Commentary: silos, bunkers and their voices

During periods of disillusionment when I bemoan (what I perceive as) a lack of progress in knowledge gains in the academic domain of leadership, I wonder whether (if I had my time over again) scholarly life might not have been more straightforward had I been a physicist. The reason is that in the domain of physics (I imagine) one would be dealing with the inanimate phenomena of matter that are governed by laws and about which there is an agreed-upon language and commonly shared definitions of problems to the resolution of which (through experimentation) one’s colleagues devote their energies. There might also be, of course, the added attraction of nice big toys to play with like a synchrotron or the Large Hadron Collider. And, what is more, unlike humans and their fickle behaviour, matter doesn’t answer one back. It was while musing along these lines recently, however, that I stumbled on Hilary Putnam’s (2004, pp. 25-26) brief discussion of a legacy of philosophical thinking devoted to trying to render language meaningful according to a model of the language of physics. It was after absorbing Putnam’s demolition of this endeavour that my courage failed me and the physics thought bubble burst.