Excellent post—substantial, important, and most legible indeed! I wanted to include a couple thoughts about some forms of legibility that seem under-emphasized here.
Cruxiness
Cruxiness is a key part of epistemic legibility that perhaps could use some extra emphasis here. Don’t just be clear about the evidence on which your beliefs are based—prioritizeand weigh that evidence. Being explicit about some of the justifications for your beliefs is helpful. Far better, though, to be explicit about which of these justifications, if falsified, you would consider most damaging to your argument.
Audience expectations and your level of confidence seem important in choosing where to be cruxy. An informational scientific poster for the lay public probably doesn’t need to include the phrase ”.. and if you can disprove X, we’ll take this poster down.”
It can also be challenging to accurately determine your crux, or precisely how you’d change your mind in response to new evidence. If some evidence comes out against the most important underpinnings of Dweck’s rationale for growth mindset, what exactly should she do? Abandon growth mindset entirely? Interrogate the challenging evidence? Acknowledge it and tone down the most extravagent claims a bit? It would be unfair to insist that anybody making an argument have answers to all these questions.
There are alternatives to publishing the complete blueprints of your argument, though. One is to articulate your major uncertainties, and whatever next steps you plan to investigate next.
Contextualizing
The introduction of almost any scientific paper will contextualize the research in a body of prior scholarship. This is part of showing the basis of evidence for the argument, as well as for motivating the work, but it also makes the community of scholarship legible. The work no longer appears superficially to be a standalone, definitive source, but a single voice in a larger debate. Here’s an example from ACOUP’s new series on the fall of Rome:
As will readily be apparent, that significance of that division of topics will be important because this is one of those questions where what you see depends very much on where you look, with scholars engaging with different topics often coming to wildly divergent conclusions about the impact and experience of the fall of Rome. And there is no way to really discuss that divergence (and my own view of it) without diving into the still active debate and presenting the different scholarly views in a sort of duel. I’ll be providing my own judgements, of course, but I intend here to ‘steelman’ each argument, presenting it in what I view as its strongest form; as will some become evident, I think there is some truth to both of the two major current scholarly streams of thought here.
So who are our combatants? To understand this, we have to lay out a bit of the ‘history of the history’ – what is called historiography in technical parlance. Here I am also going to note the rather artificial but importance field distinction here between ancient (Mediterranean) history and medieval European history. As we’ll see, viewing this as the end of the Roman period gives quite a different impression than viewing it as the beginning of a new European Middle Ages. The two fields ‘connect’ in Late Antiquity (the term for this transitional period, broadly the 4th to 8th centuries), but most programs and publications are either ancient or medieval and where scholars hail from can lead to different (not bad, different) perspectives.
Devereaux goes on for 10 paragraphs contextualizing this series of 3 blog posts before diving into his analysis. Having done this work, he’s able to refer to his framing throughout. This permits him to go beyond arguing for one side or the other, and to engage in an act of synthesis. He can divide “the fall of Rome” into multiple categories (words, institutions, things and people), as well as subcategories, and show that in some (sub)categories, we have more change-and-continuity, while in others we have more of a decline.
This isn’t just about sourcing specific facts, though Devereaux does that too. It’s about giving the reader a bird’s eye view of this field of historical writing, so that the reader never loses sight of the fact that diverse viewpoints exist on every facet of a debate with which they’re likely to be relatively unfamiliar. Devereaux sets himself up as an informed and opinionated guide to this debate, rather than as its final arbiter.
Excellent post—substantial, important, and most legible indeed! I wanted to include a couple thoughts about some forms of legibility that seem under-emphasized here.
Cruxiness
Cruxiness is a key part of epistemic legibility that perhaps could use some extra emphasis here. Don’t just be clear about the evidence on which your beliefs are based—prioritize and weigh that evidence. Being explicit about some of the justifications for your beliefs is helpful. Far better, though, to be explicit about which of these justifications, if falsified, you would consider most damaging to your argument.
Audience expectations and your level of confidence seem important in choosing where to be cruxy. An informational scientific poster for the lay public probably doesn’t need to include the phrase ”.. and if you can disprove X, we’ll take this poster down.”
It can also be challenging to accurately determine your crux, or precisely how you’d change your mind in response to new evidence. If some evidence comes out against the most important underpinnings of Dweck’s rationale for growth mindset, what exactly should she do? Abandon growth mindset entirely? Interrogate the challenging evidence? Acknowledge it and tone down the most extravagent claims a bit? It would be unfair to insist that anybody making an argument have answers to all these questions.
There are alternatives to publishing the complete blueprints of your argument, though. One is to articulate your major uncertainties, and whatever next steps you plan to investigate next.
Contextualizing
The introduction of almost any scientific paper will contextualize the research in a body of prior scholarship. This is part of showing the basis of evidence for the argument, as well as for motivating the work, but it also makes the community of scholarship legible. The work no longer appears superficially to be a standalone, definitive source, but a single voice in a larger debate. Here’s an example from ACOUP’s new series on the fall of Rome:
Devereaux goes on for 10 paragraphs contextualizing this series of 3 blog posts before diving into his analysis. Having done this work, he’s able to refer to his framing throughout. This permits him to go beyond arguing for one side or the other, and to engage in an act of synthesis. He can divide “the fall of Rome” into multiple categories (words, institutions, things and people), as well as subcategories, and show that in some (sub)categories, we have more change-and-continuity, while in others we have more of a decline.
This isn’t just about sourcing specific facts, though Devereaux does that too. It’s about giving the reader a bird’s eye view of this field of historical writing, so that the reader never loses sight of the fact that diverse viewpoints exist on every facet of a debate with which they’re likely to be relatively unfamiliar. Devereaux sets himself up as an informed and opinionated guide to this debate, rather than as its final arbiter.
link for cruxiness is broken.
Fixed!
No, still broken.
Thanks, should be actually fixed now.