If you feel that you should preface your question with a statement to the effect that you don't know much about the issue addressed in the paper, or have not kept up on the literature that's central to the paper's argument, don't bother asking your question.
6 comments:
Brilliant!
Yes, by all means. Conference talks exists so that the 3 people who specialize in a bleedingly narrow and dull subfield can repeat to each other the objections and replies they've already read in each others' published work.
The problem with philosophy is that we're constantly being forced to confront ideas and perspectives outside of our little group of area-specific experts. We need a small dash of narrowness and myopia in our field for a change.
I second 8:23am. As long as the question is merely uninformed, and not stupid, I think it's fine to ask it. At department talks where I work, some of the most interesting questions come from people not working in the area. I find that those sorts of people are less inclined to do things such as, engage in burden tennis, cite themselves, or orgasm on themselves due to hearing their own voice.
8:23 - no way. APA sessions are short, and I take my work to the APAs precisely in order to get feedback/pushback from my peers. And "peers" in this context means those who are at the cutting-edge of an issue. There's nothing worse than having the precious minutes of a Q&A sucked away by an amateur who likes to hear his own voice and who thinks it's my job as a speaker to educate him about the topic of my paper, while in the meantime the people who I most want to engage with struggle to get a question in. If you want me to teach you about the basics of my paper, invite me to coffee after the session.
4:08, I think there's a very large class of audience members who fall between the 3 bleeding edge specialists you're focused on and the amateurs who like to hear themselves talk.
The top end of that class may have useful or relevant questions that make your ideas more accessible to the top end of non-bleeding-edgers.
More importantly, the bruised-but-not-bleeding edgers may have a degree of distance that allows them to bring fresh perspective that the bleeding edgers cannot bring--they may even be able to see serious problems that the insiders have a shared blindness to.
In any case, if you seek feedback from peers in such a narrow sense, why not seek it at a small society meeting, rather than the APA?
4:08- I see that it's crucial to your view that the number of those who show up at apa sessions with a specialization in the topic of the paper is so small (3 seems to be the magic number). I don't know what topics you work on (perhaps they draw the attention of only a very few), but I'm talking about what I take to be the more usual case at a main program apa session where there are several experts in the audience, and only 25 minutes for Q&A. Assuming modestly that each audience has 5 such persons, that's time for 5 minutes for each question/answer. So why waste everyone's time with an uninformed question?
And if you want to know about the topic of my paper enough to ask such a question, why not just do some reading about it and stay out of my session?
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