If concepts, categories, and systems of classification are tools that we devise and use for purposes, then what about such things as a college course’s syllabus or a book such as this? Would they not also be historical artifacts rather than things that spring from the ground overnight, like a mushroom? Taking the study of human behavior seriously means understanding scholarship itself to be but one more human practice, yet another way of trying to make the world knowable.

George Bernard Shaw once made a wisecrack that I think defines the academic disciplines as social entities: ‘I may be doing it wrong but I'm doing it in the proper and customary manner’. This raises at least two questions that I would like to examine. First is the white lie, which comes up when we are self-conscious about speaking in a nondisciplinary fashion about our subject. Second is disciplinary lying, which is part of the process of initiating somebody into a discipline. Indeed, disciplinary lying may be the marker of what it is to belong to a discipline.

The White Lie

We lie, it seems to me, in a number of ways. We sometimes cheerfully call the lie words such as ‘generalization’ or ‘simplification’, but that's not really what we're doing. We're really lying, and lying in a relatively deep fashion, when we consistently disguise, in our introductory courses, what is problematic about our work. For example, we traditionally screen from our students the hard work that results in the production of exemplary texts, which we treat as found objects. We hide consistently the immense editorial efforts that have conjecturally established so many of the texts we routinely present to our students as classics, not to speak of the labors of translation that enable many of them to read these texts.