"The feminist theorists had a great point when they noted that we’re all embodied, and flawed, and, in some sense, blinkered. The lesson I drew from that was a need for humility in the face of complicated, messy realities. But the humility isn’t in the service of fatalism or a flight to innocence and virtue. It’s in the service of making changes that aren’t doomed from the outset," writes Dean Dad on The Confessions of a Community College Dean blog.
For those with a background or interest in philosophy now hunkered down in the trenches of day to day reality as a higher ed professional, this is great stuff! It is insightful, relevant - and here I am speaking specifically to the armchair philosophers out there - fun to apply the theories and concepts of particular philosophies to the tasks and issues facing our contingent realities (that was a bit of a rhetorical flourish, I will admit).
"I was reminded of that this week in a discussion about a proposed program. When I raised a series of questions about the practicality of it, I was hit with the concept/implementation distinction. And I realized that from the perspective of someone responsible for budgeting and staffing, the distinction is false. A concept that can’t be implemented is a flawed concept," Dean Dad muses.
Who doesn't love to "spend time in the weeds of postmodernism"?!?
If the excerpts above at all capture your intrigue, I suggest you read the whole post, where Dean Dad uses basic concepts of feminist theory, postmodernism, and pragmatism to frame his view of best practices when managing the relationship (dare I say dialect?) between a strong conception and its realistic implementation (definitely a thesis-antithesis-synthesis thing!).
Anyways...Dean Dad's blog post brings to mind parallels with another book I am currently reading: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. In this tome of contemporary psychology by one of its current stars, Kahneman talks a lot about heuristics. In short, a heuristic is a mental shortcut our mind takes - often automatically - to make quick and short work of the deluge of information constantly being hurled at it. For the most part, the use of heuristics is an effective and amazing ability of the mind. allowing us to adapt and thrive without getting mired in information overload, just as pragmatism prevents a postmodernist from getting "lost and paralyzed in an infinite regression of what’s already implicated in what" (Dean Dad).
The challenge, however, is that heuristics - as a necessity - tend to (over)simplify situations and can produce inaccurate judgments as a result. And thus we have biases.
This is an important consideration to make when we are involved in the fast-paced world of making administrative judgments, balancing conception with implementation and the like. Postmodernism, as well as the psychology of biases, reminds us that our judgments and intuitions are anything but clean cut objective assessments of the world. Whether or not we care to admit it, our thoughts are mired in conditions of emergence and heuristics. As Dean Dad states, this does not mean that we need to be fatalistic and throw our hands up. But it does mean that when making decisions, we should be mindful of the perspective and bias integral to our judgment. In this situation, a bit of humility mixed with time out for critical reflection and gathering the views of others can at least move us in the direction of a rational assessment befitting an effective action-outcome response to the contingencies that we face.
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