. I haven't thought a whole lot about it, but I would say my core… my kind of general take would be,
Donovan Schaefer: Moral emotions and intellectual emotions are not qualitatively different. They're both part of the same kind of…
Donovan Schaefer: Of what we would think of as our, kind of, core emotional drivers or capacities.
Donovan Schaefer: But the moral emotions, I think… I think moral emotions have these kind of competing pulls in exactly the same way that intellectual emotions have competing poles. So that's where I think, like, you see these kind of, regimes of violence or totalitarianism or something like that coming out.
Donovan Schaefer: It's a particular moral emotion, like,
Donovan Schaefer: Jonathan Haidt has done, like, Jonathan Haidt's interesting stuff on this, like.
Donovan Schaefer: loyalty to authority is a kind of moral emotion, or loyalty to your community is a kind of moral emotion. But that has a sort of,
Donovan Schaefer: A kind of, like…
Donovan Schaefer: a kind of failure condition, like too much loyalty to your community turns you into this, like.
Donovan Schaefer: my country, right or wrong absolutist, where, you know, anybody who wraps themselves in the flag, like, is just automatically, you know, a savior or something like that. So this idea that, like, there is a kind of moral emotion there that's been extended, hyperextended to this kind of
Donovan Schaefer: critical, like, danger threshold. That, to me seems… that to me seems like a sound way of talking about that.
Gus Breytspraak: Damon, you've got your hand up.
Damon Kutzin: Yes, thank you.
Damon Kutzin: Yeah, I just… maybe this is a related question, maybe not, but I was just curious how…
Damon Kutzin: In your epilogue, you sort of call on academics to renew a commitment to truth.
Damon Kutzin: In their… in their inquiry, and I guess in their public-facing persona as well, and I suppose this is a question for everyone, kind of building off the discussion Donovan and John Fennell had about how if human beings are fundamentally affective.
Damon Kutzin: or feeling creatures, what does this… what would this commitment to truth look like? I suppose the…
Damon Kutzin: Before the thinking-feeling binary, it would look like some kind of cold, you know, dispassionate.
Donovan Schaefer: convey all of facts to an audience in some way. What is the alternative to that, given this… the rejection of the thinking-feeling binary as a premise?
Donovan Schaefer: Totally. I mean, I think that comes back to the Latour thing.
Donovan Schaefer: it's very difficult for us to map this intermediate zone between absolute objectivism and absolute relativism. Like, it's very hard for us to say, this is what it means to commit ourselves to the idea that we can know the world better and understand the world better.
Donovan Schaefer: without saying that that gives us access to absolute truth. Like, we just don't have a well-built-out vocabulary for living in that space.
Donovan Schaefer: I would make the argument, maybe this is a little bit overly optimistic, I would make the argument that getting more in touch with our intellectual emotions helps us map that middle zone.
Donovan Schaefer: Because, I think that… On a certain level.
Donovan Schaefer: People… some people, are inclined to recognize that there is an emotional dimension to learning about the world around us.
Donovan Schaefer: And I think the… the basic template of saying the emotional protocols of knowledge production can both lead us to a better understanding of the world, and they can lead us to a worse understanding of the world, I think that helps us better understand,
Donovan Schaefer: this sort of complex, like, middle zone, where it's both, where both of these processes are active at the same time. And it sort of comes back to what Mary was saying as well. Like, I think as a pedagogical scenario.
Donovan Schaefer: Attuning people to the way that they feel.
Donovan Schaefer: when they encounter information, especially new information or contradictory information or challenging information, just getting people to see that you have an emotional response to an idea that has been put in front of you that maybe makes you uncomfortable on some register, I think that's extraordinarily valuable in its own right. So one of the things I would like to see is more self-reflexivity among
Donovan Schaefer: teachers.
Donovan Schaefer: About how to cultivate that attunement among students.
Donovan Schaefer: I feel like I'm kind of giving your question a glancing blow, but that's sort of how I would respond.
Damon Kutzin: Oh, that's very interesting. Thank you.
Gus Breytspraak: So, we are almost out of time. I've got a couple… can we have a quick question from Ron, and then maybe Duane? And I'd like to hear, Donovan.
Gus Breytspraak: If you can share, what you're working on now, or whether you're just too busy with the response to this book still. It seems like you're still dealing with a lot of response to this one. But, Ron, and then Duane quickly?
Ron: Yeah, I was wondering if you might say just a little bit more about what do you mean by
Ron: the hot word binary, since it's thrown around a lot these days with regard to computer languages and to all sorts of things, and I'm wondering.
Ron: Do you think of binary as a kind of dichotomy, or a distinction, or maybe even… do you think of it sort of like I think about Merlo Pompey's idea of perception and its relation to thinking as a…
Ron: that perception is a transcendental condition for thinking. Is feeling… would you be comfortable thinking that, that, feeling is a transcendental, condition for thought?
Ron: I guess not.
Donovan Schaefer: On… in Merle Ponte's terms, yes.
Donovan Schaefer: It gets complicated, because I think…
Donovan Schaefer: It comes back to what you were asking earlier as well, actually, because… Once you start emphasizing
Donovan Schaefer: Once you sort of, like, get into this phenomenology, talk about, like, the transcendental condition.
Donovan Schaefer: there's less attention to what I see as
Donovan Schaefer: to use another philosopher term, like the kind of dialectical relationship between thinking and feeling. This was one of the puzzles that I stumbled into on the book, was that, on the one hand, I wanted to move on from the thinking-feeling binary
Donovan Schaefer: And yet, I could not get away from the sense that feeling is primary.
Donovan Schaefer: Okay, but does that mean that I'm just bringing the binary back in, maybe in a more kind of tuned-up version? And honestly, I never solved that problem. I just… still to this day, I'm like, I reject the thinking-feeling binary, and yet whatever thinking and feeling is as a relationship, feeling is primary. And I don't know if that walks me back into the snare of the thinking-feeling binary. But honestly, I mean, these are…
Donovan Schaefer: like, I love these questions, because these are questions that, like, I…
Donovan Schaefer: I ran up against, like, in writing this book that I still don't have good answers to. So, yeah, thank you. I mean, that's… it's… it's… these are the puzzles that I'm still wrestling with as well.
Ron: I've never quite heard of a philosopher saying I don't have an answer to this, but thank you.
Gus Breytspraak: Duane, do you still have a hand.
Duane Lookingbill: That's a quick question, you know?
Gus Breytspraak: We got 2 minutes.
Duane Lookingbill: I'm always, I'm always intrigued by titles.
Duane Lookingbill: the Wild Experi… experiment.
Duane Lookingbill: I'd… I'd kind of like to…
Duane Lookingbill: look… look beyond that to where this project or experiment or the wildness of this is going for you. Is there a life to this, or a direction to this? Wild is something that's uncontrollable. It actually made me think of the Holy Spirit.
Duane Lookingbill: that's undomesticatable, and especially in relation to what I haven't read your book, but the conversation about evolution and the SCOPS trial, which, you know, part of that
Duane Lookingbill: Part of that story has to do with the Holy Spirit and the Bible. But anyway…
Duane Lookingbill: What's the life of this project as you see it? Where… is it going somewhere?
Gus Breytspraak: What's… and what's next? Yeah.
Donovan Schaefer: Yeah, thanks for asking. I, I've got two things on the go right now. One of them is I've become very interested in the category of meaning.
Donovan Schaefer: The way we use this word, meaning, And,
Donovan Schaefer: It's something that I think would really benefit from sort of putting it in conversation.
Donovan Schaefer: with, theories and philosophy of emotion. So I'm working on something on meaning. I'm also working on something on,
Donovan Schaefer: material culture. So, kind of pivoting away from the epistemological aspect, and thinking more about… but, I mean, but pivoting back to the phenomenological aspect, what are the kind of emotional affective dimensions of our relationships with objects, with environments, with,
Donovan Schaefer: ecosystems,
Donovan Schaefer: Which is not unrelated to the question of belief formation, like, why do we believe certain things about the world around us? But I think that there's room to start talking more about things like affordances, and to, like, the built environment, materiality as these other venues for thinking about affect.
Ron: Well, when you start thinking about Manning, you need to think about Wittgenstein, which I'm sure you have.
Donovan Schaefer: This is the tricky thing, is there's meaning in the semiotic sense of, like, representation, what something means in a kind of dictionary sense, and then there's this other sense of meaning in a kind of existential sense.
Donovan Schaefer: And they're sort of related, they're kind of wrapped up together, but I also want to disaggregate them and figure out how they're distinctive as well.
Donovan Schaefer: But yes, I'll definitely be looking at the constraint.
Ron: And Cabelle, must we mean what we say?
Donovan Schaefer: Sure, yeah.
mullins: And I'm sure you are aware that Plinya's last book with a co-author is named Meaning, and they're about a ton of archival documents from 68 forward that are all about meaning.
Donovan Schaefer: Interesting. Okay, yeah, I need to check that out, too.
mullins: Well, I think we've come to the end of our hour. Thanks again so much,
Duane Lookingbill: You, you have an email we can email, to you?
Duane Lookingbill: in person.
Donovan Schaefer: Absolutely, drop me a… anybody who has more follow-up questions, feel free to reach out.
Donovan Schaefer: I'm easy to find, just Google me.
Gus Breytspraak: And thank you again, Damon, for a wonderful review. If any of you haven't read it, go to the Polanyi
Gus Breytspraak: Website, and thanks for your contributions as well.
Gus Breytspraak: Very good to be with everyone.
Donovan Schaefer: Thank you all so much for having me. This is a pleasure, fascinating conversation, I learned so much. Thank you again, I really appreciate this.
mullins: Let me…
Ron: It was a serendipitous thing, wasn't it, Gus, when you and I stumbled into Donovan's presentation at the AAR?
Gus Breytspraak: Yes, yes, Ron and I take, credit for this. We heard that panel in San Antonio, and…
Donovan Schaefer: I'm so glad, I'm so glad that happened.
Duane Lookingbill: Big thanks. Big thanks, big thanks.
mullins: Let me remind people that there is another one of these posted for March 14th, Tempering AI. Ponya had quite a bit of interest in AI, and some people have run with that, so if you're interested in that, come again.
Donovan Schaefer: Thanks, everyone.
Damon Kutzin: Thank you.
mullins: Thank you again.
Gus Breytspraak: See you again.
mullins: Well, we had lots of people, Gus.
Gus Breytspraak: Yeah, very good turnout, great discussion.
mullins: Yeah.