The Search for “the Illusive Cognitive Nil”

Abstract

As you read the articles in this issue of the Journal of Thought, you will notice that the authors are engaged in what appears to be as well as what actually may be searches for more illuminated ways of thinking and thinking about educational metaphors, classroom practices, student-professor expectations, and societal, economic, and political arrangements. Explicitly and implicitly, they grapple with clarifications, meanings, understandings, truths, goods, and powers. But they appear to have moved beyond grappling at times to discovering and constructing. And, in obvious and covert ways, they look as if they have commingled their grappling, discovering, and constructing with convincing. So, we may wish to ask: Are they attempting to enter, if not intrude, into our life spaces, into our minds, affections, motivations, dispositions, actions, habits, and behaviors? Do they want us to adopt, before they are led to impose, their permanently insane set of epistemological, aesthetic, and moral virtues on us? Have they forgotten what we have learned as postmodernists? What has happened to their appreciation for the lessons we have learned from the calls for caution found in discussions regarding subjectivity, context, nestedness, fallibility, situatedness, and perspectivism? Have they abandoned their epistemic skepticism and cynicism to satisfy their primitive needs for power and, more importantly, security? Do they now collude to prod us toward their delusional pursuit of warranted assertions, provisional propositions, or, even, absolute truths? For the moment, it looks as if we are in the presence of rogue scholars who think they can think for themselves about the aforementioned issues. Do they not recognize, however, that thinking for themselves is bounded if not determined by a maze of presuppositions and primeval instincts that are permeated by inaccuracies, myths, quasi-data, misunderstandings, misinterpretations, pseudo-truths, confusions, and errors? Are they as misled as they appear or are they part of a loosely-knit but widespread scheme to have power over our minds, to manipulate our views, and to indoctrinate us with their ideologies? Whatever our conclusions (non-rational or otherwise), we can be absolutely certain that our inquiries and intuitions, doubts and reservations, dogmas and ideologies, instincts and intelligences, customs and traditions, experiments and impressions, and brain activities and intestinal churnings will fail us as theirs have them. The ostensible universe has collapsed on our wished-for reality and leaves no trace of itself or us. Hence, there is no searcher, no search, no searched for. The ultimate hegemonic unreality--nothingness--has overpowered and subdued us. Still, we seem to have what appear to be the articles in this issue. As we begin with William Hare's article entitled Helping Open-mindedness Flourish, we are introduced immediately to the enormity and relevancy of an old if not ancient and contemporary intellectual virtue. But the term may, if we are unfamiliar with recent forays regarding the concept, cause us to think of the importance of being tolerant and broadminded regarding the enormous cultural, ethnic, racial, sexual, religious, gender, linguistic, aesthetic, and intellectual diversity. But is another, if intersecting, vein of inquiry. Hare asserts that open-mindedness is an intellectual virtue that reveals itself in a willingness to form and revise our ideas in the light of a critical review of evidence and argument that strives to meet the elusive ideals of objectivity and impartiality. But why make an effort to be open-minded if knowledge claims are pure or, better, biased subjectivities or whimsical non-musings rather than based on the ideal of objective and impartial investigations? Why pay attention to being open-minded when we have the equally valid ideal of being closed-minded? Indeed, how do the two concepts differ except in pretense? …