That's not surprising inductive risk does not entail secrecy, but it's always a live option in light of it. What makes the passage notable is that Sabul, the director of the Sciences Institute, uses the inductive risk argument in the service of secrecy. And she used her keen powers of observation and analysis in her (gentle) satire and advocacy of the intellectual life (including the labor of spouses to make it possible). (Yes, I am a fan.)Īs an aside, I am usually not one for insisting biography matters, but while Le Guin never completed her doctorate, she was the daughter of the influential anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber, the sister of the l iterature professor Karl Kroeber, and the spouse of the historian Charles Le Guin. And while I would never claim you should primarily read the book in virtue of its many insights into the nature of the socially embedded intellectual mind, but it is a good reason to read the book. And part of the action of the book is us viewing his education in politics (as well as the politics of science). As I noted back in 2015 Shevek is politically very naïve, "a fool," this includes the politics of the science. Okay, in the quoted passage above, our main protagonist, Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is introduced to a feature of what philosophers call 'inductive risk' (a now flourishing topic again thanks to Heather Douglas' revival of it). (This post will illustrate that.) So now, I'd like to try again with a series of posts, including, eventually, a revisit the significance of that scene. Normally, I use these digressions to think my way through to some clarity or higher order confusion, but, despite writing joyously about many of Le Guin's other works since, I was blocked on The Dispossessed, which I think of not just as a work of science fiction, but a major contribution to Socratic political theory ( recall also here this one on Thomas More and here on Kant and Spinoza) in utopian and anarchist thought. However, when I taught it the next time around, a class discussion about the sexual assault scene in chapter 7 made me realize I didn't understand the book. And I intended to return to it regularly. I wrote about the book enthusiastically six years ago almost to the day (recall here-that counts as pt 1 of the present series). 89 in the (1999) Millennium edition).Īs regular readers know, ever since Joshua Miller introduced me to The Dispossessed, I have become an Ursula Le Guin fan-boi. Shevek left, carrying the dynamite carefully, with revulsion and devouring curiosity.-Ursula Le Guin (1974) The Dispossessed (chapter 4 p. “All right” Sabul turned away, scowling with what appeared to be an endemic, not a specific rage. “If you found a pack of explosive caps in the street would you ‘share’ them with every kid that went by? Those books are explosives. “I’m to acquire knowledge which I’m not to share,” Shevek said after a brief pause, stating the sentence as if it were a proposition in logic. You follow that? Privilege is responsibility. You’re now a member of the Central Institute of Sciences, a Physics syndic, working with me, Sabul. Sabul got up again and came close to him. ![]() The young man paused, turned back, and said after a moment in his calm, rather diffident voice, “I don’t understand.” Sabul raised his growl: “Keep those books with you! They’re not for general consumption.” ![]() ![]() “Come back when you can read that,” Sabul growled. He remembered the book Palat had shown him, the book of numbers. He was holding it, the thing he had wanted to see, the alien artifact, the message from another world. Shevek stared at it, took it from Sabul, but did not open it. The title was stamped in gold letters and seemed to say Poilea Afio-ite, which didn’t make any sense, and the shapes of some of the letters were unfamiliar. Wait.” He hunted through an overflowing drawer and finally achieved a book, a queer-looking book, bound in blue, without the Circle of Life on the cover.
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