Academic Credentials

How important are they? Top o' the Stack.

Comments

[Joe Odegaard]

Neither of the Wright Brothers even graduated from high school.

[Elliott]

There’s a fallacy I call the Titleist Fallacy. (It’s not about golf.) It goes something like this:

For any S, if S does not have a Ph.D. in a given subject of discussion, then S has nothing reasonable to say about that subject and should remain silent with respect to it.

Example:

Jones: The government is too powerful. I’m opposed to big government.

Smith: You don’t have a Ph.D. in government or in political philosophy. So you can’t discuss the topic of government intelligently and should remain silent.

Jones: You just committed the titleist fallacy!

[BV]

Elliot,

That is indeed a fallacy.

The use of, and especially the insistence on, titles is decidedly middle class behavior and signals class anxiety. In the summer of '81 I participated in Roderick Chisholm's NEH seminar at Brown University. Those were the days when the ivy was not yet poisoned. Chisholm addressed us as Mr and Miss even though we all had doctorates. And of course he had too much class to refer to himself as 'Dr. Chisholm.'

Paul Fussell wrote a very entertaining book on class in America, aptly entitled: https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253

You will recall that Jill Biden, plagiarist, who has the least prestigious doctorate there is, the D. Ed., insisted on her title. So typical of the Bidens, hustlers, grifters, careerists, social climbers, phonies, frauds. Later I'll tell you what I really think about them.

[Elliott]

Bill,

Thanks for the reading suggestion. I just put Fussell's book on my reading list.

I love Chisholm. The NEH seminar must have been a blast! By the way, I've been re-reading sections of his Theory of Knowledge (Third edition) and Person and Object. He makes some interesting points about certainty, self-presenting properties, and the experience of "being-appeared-to." I am re-thinking these issues in light of your recent question: "How can the ineffable serve as justificatory ground of the effable?"

If I can muster anything worth saying on the question, I might post it in your "Logic Quiz" thread.