If you’ve come within hailing distance of a philosophy talk in the past several years, you’ve no doubt become acquainted with the “finger.” No, not that finger. The finger in philosophy talk circles refers to a convention whereby a member of the audience, instead of raising a hand to ask a question, raises a finger to indicate that they have a follow-up question to the one that’s just been asked. This alerts the moderator to the fact that they need to call on that questioner right away rather than proceed to the next person in the queue.
I’m not sure where this practice originated (sociologists of philosophy, please feel free to enlighten me), all I know is that it seems to have spread, as we used to say, like a virus around departments in North America in the recent past. I can’t even remember where I first witnessed it but I do recall resisting it adamantly (and perhaps a little rudely) a few years ago when a colleague suggested it when I was moderating a talk.
So what’s wrong with this neat convention: hand = new question, finger = follow-up to the question just asked? For one, it raises a philosophical question: what constitutes a real follow-up and what’s a genuinely new question? This is the kind of conundrum that might spawn a philosophical cottage industry in erotetic logic, yet in the pressing context of a talk, the moderator has to take the questioner’s word for it and just assume that the question is a real follow-up. This is liable to result in questions that are not mere follow-ups being asked out of turn.
This brings us to the second problem with the finger convention. Given that the moderator has to take the questioner’s word for a question’s being a follow-up, this opens the door to all kinds of abuse. Professor X asks a question, Professor Y thinks they have a follow-up and raises a finger, and the moderator goes directly to Y. Let’s suppose that Y is sincere and he genuinely thinks that the question is a follow-up. Are we sure that Y is not deluded into thinking that every question relates to his own pet topic or theory? Don’t we all have a colleague who is always carrying around a hammer and treating every utterance in their vicinity as a nail? What’s supposed to be a follow-up to the original question ends up being a different question altogether on some entirely different issue.
A third problem with this practice is that it often pulls the rug out from under the original questioner. I’ve been in Q&A sessions where the original questioner herself seems to have a follow-up but before she gets a chance to ask it, her colleague jumps in with his finger and takes the floor. Perhaps the original questioner hesitated a couple of seconds before her colleague’s finger shot up and that was enough for the moderator to cede the floor to him. Perhaps the moderator was insufficiently attentive to the questioner’s body language and didn’t notice that she had a follow-up. Either way, it’s effectively a means for certain pushy characters to jump the queue and insert themselves into the conversation before their turn.
The pronouns in the previous paragraph may already have brought to mind the fourth problem. Is it just my imagination or is it frequently older, maler, more established mansplainers (like me) who are so keen to follow up on other people’s questions? All too often, the pattern is that a female junior colleague or grad student has asked the original question, and the follow-up comes from her senior colleague or professor who is allegedly helping out by framing it more clearly, concisely, sharply, pointedly, analytically. Except that he’s not.
Even though over the past year, philosophy talks have gone virtual, and Zoom has a “raised hand” function but no raised finger (at least as of this writing), the practice seems to persist. I’ve been to numerous talks recently where the moderator has asked members of the audience to indicate in the chat if they have a follow-up or new question, or even to type in “finger.” So the convention is robust enough to survive a move from actuality to virtuality and doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
Fans of the finger might protest at this point that the practice serves an important purpose. It enables questions along thematic lines to be grouped together and lets us avoid circling back to something that’s been covered before. But what’s wrong with shifting gears to a different question then coming back to some earlier issue later in the Q&A session? Maybe by then, the speaker has had time to think a little more about it and can come up with new things to say, and maybe it’ll retain the audience’s interest to mix it up a little. I know that I tend to lose my patience with a line of questioning after the second or third round, and we could all benefit from some variety in the kinds of questions posed after a talk.
We’ve all been to talks in which one or a few bad actors monopolize the Q&A. Often, time runs out and there are people left in the queue who had perfectly interesting questions on topics that are different from the one that generated all the follow-ups. It can be frustrating for speakers as well as other questioners when there are a couple of topics that dominate, which may not even be the ones that are most interesting to most of the audience. A series of successive fingers sometimes ends up derailing an entire post-talk session.
Is there a danger that Prof. Y might forget his question if he’s forced to stand in line with everyone else? Just jot it down on a piece of paper — and get used to waiting your turn. Philosophers are notoriously bad at the skills that we should have learned in kindergarten and could benefit from deploying some self-restraint. Using the finger option is tantamount to reaching for the marshmallow before the experimenter returns. And I would argue that it can be abused in such a way as to enforce existing power dynamics in the profession. So I appeal to the gatekeepers among us, as a new academic year begins: the next time you’re asked to chair a panel or moderate a presentation, please give the finger to the finger.
Thanks to Alice MacLachlan and Kevin Lande for very helpful feedback on a previous draft.
Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Muhammad Ali Khalidi is Presidential Professor of Philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center, where he has recently moved from York University in Toronto. He works primarily on philosophy of science, especially cognitive and social science. He is the author of Natural Categories and Human Kinds (Cambridge 2013) and is working on a book titled Cognitive Ontology: Taxonomic Practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences.
Great post. I completely agree with all the reasons Muhammad Ali spells out here for not liking the finger, and when I moderate talks, I’ve chosen not to follow the finger policy.
Luckily there is a readily available solution to such conversation complications, online discussion forums.
Most philosophers are articulate natural writers, or they wouldn’t have gotten very far in the field. Also, many philosophers, this one included, are not naturally gifted with real world social skills. A text based environment seems a natural fit for many of us.
Forums provide an opportunity to think before asking or answering a question. One is not required to engage on the spot in the heat of the moment, one can pause to reflect, think on it, sleep on it, write and rewrite. Generally speaking, on average, this process would seem likely to generate better questions and answers.
A discussion on a forum can be very democratic and inclusive, as forums can provide unlimited time to everyone who is participating. There’s no need to worry about time running out before one has the opportunity to engage. There’s no need to raise the finger, and then have a debate about whose finger is legitimate. On a forum, if you want to say something, you just say it. And what you’ve said does not vanish in a moment, it remains said for years.
A discussion on a forum can go on for months, instead of just an hour or two at a live event. This unlimited time creates a space for deeper investigations. And, as the discussion unfolds over an extended period it will usually attract new voices who can enrich the conversation with new perspectives.
Forum discussions can be moderated, just like live events. This can solve the problem of the attendee who thinks every subject is a nail for their pet topic hammer (ok, ok, I plead guilty!) and moderation can pull the plug if personality conflicts start to undermine the conversation.
Forum users don’t even need to lose the face to face contact, as those more comfortable with speaking than writing can simply make their points in video, which is easily inserted in to a forum post.
And obviously, forums are hyper convenient. If you want to participate during business hours, and I like to write at 3am, not a problem. You don’t even have to comb your hair, just show up when you’re ready, and engage.
The primary problem with forums is a branding issue. Almost all the forums on the net use an “almost anybody can say almost anything” publishing model, which is a recipe for lowest common denominator content. Thus, intelligent people like philosophers are understandably wary of engaging in an environment which will almost surely be a waste of their time and talents.
Luckily this problem has nothing to do with forum software, and is entirely a result of a forum owner’s decision to prioritize quantity over quality. If a forum owner is serious enough about intelligent conversations to instead prioritize quality over quantity, forum software then becomes a solution to all the problems described above by Muhammad Ali Khalidi.
As you can see, I’m quite passionate about online forums. I’ve been using them almost daily since they first arrived on the net, and even coded my own forum software from scratch awhile back when my nerdy nature became excessively enthusiastic. Readers who share a love of forums can click my name to see my latest forum project, whose goal is to address the only problem forums have ever had, a chronically poor publishing model.
Thank you for allowing me to raise a finger to provide a followup addition to this article. Although blog software is quite limited in comparison to forum software, if the editor allows there’s plenty of space here for a conversation should that interest any reader.
I don’t know if this kind of convention came from the social sciences, but I’ve seen something like it a lot in those meetings over the years (mostly political science and policy).
But the convention there was: Raise one finger for a new question, or two fingers for a “hot pursuit” or follow-up question.
And here’s a suggestion for how to do it over Zoom: https://ndisc.nd.edu/conferences-seminars/virtual-meeting-tips-and-procedure/