Knowledge And Decisions

Many occupations deal with ideas, and even with ideas of a complex or profound order, without the practitioners being considered intellectuals. The output of an athletic coach or advertising executive consists of ideas, but these are not the kind of people that come to mind when “intellectuals” are mentioned. Even the designers of television circuits, mining equipment, or parlor games like “Monopoly” are less likely to come to mind than professors, authors, or lecturers. Those occupations which involve the application of ideas, however complex, seem less likely to be regarded as intellectual than occupations which consist primarily of transmitting ideas. Moreover, even those transmitting ideas that are highly specific — a boxing manager telling his fighter how to counter a left jab, or a printer explaining the complexities of his craft — are not considered to be intellectuals in the same sense as those who deal with more sweepingly general ideas such as political theory, economics, or mathematics. The most narrowly specialized physicist bases his work on generalized systems of analytic procedures and symbolic manipulations common to economics, chemistry, and numerous other fields. He is an intellectual because his work deals in generalized ideas, however narrow the focus of his particular interest. By the same token, a drugstore clerk is not considered an intellectual, though dealing with a wide range of products and people, but with the work itself not requiring mastery of a generalized scheme of abstractions. Nor is it complexity or intelligence that is central. Even if we believe (like the present writer) that being a photographic technician requires more intelligence and authenticated knowledge than being a sociologist, nevertheless the sociologist is an intellectual and the photographic technician is not, because one transmits generalities and the other uses ideas that are far less general.

The point here is not to illustrate an arbitrary definition, but to show that the definition is far from arbitrary, and reflects what is a general pattern of usage, even if unarticulated. Moreover, as will be seen, these definitional distinctions correspond to empirical distinctions in the political and social viewpoints of the various groups as categorized. Even on university faculties, agronomists and engineers have very different political opinions from those of sociologists or the humanities faculty.⁸⁸ In defining the intellectual occupation, the purpose is not so much to make hard-and-fast boundaries as to define a central conception and to recognize different degrees of approximation to it. Thus there is some sense in which an agronomist or engineer is less likely to be classified as an “intellectual” than is a sociologist or a literary critic, or is thought to fit in the category less fully or less well.

The incentives and constraints of intellectual processes are quite different from the incentives and constraints of intellectual activity as an occupation. For example, intellectual processes are highly restrictive as to the conclusions that may be reached, requiring painstaking care in the formulation of theories, rigorous discipline in the design and carrying out of experiments, and strict limitations of conclusions to what the evidence can logically support. By contrast, intellectuals as a social class are rewarded for presenting numerous, sweeping, plausible, popular and policy-relevant conclusions. Criminology may be at a stage of highly disparate speculation,⁸⁹ but public policy pressures to “solve” the crime “problem” mean that large sums of government money are available to criminologists who will claim to know how to “rehabilitate” criminals or discover the “root causes” of crime. How many criminologists or intellectuals in general succumb to the incentives of their class, as distinguished from the incentives of their cognitive process, is not at issue here. The point is that they are very different incentives.

THE INTELLECTUAL PROCESS

Intelligence may take many forms, from the incrementally imperceptible and partially unconscious modifications of behavior over the years that we call “experience” to the elaborately articulated arguments and conclusions that are central to the intellectual process. Intelligence and intellectual are two different things. The hoped-for result is that the latter will incorporate the former, but whatever the facts may be about their overlap, they are not conceptually congruent.