Yeah, Karin herself has expressed qualms about having her analytic categories re-deployed in a classroom context. I don’t really understand her objection or yours, to be frank. The difference between a grad student and a professor is in my view one of institutional status and professional experience, not of epistemic status. In my view, one can perfectly well have “negative knowledge” in a classroom; it’s just that the social implications of performing that knowledge are quite different in the context of pedagogical evaluation than they are in a laboratory or publication situation. But do you see things differently? At a minimum, I don’t think you can just assert that “graduate students aren’t bona fide knowledge producers”; that needs some kind of argument.

Re-reading my post, I think a better objection would be not that graduate students aren’t “bona fide” knowledge makers but that Knorr’s “negative knowledge” refers more to things like data noise, failure modes in experimental instrumentation and the like; it doesn’t have so much to do with the sorts of qualifications of statements that I’m invoking here. On the other hand, one might say in response that “negative knowledge” in the classroom is a matter of indicating one’s skepticism about one’s own epistemic capacities — as if it was the speaking self itself that constituted the instrument of potential epistemic failure in the classroom situation. Or is that too obtusely worded to make sense?

In all honesty, I think it’s going to be hard to fit negative knowledge to the expressive habits of grad students, if only because a grad student is still not a bonafide knowledge-producer. I think you’ll find more traction exploring competition as a social form (think natural selection and the free market) and the results of repeated attempts to exorcise it from the uni classroom.

As far as the cultural differences are concerned, I agree that it has a lot to do with how we interact at different levels of influence and power. In the East, for example, I think that language is more direct and straightforward, and the less power you have in an interaction (for example, a young wage worker interacting with her/his boss), the less likely it is that you’ll be speaking at all. In the West, the less power you have in an interaction, the more qualifiers you’ll use to convey your points (since qualified statements are less likely to cause unnecessary disputes that may reveal weaknesses in intellect, reasoning, etc). Graduate school is a nice test bed for this kind of research, because the power dynamic is so apparent, nearly tangible, and it seems that professors, in particular, are quick to pick up on and grind away at certainty. I’m not sure if that’s because professors are simply prone to exercising critical thinking faculties, or if it’s a response to their position being challenged (i.e. they are the only ones allowed to make definitive statements), or a mix of both.

I’m especially interested in your second paragraph; linguistic anthropologists would have a field day investigating that kind of phenomenon (culturally variable burdens of comprehension, if you like). It does seem to me, though, that although there may well be these kinds of general cultural differences at work, that can’t be all there is to it — because it seems to me that, in the United States for example, certain social or institutional situations elicit this kind of qualifying behavior more, or differently, than others. For instance, there are grad students that are really awkward about talking in a seminar who would be totally at ease and confident in themselves if they were talking about how they got wasted at the bar on friday night. So it does seems to me that there’s something to think about how the institutional situation of graduate school induces these qualifications more than it happens elsewhere. Yeah?

Also, in the West, it seems that typically the burden is on the speaker to make her/himself understood. This may explain why our language is often riddled with qualifiers. Our impulse is to avoid being misunderstood, and one way of achieving that end is by staying away from statements marked as absolute and/or definite. On the other hand, in Korea (and probably much of the East, especially Japan and China), the listener is responsible for understanding the speaker. This is reflected at the basic sentence level, where only information that is absolutely essential to understanding resides. In English, it’s the exact opposite. We are constantly reintroducing subjects and objects to make extra sure that our listeners understand what we’re trying to convey.