The Hunt for Explanatory Principles

The humanities exhibit various patterns of academic practice in today's university, but the most irritating is the "hunt for explanatory principles". Basically this is a practice where little original work is done, but where academics seek to sound clever by attempting to fit the work of a neglected transdisciplinary intellectual figure to a manifest (and usually intangible) phenomenon within a specific discipline. As a transdisciplinary person myself, I find some colleagues who are securely grounded in a discipline always on the hunt for some clue for their latest "conquest". Whatever clue I or others like me might provide becomes their speech acts of the kind "I've discovered x and applied it to fashion/art/music/business/society/etc". Perhaps we shouldn't tell them about x in the first place, but I can't get angry about it other than to be disappointed that it's so intellectually lazy because "x" is usually barely known within a particular academic community, and there is little authority which can be brought to bear to criticise the new explanatory principle, while the academic parades fake erudition and often misconceived interpretations of what "x" was going on about in the first place. 

What this often represents is, once again, the disciplinary colonisation of transdisciplinary concepts. It is the Procrustean move of the institution, whose academic reward structures favour codifiable disciplinary appropriation, which in turn encourages expedient academics to own things that weren't intended to be owned - and certainly not by them. 

A deeper problem with this is that nothing fundamentally new gets done because the brains of academics are focused on their constant attention-grabbing practices in pursuing explanatory principles, rather than actually making any intellectual progress at all. Then there is the problem of explanatory principles in the first place. 

To say "I can explain q" or "with the theory which I have discovered by dead philosopher x, I can explain this (and I shall bask in x's reflected glory!)", is an epistemological error. Gregory Bateson (another "x"!) long ago pointed out the misapprehensions around "explanatory principles". An explanatory principle can explain anything we want it to explain. It is a speech act designed to satisfy (or perhaps dull) curiosity. Bateson's favourite example of an explanatory principle is the "dormitive principle" to explain why ether puts us to sleep, as described by Moliere. I'm finding it a bit depressing at the moment that cybernetics is being used in a similar "dormitive principle" kind of way. It's great for making people sound clever - but what's new? Where's the progress?

It's as if we've got the scientific method round the wrong way. In Hume, explanation was part of the dialogue between scientists seeking to articulate causal explanations for the phenomena produced by experiments. Increasingly in the arts and humanities, and Business Schools, we see precious few experiments. Of course, in the light of a candidate causal explanation, one would then seek further experiments. But we don't see this. Often all we see is self-congratulation. It's perhaps not a million miles away from how the scholastic university must have been just before everything was discredited and overturned in the 17th century. I'm not convinced that our new form of pseudo-scholasticism won't meet the same fate. 

Explanatory principles can explain anything we want them to explain, or nothing at all. It is the conversation - the coordination among scientists - where the real progress is made, and that requires experiment. We now have new means of doing experiments. Perhaps we should use them and do away with this performative nonsense!