For rea­sons diverse enough to need their own book, tonight I’m read­ing Shusterman’s Prag­ma­tist Aes­thet­ics. Not merely from a grow­ing inter­est in art and aes­thet­ics as such, but as a sort of explo­ration of why we work and think and act the way we do.

For some def­i­n­i­tion of “we” that seems to be grow­ing quickly in our cul­ture: Crafts­men, folks with adap­tive lifestyles, those with “grit”, Edi­tors.

To imag­ine there is no aes­thetic sense in the expe­ri­ence (that is, the mak­ing or learn­ing) of sci­ence and engi­neer­ing is ridicu­lous. Worse, I think the preva­lent aca­d­e­mic denial of the impor­tance of such aes­thetic expe­ri­ence in sci­ence and engi­neer­ing is what’s ruin­ing it: pushed it out of reach, atten­u­ated it into a spe­cial­ist eso­teric “advanced” pile of dis­parate things, enabled its mak­ers to treat lay­men as boors and enabled lay­men to treat mak­ers as unin­tel­li­gi­ble nerds, and priv­i­leged the inces­sant nov­elty of con­cepts over repro­ducibil­ity and applic­a­bil­ity in the professions.

Have you ever noticed how each spe­cialty, each dis­ci­pline in the acad­emy tends to find the small­est num­ber of com­pe­tent spe­cial­ists, and grow the field of boor­ish lay­men to include not just the une­d­u­cated but the dif­fer­ently edu­cated spe­cial­ists of other fields? Yes, we need to advance the fron­tiers of the­ory and prac­tice. We also need to ship. That’s our job too. You need to ship your work not to a jour­nal where it will sit on a shelf behind a fire­wall, but to peo­ple who will act upon it.

It needs to be expe­ri­enced. Like a work of art on a shelf on a museum store-​​room, it’s dead until it’s experienced.

In other words, I nod a lot read­ing this book.

For exam­ple, last week’s con­fer­ence reminded me that the wall between “The­ory and Prac­tice” is an impor­tant cul­tural dis­tinc­tion in my “field”. Shus­ter­man on his “field”, and the need to coa­lesce “the­ory” and “prac­tice” into a sin­gle expe­ri­en­tial whole:

Thus, though our the­o­ret­i­cal imag­i­na­tion is always largely con­strained by estab­lished prac­tice, it is not con­fined to slav­ish con­for­mity and reac­tive rep­e­ti­tion. For chang­ing cir­cum­stances and encoun­ters with other prac­tices can pro­vide new nour­ish­ment and alter­na­tive ori­en­ta­tions. Since no prac­tice is defined for all pos­si­ble sit­u­a­tions, there will always be a need of imag­i­na­tive pro­jec­tions and cre­ative deci­sions as to which of the pos­si­ble pro­jec­tions should actu­ally be pur­sued, deci­sions which are apt to be con­tested and which again raise second-​​order prob­lems of how to jus­tify those deci­sions. Since no prac­tice exists in utter iso­la­tion, unaf­fected by oth­ers, there remains the need to relate, coor­di­nate, or arbi­trate between dif­fer­ent prac­tices. As long as our prac­tices present us with such prob­lems and admit of improve­ment, the­ory will not only be pos­si­ble but necessary.

Con­ceived in this prag­ma­tist fash­ion, which rec­og­nizes the pri­macy but also the prob­lems of prac­tice, the­ory is not exter­mi­nated but revi­tal­ized by the loss of its tra­di­tional sta­tus as tran­scen­den­tal cog­ni­tive priv­i­lege. For, once we give up the foun­da­tion­al­ist view of the­ory as reveal­ing the invari­ably nec­es­sary prin­ci­ples for prac­tice, and fur­ther relin­quish its hope of apo­d­ic­tic, incon­testably final jus­ti­fi­ca­tion; once we instead see our prac­tices (and our the­o­ries) as con­tin­gent prod­ucts whose encounter with chang­ing sit­u­a­tions has neces­si­tated con­tin­ual adjust­ment, clar­i­fi­ca­tion, jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, and improve­ment; then theory’s abid­ing role as crit­i­cal reflec­tion on prac­tice is secure and seem­ingly ineliminable.