Here are some highlights from this 2011 book:
* …* more difficult for intellectuals to sustain the type of vertical authority that is associated with the first two types of public intellectuals. With education comes a growing awareness of the fallibility and contested nature of scientific findings or philosophical positions, and indeed a willingness to challenge those views and to rally support to mount such a challenge. The intense public debates and parliamentary inquiries into academic conduct at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Change Unit, after a leaking of emails (Marshall 2009; Corbyn 2010; Harrabin 2010), illustrate the greater openness of intellectuals to public scrutiny and criticism when pronouncing on issues with wider social and political impact. The increased use of academics as expert witnesses in criminal trials has exposed their reasoning to critical scrutiny, sometimes leading to arguments being undermined in the courtroom or by subsequent reanalysis. For example, after the testimony of eminent paediatrician Roy Meadow led directly to a mother’s imprisonment for the deaths of her children, re-examination of his statistical methods suggested that he had substantially overstated the odds against their dying of natural causes, leading to the woman’s release and the expert’s disgrace (Dyer 2005). Increasingly, laypeople feel entitled to be involved in debates of this nature. Although few are equipped to read the scientific papers and question the conclusions directly, they have found ways to force intellectuals from ‘lecture mode’ into dialogue: probing and publicising the sources of evidence, deploying dissenting intellectuals who can move the peer-review process into public forums, and forcing intellectuals to state their case in ‘ordinary language’, which sometimes leads them to use metaphors and examples that are more easily attacked than the underlying model. The more ‘vertical’ an intellectual’s pronouncements become, the stronger are they assailed by counter-forces aimed at knocking them down from their high perch, if their pronouncements significantly impact upon other groups or individuals.
* An increasingly educated public is more resistant to being talked down to, and more inclined to demand a voice in conversations involving professional intellectuals. This is not to say that expansion of general and higher education has narrowed the knowledge gap between intellectuals and the general public. On the contrary, this gap has almost certainly widened. Academic journals (for instance, the Economic Journal or the American Sociological Review) are rarely as understandable to the ‘educated lay reader’ today as 50 or even 20 years ago. The epistemic distance between intellectual and lay conversation has been lengthened by increasingly technical use of language (especially mathematical and statistical), and increased use of referencing to past contributions, a knowledge of which is required in order to make sense of new contributions. What narrows as a result of expanding education is the evaluative distance between intellectuals and the public. ‘Lay’-audience members become more competent at assessing the nature, coherence and effectiveness of intellectual arguments, and more confident in expressing scepticism or demanding clarification. This increases the public inclination to challenge, reserve judgement on or
even outrightly reject intellectual arguments, without any claim to have received or fully understand the technical details of those arguments.
Education leaves ‘lay’ readers and listeners better equipped – or believing themselves to be better equipped – to assess the structure and coherence of intellectual arguments, without grasping their full content. The separation of evaluation from technical understanding is assisted by the enhanced formalisation and empirical testing of arguments that accompanied the rise of the professional intellectual. Formalisation involves the conversion of verbal arguments into models – making explicit the axioms or assumptions underlying those models, which a lay public can consider and challenge even without understanding the intricacies of the modelling that follows. (The ‘professional’ models can also often be reduced to a skeletal form which the public can come closer to understanding.) So, for example, many ‘lay’ people challenge complex economic models on the basis of assumptions that wages adjust to create full employment in labour markets, or that individuals and firms make rational maximising choices. Empirical testing confronts models with data, whose provenance and accuracy can be judged by a lay public independently of their assessment of the models. So, for example, climate change sceptics have challenged global warming models on the basis that their calibration uses data that can be alternatively interpreted, or whose accuracy can be disputed. Education can confer the ability (and confidence) to identify
and challenge the style of intellectual argument, even when the argument’s technical contents are beyond lay comprehension.
