The Fox’s Curse
At least under one of its interpretations, Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between the hedgehog and the fox can be understood as the contrast between the specialized expert who masters their narrow subject on the one hand, and the educated generalist possessing more widespread but less deep knowledge on several subjects.[1] Since Berlin coined it, this distinction has been used many times in many different contexts, sometimes pejoratively (most often toward the “hedgehogs” for supposedly being narrow-minded). Its heuristic value however mostly lies in the fact that it singles out two general types of knowers, more than it would imply a supposed hierarchy between them. What we can tentatively agree on is that it is possible to class most of the knowledgeable persons in one of those two categories and that an ideal world would need both foxes and hedgehogs. As it happens, I have had in recent weeks conversations with colleagues that make me think that modern times are unfriendly for foxes. I shall briefly explain why.
Let’s call a knower a person whose main comparative advantage in their society is to produce and/or transmit knowledge. In principle, this can be any kind of knowledge, but my discussion will focus on knowers who produce/transmit scientific knowledge, broadly understood (thus including, e.g., philosophical knowledge). Knowers can put their comparative advantage to work in at least two general fields. First, the “academic field”, where knowledge production/transmission follows specific rules essentially related to peer-reviewed evaluations. In this field, the knowledge produced and transmitted is essentially addressed to academics. Second, the “public field” where the production/transmission follow different rules, governing for instance the information institutions (newspapers, social media). Here, the addressees are more heterogenous: public officials, businessmen, associations, and citizens.
It is largely acknowledged that the academic field is undergoing a process of specialization. This is not new of course, but there are good reasons to think that this process is accelerating. This process brings many benefits. Specialization is just the result of a deeper division of work and, in academia as elsewhere, this contributes to increased “productivity”. Specialization is actually largely the product of necessity. Metaphorically, scientists have picked the low-hanging fruits of knowledge over the last centuries, and making new important discoveries requires more effort and deeper expertise on very specific issues. The result is that to make an impact in one’s domain, one needs to invest an increasing amount of resources on very narrow topics. This is obviously strengthened by the fact that the literature keeps on growing, making it more and more difficult to master any subject.
Increased specialization clearly favors the hedgehog type of knowers. On the other hand, its overall effect on the value of foxes is ambiguous. Economists know since Adam Smith that specialization and division of labor coevolve with the market size. Specialization permits producing more at a reduced cost, but the additional production needs to be sold somewhere, hence the market must gain in scope. Though details are different, a similar logic is at play in the ”market for ideas” within the academic field. The value of very specialized knowledge – and thus of the activities producing it – partially depends on the possibility to integrate it with other bits of knowledge to solve issues larger in scope and significance. But to do that, you need knowers able to master the different bits of knowledge, even though they may not have directly contributed to their production. So, in principle, increased specialization also raises the value of the fox type of knowers because they bring competencies that are as relevant as ever.
There are several factors that counteract this effect, however. First, the ability to master different bits of knowledge to articulate them is very valuable at relatively small scales, those at which ambitious scientific projects are mostly conducted. It is also in principle valuable at larger scales, involving inter- or transdisciplinary knowledge, but in spite of an ever-present rhetoric in the academic world, interdisciplinary work is not always valued as it should be. This is partly explained by a second factor related to the way academic institutions work. Academics have to publish to get a job, preferably in their disciplines. This has at least two implications: (a) it discourages the kind of interdisciplinary work that put more value on fox-type abilities; (b) it encourages academics to read others’ work very selectively – if at all – and of course in the narrow domain where they want to make a contribution. They may find more generalist work “interesting”, but given the constraints, they can’t rationally allocate too much time to read them. This is even truer in a context of uncertainty: maybe allocating more time to read more fox-type work would prove useful, but as you can’t be sure, better to play safe. This is magnified by the third factor. Academics generally have a lot of things to do besides producing knowledge, and so the time available to enlarge one’s perspectives and interests is even more reduced.
All this plays against fox-type of knowers in the academic field. Not only they may have a harder time publishing the kind of work that will grant them a job, but more generally they will have a hard time getting the attention of other academics. We could however suspect that prospects are better in the public field. After all, the above factors are not at work there. Public officials or citizens do not need and are not demanding ultra-specialized knowledge. The former want synthetic forms of knowledge that can be made operational relatively easily and the latter, broad overviews that can help them to navigate in our complex world. But things are not better there.
The problem is of a different nature. Because the world is complex and knowledge more and more specialized, the form of all-encompassing synthesis that fox-type knowers can produce is likely to be also more and more complex, at the cost otherwise of propagating falsehoods. But too much complexity is obviously a handicap in the “public market of ideas”. The demand side is unlikely to be receptive to ideas that are complex to understand, in part because they presuppose that the receivers already possess a minimal background knowledge. Add to that the traditional constraints that imply that agents can’t allocate too much time mastering complex syntheses and the biases introduced (or reinforced) by the development of social networks.
In the public field, the opponent of the fox is not the hedgehog, but another kind of “knowers” masquerading ideology for wisdom. There are actually several kinds of such knowers. Some of them, while they may have an academic background, have been ejected from the academic field a long time ago and contribute to the diffusion of false theories. Others still have a foot in the academic field – and may even have been key players at some point – but essentially rely on their reputation and outdated knowledge. Their common strength is, however, their ability to communicate relatively simple messages that appeal to their audience’s prejudices, a priori beliefs, or that are calibrated to exploit cognitive biases.
The figure of the “public intellectual” exemplifies the thinness of the frontier between being a fox in the public field and being one of those aforementioned kinds of “knowers”. It is relatively easy to cite names of major public intellectuals in the 20th century. The name of John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman, or, in France, Raymond Aron, come to my mind, but there are many others. Sure, some of their ideas were controversial, sometimes based on an inaccurate or overly simplified use of scientific knowledge, and their opponents would argue that they were essentially advancing their ideologies. That may be true, but it remains that it seems not so easy today to find equivalents for the 21st century.
Overall, it’s probably not good to be a fox today, unless you have already acquired by some means or another a reputation and followers in the public field. As for the academic field, its institutions put them at a big disadvantage. So is the Fox’s Curse!
[1] Isaiah Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox. An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History”. Berlin starts his essay by quoting the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. The interpretation of the distinction I put forward in this post is I think essentially in line with the literal reading of this quote.