In Defence of Wonder and Other Philosophical Reflections by Tallis Raymond;

Author:Tallis, Raymond;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2009-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

17 “I Kid You Not”: Knowingness and Other Shallows

DOI: 10.4324/9781315729930-17

You’ve heard about some of these pet projects, they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit-fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

Governor Sarah Palin, US Vice-Presidential Candidate, 27 October 2008

Sarah Palin is on the stump, rousing the faithful in support of the causes, the values and the world picture for which she and true Republicans everywhere stand. She is against big government because this means high taxes squandered on projects that bring no conceivable benefit to anyone apart from those who are paid out of those same taxes. An example occurs to her: fruit-fly research in Paris (adding “France” in case her audience may have thought she was talking about Paris, Texas or Paris Hilton). Pause for audience laughter. And then she adds (and you can almost see the famous wink, although it is not there on the video), “I kid you not”.

There is probably little point in explaining to someone who (so the story goes) thinks that “Africa” is a country, that she could not have chosen a less-telling example. Research on fruit flies – which has been conducted for over a century and not just in Paris – has been enormously fertile of knowledge and insights. It has cast light on mutations, on evolution, on the expression of genes and the interaction between genes and the environment and, in my own field, on the mechanisms of ageing. As Adam Rutherford of the Guardian pointed out, the fruit fly is on a par with the mouse as the founding model organism for the field of genetics. Better, instead, to reflect on the phenomenon of “knowingness” and other shallows in our consciousness, to which we are all prone.

Palin’s confident howler beautifully illustrates the connection between knowingness and lack of knowledge. The less you know, the less you will be aware of your ignorance. The familiar metaphor reminds us that the wider the circle of our knowledge, the greater its contact with the unknown, and the more oppressive our feeling of cognitive inadequacy. A small mind finds a small world to match it and the smaller our mind, the more we feel we have the world sussed. Knowingness should be of interest to philosophy if only because it is the obverse of the anguished sense of uncertainty that drives its premier discipline: epistemology. We need, perhaps, a philosophy of knowingness to complement a philosophy of knowledge; or, more broadly, a philosophy of our shallows, of triviality, boredom, indifference, pettiness. For example, the macroethical debate around moral principles might be enriched by taking account of the microethical environment of rudeness and courtesy, irritability and forbearance, in which they are implemented.

This is not an entirely novel suggestion. The Oxford moral philosopher Philippa Foot wrote about rudeness and some of Martin Heidegger’s profoundest writings were triggered by meditating on boredom. By all means mock Sarah Palin’s confident ignorance.

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