In one chapter of Winning Arguments titled “Academic Arguments,” author Stanley Fish claims that the world of academic discourse, which attempts to give the appearance of presenting facts in an unbiased and opinionated manner, is in fact beholden to an unwritten decorum. He theorizes that modern academics have formed an “interpretive community,” defined as a group of people who follow an ingrained precedent on how to act without an authority to force them to do so, in the same manner that a university class knows how to behave during a lecture.
Fish expands upon this claim of group uniformity by stating that true originality is shunned upon in academic circles; ideas cannot simply be presented out of nowhere, they must be presented in relation to an existing argument in a way that proves the existing notion to be lacking. This type of interconnectivity, which may be useful for forming synthesis arguments, leads to completely unorthodox ideas with no relation to mainstream academia being shunned.
As an example, Holocaust deniers, a group which contains “historians, heads of state, public intellectuals, and entertainment stars” (“Academic Arguments”), and those who question if Shakespeare is the true author of the plays attributed to him are seen as psuedo-intellectuals for their breaking from the academic mainstream. This can lead to disconnect between the academic and non-academic worlds: a sizable percentage of the population believes in Creationism and Intelligent Design, yet the world of science strictly adheres to Darwinism and Natural Selection. Fish clarifies that the presence of the interpretive community does not eliminate change, but renders it into a slow process, with the proponents and detractors of the status quo limiting themselves to ideas that they consider to be acceptable in relation to the mainstream.
Source
“ACADEMIC ARGUMENTS.” Winning Arguments: What Works and Doesn’t Work in Politics, the Bedroom, the Courtroom, and the Classroom, by Stanley Eugene Fish, Harper Paperbacks, 2017
