Is saying that something is interesting cognitively valuable?
I ask this because I recently read a piece (here)
suggesting that the term is more emotive than cognitive. Or, as the piece (author: Corey Powell (CP)),
puts it “[c]alling something interesting
is the height of sloppy thinking. Interesting is not descriptive, not
objective, and not even meaningful.” Thus, thought use of the term may carry
information, it is subjective information about the user (denoting,
perhaps, something like entertainment value (CP: “In practice, interesting is a synonym for entertaining”)) rather than an objective
judgment about the intellectual content of the subject matter. Here’s the CP
article’s take:
…if someone tells you ‘this is interesting’, remember that they aren’t
describing the thing at all. They are describing the effect of that thing on
them. Even though we hear it a lot from the would-be Vulcans around us, interesting
is a subjective, emotional word, not the objective, logical word we want it to
be.
I disagree. Here are
some reasons why.
First, I doubt the
claim that interesting is merely
evaluative. What I mean is that it is perfectly reasonable to ask why someone considers something
interesting, while it is far less clear that it is equally apposite to ask why
someone considers something entertaining. Entertaining
is a more like tasty in that it is a
matter of mere taste.[1]
Someone’s tastes may be perverse, but they are what they are. Asking someone why they find something entertaining is
less asking for information than asking for justification (as in: that is no laughing matter and so not entertaining, and so you shouldn’t
be laughing, unless you are a pervert). Interesting
is different. Unlike tastes, interests can be defended, criticized, and reasoned
about. In particular, it is legit to ask for a defense of one’s interests in
polite company. In this sense, then, interesting
aspires to cognitive content in ways that entertaining
does not.
Second, there are many
things worse than being entertaining. Indeed, I would go further, at least when
it comes to intellectual matters the best ideas are vastly entertaining. There
is nothing quite like the feeling of delight that accompanies ingesting and
digesting a really good insight. It has a palpable taste and the better the
idea the rounder the experience. Think wine, but a whole body experience. Think
sex, but the high lasts longer. Good ideas are
entertaining and that is one very good reason for relentlessly pursuing them.
Let me harp on this. I
was recently discussing the emotional vicissitudes of academic life with a grad
student. The major downside is that research is deeply unfair. Reward is not
guaranteed to the just or the hard working. Lazy shits can, and do, succeed.
The reason is that there is no unity to the good: bad people can be smart,
beautiful humans can be lazy, lazy people can be lucky, virtuous people can be
dumb. Thus, the fact that you have done everything “right” and have lived a
righteous research life does not mean that you will ever run into a good idea.
But, and this was what we discussed, the possibility of doing so is what drives
many of the academics I know. Once you’ve tripped over one, or one has snuck up
and grabbed you the sensation is so fantastic and intoxicating that the (often
hopeless) pursuit of others of the same ilk (ideas that will generate a similar
visceral sensation) becomes addictive. So, never let anyone tell you that
intellectual work should not be entertaining to be serious. Truth may or may
not be beauty, but deep ideas really are entertaining, which is one good reason
to look for them.
Does this mean that
everything that is entertaining is a good idea? No, there is such a thing as
cheap entertainment (and I don’t reject cheap entertainment either, but it’s
not the same thing) and its joys are different. But, I do think that being
entertaining in the right way is a
mark of a serious idea and, hence, a useful symptom of one.
Third, evaluations of interest serve an important function in
research. Interesting is a predicate
mainly of ideas, as opposed to facts. This is not to say that facts might not
be interesting, but I think that their interest is at one remove. They are interesting for what they might tell
us or suggest about theories, ideas, hypotheses. In and of themselves, facts
are, well, facts. Being interesting lies
not primarily in what there is, but in why what there is is the way that it is.
And this requires explanations. Theories, hypotheses, guesses, conjectures, thought!! And that is why interesting is an important adjective
and not, as the CP article claims, just so much “linguistic connective tissue.”
Again let me
elaborate. As I’ve lamented many times before, linguists tend to undervalue
theory. There is a “just the facts ma’am” attitude abroad in the land where
corralling a stray data point is taken to be most important thing research can
hope to achieve. Interesting is the
adjective of choice for the anti-attitude to this. We don’t have nearly enough
questions of the following sort: Why is what you are doing interesting? Why
should anyone be interested in this? Why should I care? Questions like these
force explanatory concerns onto the table. And as the aim of research is to
explain (with description being in service of explanation) asking why a
proposal is interesting is asking for
the proposal’s explanatory oomph. And, sad to say, many advancing a proposal
have little idea of why or what makes it interesting. The problem is not then
with the term. Asking for interesting
is asking about/for a real, abstract but objective, facet of ideas. The problem
is that too many people have no idea how to explain why and how a proposal is
of interest. Many would rather dwell on the data coverage and forget about the
stories that make sense of them and that the facts should be in service of.
Many think that data speak for themselves, or at least should do so. Many think that data, especially Big Data, will make interesting superfluous. Many hope that
we can mechanize thought and eliminate imagination. Many many many hate theory and think it pretentious.
These same many distrust interesting because
it adverts to theory. IMO, that is too bad.
So, do I think that CP
has gotten it wrong? Not entirely. Part of what CP says seems right to me. It is
that we have lost grip on how the term ought to be used. Ideas are objectively
interesting or not. Proposals can be ranked wrt their oomph scale. Science
amounts to more than collecting, cleaning, and arranging facts. Science aims to
explain, which is why we prize it. When done well it provides cognitive kicks
with their own special flavor. When done well, it is interesting and entertaining.
The hollowing out of interesting is
yet another sign that the explanatory aims of science (and intellectual life
more generally) are under data siege. It is a leading indicator of the rise of
a pernicious Empiricism, one that takes theory and hypothesis to be little more
than a way of summarizing the facts, and hence something once removed from what
is real. And one main problem with this view is that it is so uninteresting.
[1]
I say mere here deliberately. Taste
is often worth debating. So de gustibus
disputandum est. In fact, it is often
the most important thing to debate. But, this is less true for low level tastes
(maybe better termed preferances). I
like vanilla you don’t. What’s to debate. But, I like theories that shed light
on FL and you don’t, THAT I am happy to
debate till the cows come home, and then some.
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