Journal 1: from January to July 2001
The trip so far has been better and worse than expected, faster and slower than expected and so surprisingly on. It took 6 months from conception of the trip in July of 2000 to get started. Part of this delay is from my consulting job in Essex, Connecticut which takes 2 months out of every four. And part of the initial delay was because the pieces of the new lifestyle puzzle took awhile to work out. In any case the 19' Coachmen class B motor home refrigerator, two beds (1 up top), gas heater, two-burner stove, toilet, shower, generator, microwave, etc. was purchased in September, 2000 in Ft. Lauderdale. I wanted a smaller RV to be able to park in cities near campuses more easily despite the restricted living space. Fitting it out with bookshelves and extra storage (using the tub/shower) and all the accoutrements took more time. Moving out of the house in Tallahassee and changing my lifestyle with cell phone, insurance, selling car and so forth took more time.
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Just after purchase in October 2000 in yard in Tallahassee (47,000 miles on odometer) |
The first interview under the reach-out plan of the Epistemology Express was at Florida State with John Kelsay of the theology department. It was enjoyable and very helpful. In December I made the following entry of a more sobering encounter (all entries were e-mails made to friend Dick in Oakland):
And today I paid a little visit on a local epistemologist, Jack Lyons, over at FSU during his office hours. It was sobering which is what I needed now because I was flying a little too high anyway. I can't say that it was a bad meeting in that we talked somewhat productively for about 20 minutes. He couldn't however think of anyone doing anything similar to my work which was not unexpected, but he didn't entirely reject it or fail to see the parallels with a lot of other work going on today. His main difficulty seemed to be a difficulty appreciating how one could situate the subject as agent in an extended body. In other words if Jack's loving Jill is a composite body of Jack and Jill then how is (from Jack's side of the equation) Jack's loving Jill composite body loving Jill? When I inquired about how he might construe a subject without an object to define it, he had difficulty ("I'm not an Eastern philosopher."). When asked what would make his life better, he replied "Having a permanent job." When asked why, he said "So that I wouldn't worry." I asked if "not worrying" was not a subject as body regulating itself rather than a subject defined by objects, and he paused without our really being able to pick it up from there.
What was amazing to me was that at first he could drone on about this boring stuff (I had just heard him rehashing textbook stuff with a student before I went in) in a way that sort of depressed me. This is partly because I have the phrase of one FSU philosophy doctoral student ringing in my head (before Jack himself came here) "They're (the philo profs) are all dead." But what was impressive is that when I switched the subject to my stuff, he changed gears completely after 2 or 3 exchanges and started methodically probing my arguments. He wasn't exactly enlivened but he could apply the same detailed, methodical probing to new material.
In early January I finally got away and went to U of Florida for just two days:
I am sitting here in my warm but cramped, little RV drinking a cup of Tahitian vanilla tea while my heater is running to keep up with the freezing weather outside and while Kitaro is playing on the CD player. I didn't cook tonight but had a gyro down near the U. of Florida campus earlier this afternoon and then had a bowl of cereal here in the van. Last night I did cook and had spaghetti with a salad of tomato and avocado. My "kitchen" is tiny but I was able to get it done by constantly moving things one way or another including onto the couch/bed. Now I'm typing this on the tiny, wobbly table that sits between the couch/bed and the sink/stove. Life seems pretty good.
But today at the campus went pretty well. I only had two conversations, but they were both nice and helpful. The day got started late as I had trouble finding a non-chain breakfast restaurant. I finally found what somebody recommended to me as a very good non-chain restaurant but which turned out to be the 43rd Street Cafe (on 16th Street) which was suspiciously indicating that there were now at least 2 of them, but I was too starved at that point to card them.
Anyway, I talked to a woman, Marilyn Holly, in the philo department who specializes in "environmental philosophy" and American Indian philosophy. She looked fun to talk to and was. And she had a done a year's residency at the Jung Institute in Zurich just a year after James Hillman was disbarred from being the head of the Institute. Unfortunately this time right now is what she termed the little tidal wave of the beginning of the semester for the faculty which is somewhat less hectic than the big tidal wave of the beginning of the fall semester. We both had stories and anecdotes to tell each other and she was very encouraging with my trip. On a directly helpful level she reminded me of the phrases "situated knowledge" and "positional knowledge" which I had heard from feminist epistemological studies but have not integrated to my concept of knowing from within a body of knowledge.
I've got an appointment tomorrow with Robert Baum, a more traditional epistemologist in the department. The next guy I talked to was a Ben Bolker who is in the field of theoretical ecology. He was also in the semester beginning rush but took about 10 minutes for a quick and somewhat helpful conversation. He gave me a couple of other names and introduced me to the concept of "extended phenotype" which is apparently a way that genes can be considered to specify external conditions necessary to an organism. He admitted, however, that he was more traditional as an ecologist and generally looked for emergent properties to explain ecologies from given species characteristics rather than looking for more radical approaches to escape reductive tendencies in a subject that is inherently more holistic than reductive.
In any case between those conversations and a few runs to libraries and bookstores before and after my first day on the job of doing the epis express not only went better than I expected (no rejections, for example) but also got me very stimulated and propelled right back into it.
Meanwhile I just found an unopened e-mail from my friend Keith which offered these alternative names for the Epis Express:"- Samsaric Shuttle an endless round of non-novel sameness as in ‘Kali Yuga’, which loca many say that we are presently in.
"- Ouroboric Slithercraft (literally and profoundly ‘chasing one’s tail’) cf. Plotinus, Leibniz, Huxley, Wilber, Tarnas, et al.
"- Epistemology Express (your first take) which begs the question ‘How is it that that which you think, or believe to be known, is known?’ Via touring campuses?!
"- Burning Man Bus Tour (I’m surprised you don’t attend same at Black Rock, Nevada, annually over Labor Day.) Ken Kesey’s bus tour efforts in the 1960s were cute, but surely one thinks, we’ve come far since? Nonetheless, the descriptor ‘Burning Man’ does seem in a real sense to characterize the prevalent Jake - as we all know and love it - persona. During a particularly phrenic period I experienced in the 1980s a recurring refrain I hummed was from ‘Doctor, Doctor, Can’t You see I’m Burning, Burning?’ q.v. The Thompson Twins. Make of that what you will.
"- Route 666 Redux (obvious reference to the Route 66 TV series of the 1960s, but with the added significance of 666 as per Revelations q.v.). Slouching beastward?
"- Ontological Mystery Tour (more of the same, as in Mondo Cane Metaphysics). And here it seems that we’ve come full circle (cf. Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence) – the stubborn question does remain though – to what end? Et tu Charles Kurault?The only drag is that I am worn out and ready for some reading and bed. The tea is gone. I think that I will slide out to the bathroom here at the campground to brush my teeth (I didn't load up my water tank or hook up their water to my intake since it's supposed to freeze again tonight), put away this table, lock my laptop in the safe, pull out the bed and call it a day.
After a month of work back in Connecticut there is another stop.
The Express is rolling again. I've been on the road again for 7 days and it has been very good. And, I now have the van decked out with the new signs that really make it the Epistemology Express which makes the whole experience a lot cooler than just an undecorated RV. Of course most people ignore it, but then when it catches someone's eye as on the edge of their comprehension of what the hell is epistemology, it's fun. It looks great and I'll have a picture up on the website soon. In fact I just bought a small digital camera this afternoon so that I can easily document the trip.
But the epistemology itself. I've been here in Athens, GA for 7 days now parked out in front of my nephew Jesse's apartment just a few blocks from the UGA campus (oldest state college since it was founded just after Georgia statehood which was one of the first states to ratify the big C). He's a senior, playing lots of music and basically having fun being a slacker while taking the last fun courses. The only drawback to staying here is that his parking lot is on a hill and I was rolling off the bed until I turned the van around so that I roll against the wall now.
It's surprising to realize that I only talked to 6 profs during the week since I was averaging two a day after not getting a start until Tuesday (because of weather and because of not having picked my target interviewees off the internet yet). I spoke to most of the people that I really wanted to talk to which is in itself an impossible but necessary guessing task. Of the people whom I caught in their offices only one (a 7th) didn't warm to my approach. He was a guy in primate
cognition in the psych dept who answered no to a bunch of my questions to the point where I said that "I guess that we don't have much to talk to each other about." With this he smiled for the first time and I left.
But I did talk to 4 people in the philo dept, 1 in anthropology and 1 in ecology. They were all helpful in some way and were intrigued or supportive to some degree (2 were very supportive; 1 saying that there was a gap in epistemology that needed to be filled and the other saying that she wanted to be doing the same thing as I was doing in a van so that she didn't have to spend all her time defending her grant status to critics who wanted to misshape it anyway).
Let me give some particulars.
Richard Winfield - Hegel and epistemology, etc., read part of his book on The Just Economy before meeting him. His point in econ is that either a scientific view of economics or a psychologically driven economy (we all chase greed, e.g.) is a human-independent view of economics that does not allow for human value to enter into any economic equation. In person the discussion turned to a semi-debate on the role of third-person epistemology (we know about something else over there) versus a second-person epistemology (I know that you ... and you know that I...). A student had been waiting to see him so I suggested that I
cut it short but he seemed ready to have me come back another time which I never managed to do.Clark Wolf - philo of politics, mind and a few other things. Jesse had had him in his freshman year and really liked him. He was young and very animated. He also was very enthusiastic about epistemology and the general direction that I was going, but he did start suggesting some works including Goldman's book on the social role in epistemology that is quite new. He also liked the epistemology department at the U of Arizona; so, he was glad that I had just read Lehrer's book who is also at U of A. When he had to go to a lecture, he suggested that I come with him to a talk by a supposedly famous Indian environmentalist. I've
wanted to get back with him too but haven't had time.Randolph Clark - philo of free will, philo of mind. I have wanted to talk to someone to see how much complexity ideas and computer progress had affected the free will question. We laid out our positions (me for using lightly coupled sensory-action circuits as a way to build up the hypothetical going backwards and forwards in bifurcation zones and he for considering traditional conditions) without making any common ground. But he gave me some clues about externalism which I didn't know much about and need to.
Beth Preston - epistemology, philosophy of mind and of psychology - she liked what I was doing, got it immediately and when I asked why the feminist epistemology project and other reform directions had not arrived in full flower or been popularized, she suggested that I should do it. With her we agreed so much that we were caught without an axe to grind so the conversation got stalled in agreement. She did have one book suggestion, however, that is very striking. It is called "Being There" by Andy Clark (1999 from MIT). He makes very strong arguments for embodied knowledge, and I am really enjoying it.
Virginia Nazarea - anthropology in a department that is styled as "Ecological Anthropology" - I had heard of a book by her a few weeks ago called "Ethnoecology: Situated Knowledge/Located Lives" when I took off for a few afternoons from work to visit Yale (work was slow, I only found 2 people, Robert Adams the head of the dept, in his office and his secretary let me introduce myself as he was walking out to a meeting; so the encounter was useless and David Graeber of the anthropology department/cultural theory speciality who got all excited at my epistemological project but who was in conference with someone else at the time). Anyway Virginia was delightful. She got enthused about my project and told me about a few people she had known at UC Santa Cruz whom she thought I should talk to. Her work more catalogs how different cultural groups think differently (e.g. about the environment - preservation, aesthetics, exploitation, etc.) especially about plants. What was funny about her is that she got really enthused about my lifestyle because she is very frustrated with continually doing grant defense to people in USAID and the idea of doing her work while being "unbound" was intoxicating to her. I ran into her later and she got excited to know if the Express was parked outside.
Ron Pulliam - theoretical ecology at UGA's famous ecology dept - he suggested lunch when I first introduced myself. He's in the middle of a book on niche construction; so, he was intrigued to compare notes which is where we got to. He did suggest that I talk to two other people including the director emeritus, Eugene Odum, in the dept which I haven't followed up on yet. He is at a point in his career he said where he can talk more freely without worrying about the politics such as tenure, but we both realized that his work on niche construction is very constrained when it comes to pulling out implications such as epistemological stuff. I was surprised to hear that even though he had barely started his book, he was getting pressure from the university press. Naively, I thought that academic writers wrote from supply and not from demand.
That sums up the week in more detail that I planned. But you can get the flavor of how different people respond. I'll try to cut it shorter in the future. Even though I didn't find that colleague to jump in with and go to work together, I do feel totally invigorated from it. I'm bubbling with new insights and new audience interests. And I'm loaded with only two new books, but both of them are pullers rather than pile-making have-to-reads. And oh, I found this wonderful late '80's
book at the library on the Cognitive Economy which shows how all knowledge forms an economy of costs, benefits, capital and efficiencies. To learn and keep in memory has costs to be balanced against the benefits whereas memory functions like capital and reason can be formed from efficiency considerations.
What can I say? I"ve got to keep busy. I really want to get my website out of the basement; so, I'm taking off a few days and have come over to this state park (Ft. Yargo) between Athens and Atlanta to do some collecting and hopefully writing. I'm also rethinking my strategy for the trip. My inclination now is to slow the trip down and visit fewer places. Just meeting two people in a day can be a full day. There is the picking them out of a crowd of other profs in the school's website, some preparation work in maybe getting to know their work through a book, article or web posting, the search across campus for the office, the several returns to catch them in the office. And afterwards there
is the follow-up to check out references that they gave or reminded me of.
It's now Sunday evening. I have my laptop on the table in the Express. The heater is on as it's supposed to get very cold tonight. I have some fresh asparagus among other things to cook tonight. I'm plugged into the 30 Amp service here at the park; so, no battery worries. When I arrived here this afternoon a park ranger came over to me excitedly with "You must be either a philosopher or a preacher since you have epistemology on your van." I'm parked about 50 feet from a fairly large lake and there are only few other campers around at this time of year. An African CD collection is playing and things are pretty cozy. You are right in that the trip is a bit lonely but so far it hasn't been too bad. Of course it made it easier while hanging out with Jesse, his roommate Stephanie and other friends.
Two weeks later came the next journal entry:
It's been a whirlwind of a week and a productive one. It's Friday afternoon, and I'm sitting in a cafe in Durham, NC a few blocks from the Duke East (the older part) campus.
It's been four hectic days at 2 campuses - Duke and U of NC over at Chapel Hill which are about as far apart as Berkeley and SF except that there are many roads in which to get lost between them rather than just one bridge. Do you remember my friend Tom H.? He remembers you, even remembering your last name. Anyway, I managed to find him and his wife and 8-year old kid on the outskirts of Chapel Hill. The 3 of them left the Bay Area in 1993 to settle down in the South and then after an RV trip around the South to pick Chapel Hill. They then joined a housing co-op that was forming in the twin city of Chapel Hill, Carrboro, which is even more alternative than Chapel Hill. The housing co op is now completely built up and gorgeous. Zy Sifransky (sp?), the publisher of The Sun magazine lives in it for example. And last night I found a friend of O'than's (Jonathan's) and mine, Alan, who is retired from being a Republican campaign manager in Virginia politics to be in Duke Divinity School. Seeing both of them has been fun.
Anyway, the epistemological week. I talked to 2 people in the philo department at UNC, 1 in biology and 1 in sociology. At Duke I talked to 2 people in philo and 2 in biology. It is interesting to know that on both campuses there is a very noticeable touchiness and polarization around the issue of constructivism versus foundationalism or postmodernism versus traditionalism. Many of the people I talked to were wary of me because they perceived me as belonging to one camp or the other and they were interested in defining themselves on this issue. Apparently Duke was involved in producing or busting that scandal a few years back when two science profs managed to get published a fake article professing to analyze scientific practice from a postmodern perspective in Stanley Fish's magazine. The scientists are still laughing about that one.
The people whom I talked to who were only marginally helpful were: Judith Blau (UNC sociology), Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (UNC epistemology) Robert Podolsky (UNC zoology), Alex Rosenberg (Duke epistemology) and Stephen Nowicki (Duke evolution of behavior). But even among these guys Judith was very encouraging and she Robert and Stephen gave me quite a few contacts or suggested sources. And the other two, Alex and Geoffrey, still were helpful with suggestions even though they bowed out of interest due to a quickly perceived difference of style.
But I'd rather just tell you about the ones who were more noticeably helpful. First there was Bill Lycan from UNC philosophy of mind. Geoffrey had already said that I should talk to him since he knows everyone and everything about epistemology. Well, even though we only talked for maybe 20 minutes before he had to go to the dentist (with the memorable line that "I'd rather stay here and chat with you", the humor of which in comparison to the dentist I missed when he first said it), he followed me through a series of characterizations of the field and of my theory to either agree or add names and books of similar work. Most noticeable was when I characterized epistemology as a rotten field, with dwindling to non-existent foundations, which no one seems to notice and he assented that that was not too far off. When I asked him if anyone noticed this debacle at the heart of our foundations, he said "No, except for surprisingly lawyers." He said that he had recently been invited to a conference by lawyers about epistemology. Apparently there are a number of lawyers, who because of the debacle of expert witness testimony where one can purchase any expert to say anything, are very interested in and up on epistemology. And they're concerned. The feeling for me this week after that and after reading a particular article characterizing the epis situation equally dismally is that of coming onto a scene that is equivalent to finding a tree in the forest which is rotten at its base and hanging limply but still standing because the other trees won't let it fall. It's eerie. Everyone goes about the business in academics of using truth and chasing truth, while the truth tree is a rotten shambles that can't even fall over from inertia. Some epistemologists don't talk about justification any more but just worry about giving other people "epistemic advice." The rest are involved in cognitive psychology while maintaining that epistemology must add some normative values to an otherwise merely descriptive enterprise.
And yesterday afternoon I met Daniel McShea of Duke zoology and evolution. He was great. He was really fun to talk to for about an hour. He got everything quickly and almost always had a name for me to talk to somewhere in the country. A couple of them sound really interesting. A lot of the people we both knew and had similar hits on. A couple of people in the area had already told me that I should talk to him before I met him and seemed to respect him a lot. He had spent a year or so at the Santa Fe Institute and mentioned the name of someone there who is interested in an I-Thou perspective as well as the conventional talking-about perspective. He was the closest that I've gotten to feeling as if his suggestions for contacts would be people that I would really have something in common with. He had lots.And then today I talked to a guy in Duke philo of mind named Guven Guzeldere (with 2 umlauts over the u's) that was really fun and confirming. He has a graduate student who is much older and who is working on organism-environment coupling and whom he really wants me to meet.
Basically I've had another watershed turn this week. I seemed to have succeeded in making myself understandable to and understood by epistemologically trained philosophers so that I am now losing interest in epis per se. And I have kind of set up a 3 way goal at this time. I would like to argue that truth is a concept-myth that is injurious to society; I would like to argue that there is a great need for a kind of interactive social knowledge in a second- and first-person kind of living knowledge way; and I would like to argue that I can somehow operationalize my thesis of incorporation epistemology in behavioral-interactionist terms of chemical and perceptual loops. The first of these I am already very strongly cognizant of. The second is categorically a difficulty for academics to study except in areas like conversational analysis or in some of the feminist situated knowledge areas, and it is also a strong point for me since my work is formed from 1st and 2nd person interactions. But basically I've realized that is time for me to work on the biological side of the formulation again. And so, I'm back interested in behavioral and artificial-intelligence arguments for embedding. And I've started working on the dualism aspects of agency. So far most of the behavioral stuff seems framed from kind of central model of the agent or organism managing to carry out certain actions and reactions. It builds up complications rather than reducing them (how gulls distinguish shell colors, range and evolution of behaviors, etc.). But in the '90's and late '90's particularly there seem to be some more sources that take the embedding of the knower and coupling of the environment seriously. I have to get into that literature more seriously now.
And it's good that I have a task since this phase of the Epis Express is basically over for a short while unfortunately. I have agreed to be back at work in Connecticut next Wednesday the 7th. And I'm going to drive the Express up there I've decided. They think that they will need me for most of the next 5 or 6 weeks. Hopefully, I'll be able to absorb this material and get myself ready for another round by the time that the work there is over.
What I've realized that this trip so far has just been an incredibly fast learning trip. I'm not sure what the factors are. Having 6 new faculty advisors a week of my own choosing while testing out my latest formulations of a theory that keeps pulling me forward and while having extremely good library resources on hand is probably very good basis to keep the thinking going. Today I'm worn out, but I'm sure that I'll be raring to go again in a few days or weeks of absorbing and getting primed again.
