Nobody Ever Told Me How To Do It

I thought I'd write a follow-up to these two recent posts, as I appear to be getting brickbats from the peanut gallery about them.

In Gerry Cohen's On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy he makes the argument that philosophy is something which cannot really be taught ("Nobody ever told me how to do it"). Philosophy students don't learn how to do philosophy in the university classroom through the teacher explaining to them what philosophy is, or even through explaining what thinking like a philosopher is. No: being in the classroom, reading and discussing philosophical texts, gives them the opportunity to see philosophy in action and thereby to learn how to think like a philosopher by a sort of osmosis. That's how one learns to do philosophy.

That's not to say that the philosophy teacher might as well not do anything at all provided there is a classroom and a reading list. Some (many) philosophical concepts are hard and need explaining. But the act of explaining itself should be understood as a demonstration of philosophy in action - part of the exposure of the student to what philosophy is - rather than an exercise in explaining how to do philosophy per se. Reading a difficult text by Heidegger and having its meaning explained to you is not the same as a teacher sitting down with you and telling you "how to do philosophy".

He is absolutely right about this, but it's not just philosophy: most academic subjects, to a lesser degree, are the same. There are important things that you need to be taught when studying history, literature, law, biology, economics, etc. But you can't really explain to somebody how to think as a historian, a literary theorist, a lawyer, a biologist, an economist. You can only provide them with the opportunity to see what it means to be one of those things, to think like one of those people, and hope that they take it from there.

The academic subject with which I'm most familiar, law, is a great example of this. It's fairly straightforward to memorise legal rules, whether they exist in precedent or statute. Some of them are complicated, but as long as you can read, and have the time and energy to just sit there and memorise things, and have a teacher to explain difficult concepts, you can perform that task readily enough. But legal reasoning - thinking like a lawyer - is a different thing, something that only comes to you (if you get it at all) from seeing it in action - reading cases, watching advocates, doing work experience, and so on - not from the teacher explaining how to do it. In other words, there is a bit of technical knowledge that has to be explained, but the bulk of the learning involves being introduced to a certain method of thinking.

Even the hardest of hard sciences, like maths and physics, are like that I think: it's not so hard to memorise that 2+2 = 4 or that a2+b2=c2 or whatever, and having a teacher is helpful to explain difficult concepts, but mathematical thought is a certain type of thinking that you develop yourself from ongoing exposure to it - you are introduced to it by your teacher, not taught it.

This can be contrasted with other exercises in human learning that are more technical like, say, learning to write, learning a foreign language, or learning to drive. Learning to write is almost entirely technical: it's how to hold the pen, how to physically make the marks on the page, how to make sure they correspond to accepted spelling conventions. You don't learn it primarily from watching other people write. You have to be sat down and have it explained to you over the course of years.

As an adult, learning a foreign language is the same: nobody is going to learn Swahili just from going to Tanzania and listening to people talk. Somebody (or a dictionary or textbook) has to explain to you what this word means, what that word means, how to conjugate this verb, how to make a noun into a verb, and everything else. You actually need to be taught it - shown it.

Learning to drive is similar: you need to be walked through the process of how to indicate, how to use the hand break, how to use the clutch, how to change gears, how to do a three-point turn, and all the rest. Back in the day I remember my driving instructor having little coloured dots around the rear window frames in the car, so when teaching how to reverse into a parking space he could tell you to line the red dot (or whatever) up with the line on the tarmac to make sure your angles were right. You don't learn to drive from watching others do it. You work through the process with somebody - usually an irascible older man - telling you directly what to do.

Now, don't misunderstand me: it's not that the actual practice of writing, speaking a foreign language, or driving don't involve intuition and that you don't get better at them with solo practice. It's just that the actual learning process is primarily one that has to be explained, rather than just demonstrated.

All the above is a rather long-winded way of saying: learned human activities exist on a spectrum. Some are almost entirely explained (learning to write), while some are almost entirely introduced (philosophy). In reality the vast majority of things are in the middle. Certain learned activities - car mechanics, martial arts, sport - are more towards the end of the spectrum where we find learning to write; others - creative writing, policing, teaching, acting, music - are more towards the philosophy end.

My contention is that DMing is much more something one learns to do well through what I've called "introduction" rather than having it explained - it is more towards philosophy than it is towards learning to write or drive; much more so in fact. At its core DMing is more akin to creative writing, teaching, acting or policing than it is mechanics or martial arts, and hence one can't learn a great deal from being told what to do or what not to do, but can probably learn better from examples and actual play reports and things of that nature, properly explicated - which would be the DMing equivalent of a philosophy student reading Being and Time and having it explained by a good teacher.

(tl;dr version: let's have less prescriptive DMing advice and more actual play reports accompanied by commentary on what worked and what didn't.)