by Lee Kit Mun
National University of Singapore (Singapore)
“I actually think I’m a hedgehog who looks like a fox.” This is how David Kellogg described himself, drawing from the analogy made by British philosopher Isaiah Berlin in his essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox. Berlin (1953) classifies writers and thinkers into two main types: hedgehogs, who relate everything to a central vision, “a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance”, and foxes, whose ideas and pursuits are varied and even contradictory, without any single organising principle.
The single vision threading through David’s seemingly diverse works and papers is, in his words, “the restless, persistent pursuit of how people come to value what they value, know what they know, and question what they question as they mature intellectually as writers and thinkers.” David’s PhD dissertation more than 15 years ago was on the theory of poetry, and his forthcoming publication is on writing laboratory science. Though this may look like a huge transition to an outsider, to David it is very “hedgehog-like” in the sense that his dissertation is about the scholarship of poetry and how people decide what is valuable in poetry, which is similar in some way to the construction of scientific communities. In fact, when he was doing his dissertation on poetry, he was reading some of Bruno Latour’s writings on the sociology of science. So the transitions between the disciplines in his scholarly development are, according to David, “not that big intellectually because of the obsessiveness in the return of the same issues in a different costume.”
When did he begin this pursuit? A formative moment for him was during a history of science course when as an undergraduate, he was to write a paper on famous writings in the field of cosmology. One of the requirements for that assignment was to cite a certain number of scholarly sources in the field. Like the others in his class, he duly went to the library, looked up some journals, found some articles, wrote down some quotes and wrote his paper. At the next session, the professor, a well-known philosopher of science, had this sad look on his face. Apparently, while they had all quoted from sources in the history of science, none of those scholars quoted agreed with one another. For the next assignment, the professor reduced the number of sources they had to cite, but the students had to disagree with at least one of those sources cited in their writing.
“This was really an eye-opening moment for me,” said David. “Like most undergraduates, I had very little knowledge of academic scholarship. To the extent that I understood anything about academic scholarship, it was that academic scholars and researchers were very, very smart people, knew much more about the subject than I did, and so had to be treated with a certain reverence. The idea that I, a sophomore in college, could disagree with a scholar on Aristotle or Galileo, seemed astonishing to me, and also kind of liberating. For the rest of my time as an undergraduate, this was a goal of mine. Every time I used research in my work, I had to at least once disagree with somebody that I cited, and it seems to me that that was a very good exercise. Breaking down the reverence that we had for scholarship was a very important transition for us.”
David believes that the tendency to cite scholarship only in a positive way that most undergraduates have, where the point of quoting sources in any paper is to support one’s argument, is a sign of their misunderstanding of what scholarship does. “My whole approach to academic writing is essentially conflictual,” asserted David. “So if a student writes ‘so and so says this about Galileo, but he misses the point that …’, he or she is already taking a maturing step towards academic development.”
David is of the opinion that this step can be taken relatively early in the undergraduate course. But he was quick to qualify that “we don’t want to make pugilists of undergraduates or to make them unduly antagonistic to scholarship. They should still treat it with respect – but just not reverence.”
David’s area of expertise is Writing in the Disciplines. When asked why he seems to be particularly interested in scientific writing and rhetoric, not being a scientist himself, he said it can partly be attributed to his childhood environment, growing up in a family of scientists. Apart from that, while in graduate school, he had worked part-time as a managing editor of the Journal of Neuroscience, where one of his responsibilities was to send papers out to peer reviewers. That work allowed him to see the arguments about why a paper should or should not be published, instead of just the published paper that most people see. “It gave me a rare perspective on how argumentative scientific writing was,” he said.
Then when he started teaching scientific writing after graduate school, it became clear to him that many undergraduates had a misunderstanding of what scientists did, how much writing they produced and how argumentative much of the writing they did was. In general, the students learn a lot of technical information about sciences mainly from textbooks, which present the consensus among scientists and their research. They may think that what a scientist does is to “look at the world, apply a technique, make a discovery and then give that new discovery, that bit of new knowledge, to a grateful scientific community.” What they may not realize is that when anyone puts forward a new idea, it conflicts with somebody else’s interpretation, which he or she then has to argue against. “At the heart of academic life,”
David observed, “are scientists arguing with each other in writing all the time.” It struck him that students have to be taught to make the transition from student to intellectual, to the point when they are willing and able to pose questions and not just apply techniques.
Does he see this intellectual development as a need that is more peculiar to students in the sciences than the arts? Not necessarily, he said. There are many humanities students who might find it difficult too. While undergraduates in biology tend to read textbooks primarily, undergraduates in English literature also tend to read novels and books on poems rather than scholarly journals. “Which is why I think it is worthwhile for professors in any discipline to bring in some current scholarship in the field. Not simply to present information which students can then regurgitate or abstract in some false scholastic way that sometimes happens in the humanities, but as an example of what happens in the field: ‘why is that question interesting?’ ”
Formerly Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Advanced Writing in Disciplines Program at Northeastern University, David is currently Assistant Professor at Coastal Carolina University. His next project is a book on the rhetoric of anti-science – on the antiscience discussions that are getting prominent in North America, such as anti-evolutionism and global warming denial.
“It is not so much about teaching writing, but the formation and legitimation of questions. It’s about intellectual conflict and the different views of the world in the way they pose questions,” he added. This, coupled with the diverse disciplines he has encountered in his academic career, seems to bear testimony to his self-image as an intellectual hedgehog in a fox’s body.
References
Berlin, I. (1953). The hedgehog and the fox: An essay on Tolstoy’s view of history. New York: Simon & Schuster.
About David Kellogg
David Kellogg is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the Coastal Carolina University. He was a Visiting Senior Fellow, at the Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore,
2010 (summer) and Director, Advanced Writing in the Disciplines (AWD), Northeastern University, 2004–2010
About the Author
Lee Kit Mun has spent the past 20 years in science and English language education, in classroom teaching and publishing of educational resources for teaching and learning. She currently teaches English for Academic Purposes as well as Foundation in Effective Communication to pharmacy students at the National University of Singapore.