Whenever I make an entry on this blog, there is always a pang of insecurity in the back of my mind. Do I really have the requisite knowledge, rigor and insight to justify my writing about a certain topic? For example, if I haven’t familiarized myself with the entire corpus of the philosophy of science, can I really feel justified writing about it? Will my contribution be meaningful? How much background knowledge does one need to know before a sense of expertise will finally emerge?
Consider a physics graduate student, working his way through a dissertation about, say, Hamiltonian mechanics. Although it is likely that they will have had some exposure to the concept initially through coursework and further deepened their understanding through review of the various relevant literature, how will they know when they know ‘enough’ about a given topic to make their piece profound, original and non-derivative? Of course, their selection of topic for their research will have been adequately specific to make such a broad understanding a non-futile exercise, but is there ever really a limit to how much they can know or read about a given topic? Drawing on Kuhn’s ideas about paradigms, how can one know that they have gleaned all the relevant information about a given paradigm such that they can make an informed contribution?
This notion of knowing a paradigm can be extended to a variety of non-scientific disciplines, with the necessary loosening of the definition. Perhaps it may be more accurate to describe this pseudo-paradigm as just the sphere of knowledge of a discipline, but I find that the analogies that Kuhn uses to describe learning a paradigm (i.e. from a textbook) and its necessity in progress capture some aspects of the issue that I find most central. While the notion that at one point in history one could glean a fairly comprehensive picture of a paradigm from a single text, in our increasingly multifaceted and expansive academic world this is simply not the case. Perhaps this is more of a reflection of the fact that paradigms in present times have grown quite massive, but I find that this unwieldiness of discipline arouses some major arguments against the notion that one must ‘know’ a paradigm in order to make fruitful contributions.
This statement makes the presumption that to ‘know’ a paradigm is to have a complete understanding all of its central tenants and spindly appendages, which is clearly not something that has been possible since perhaps the early 19th century. This brings us back to the central question of this entry: how much does one need to know?
Perhaps it is not how much one needs to know about a given discipline to proclaim mastery, but rather the validity of their interpretation of the central tenants of the discipline that allows for meaningful contribution. When one says that Sir Isaac Newton was the only one (ever) who fully understood his paradigm of Newtonian dynamics, they don’t mean that he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the full and exact extent of the entirety of his paradigm, but rather that he had the proper logic of thought to move from these central tenants in a way that preserved the internal continuity of the paradigm itself. In some ways, this view is demonstrated by much of contemporary science education, where the goal of learning isn’t the internalization of some set of information, but rather the development of faculties of thought to understand more complicated information in the future and apply it properly. In this sense, the question may not be how much, but how well.
Maybe deeper insight can be gleaned from thinking in a less theoretical perspective. Plenty of excellent writings have manifested from those writing outside their disciplines, so clearly complete and utter mastery of a given way of thinking is not requisite to making an informed contribution. In fact, in many ways, the cross-contamination of the various practices in different disciplines can be very enlightening. However, some of the best insights are gleaned when the author has a clear understanding of the motivations and rhetorical mechanisms involved in their host discipline. Perhaps fluency and competency in making contributions involves a sort of meta-understanding of the discipline in question, not necessarily intimate knowledge of all of its bits and pieces. One must know merely how it works, not all the specific details. This fits together well with the analogy made earlier with science education.
The uncertainty I described in the first paragraph of this entry still resounds even as I am typing this now, especially since I am deviated from my standard methods by trying to write something without having an external locus of inspiration. As a result, I feel that I am unable to resolve my posed questions adequately with my current knowledge and experience. Maybe the answer is something much more implicit than confidence, familiarity with a discipline, or even depth of understanding within the discipline. Regardless, I will continue my trudge through these ideas via writing, despite this foundational mystery.