I think any definition which does not explicitly contemplate the intellectual’s audience isn’t apt.
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Replying to @dmnshingreturns @nils_gilman
This is Corey Robin's definition of an intellectual: as someone who creates a "public". I think it's a good one. The difference between a mob and a public is the presence of legitimated spokespersons who turn crowd sentiment into arguments suitable for institutional contention
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Replying to @vgr @dmnshingreturns
The problem with Corey’s definition is that either it displaces the debate to some hoity-toity definition of the “public”; or it means that any entertainer with an audience counts as an intellectual. Is the Honey Boo-Boo child an intellectual? Ron Jeremy?https://s-usih.org/2013/02/what-is-the-subject-of-intellectual-history/ …
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Replying to @nils_gilman @dmnshingreturns
I think you're missing a nuance...Any spectacle can attract a crowd. I think he gets at a real sort of transformation of the crowd into a useful distributed computer through an act akin to programming. Though I get where you're coming from re: Robin from our private convos :D
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Replying to @vgr @dmnshingreturns
Corey’s definition also suffers from presentism. Is someone who writes “for the drawer” (4ex, in a dictatorship) not an intellectual because she creates no public? If she goes unappreciated in her lifetime, is she not an intellectual—but then becomes one once she’s “discovered”?
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Replying to @nils_gilman @dmnshingreturns
That weakness is shared by your institutional definition too :D Was Ramanujan a non-intellectual while he was an outsider mathematician disconnected from tradition and only became one when Hardy found him?
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Replying to @vgr @dmnshingreturns
I actually don’t believe in institutional definitions (though it gets trickier with “scientists”) — my main definition, again, is that the intellectual writes within an explicitly identified intellectual tradition. And that is something Mr Crusoe can absolutely do.
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Replying to @nils_gilman @dmnshingreturns
Sure, so long as he arrives on the island with a brain primed with received knowledge etc and choose too. But if he arrives there with only basic literacy and no such membership, and becomes the island's only expert on breadfruitology from scratch... he still counts for me
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I think this is where our relative subject matter biases are showing. Subjects like history fundamentally need a symbolic tradition to work with as raw material. Many subjects don't need such a symbolizing base layer, just observation of the environment.
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Replying to @vgr @dmnshingreturns
That’s probably right. I do tend to think of intellectuals in symbolic terms. (“Scientist” is something else, because that depends not just on thinking and writing but on actually “doing” science — which in the contemporary world is very often a capital intensive pursuit.)
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Heh, I think it's all science. Some of the sciences just have extra steps in the Great Feedback Loop of empirical grounding in something rhyming with falsifiability.
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Replying to @dmnshingreturns @nils_gilman
Or at least "Not immediately falsifiable before the paycheck clears scientists"
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