The MITS argument

Some introductory text-books for issues such as the philosophy of mind, cultural relativism, literary theory and so on, construct a figure which they refer to as the Man-in-the-street (MITS). It is argued that the MITS believes in every possible kind of intellectual heresy, though precisely what this heresy is will depend largely on the academic allegiances of the writer. Sometimes the MITS is a fundamentalist, sometimes he believes in mind-body dualism, sometimes he thinks that there is such a thing as 'truth' with a (capital) T, and sometimes he holds the opinion that science is an instrument for human liberation. Again, in other contexts, it turns out that the MITS is actually a post-modernist, or that he argues for eliminativist reductionism, or holds that truth is fiction, or claims that science is a form of imperialism.

Living in the heart of an industry that constructs MITS, one begins to wonder who the MITS really is. If I were to go out into the street immediately after typing this and asked the first man I bumped into to express his views (on any issue from Abortion to Zen), would I find that they can be described in terms of any of the above labels? Perhaps he will just sink under the burden of the views that are attributed to him in the scholarly literature. (Besides, one also wonders why it is the figure of the MITS and not that of the WITS - the Woman-in-the-street - that is invoked in such arguments. Given the common demonisation of women as irrational, surely the WITS would be just what we are looking for?)

Indeed, one could even write a book trying to summarise what role the MITS plays (and has played) in the texts of different writers from different academic disciplines. It could be asked what exactly the MITS looks like in a textbook of Indian history, of philosophy of language, of medical anthropology, of environmental studies, of literary criticism, of art theory, and of film studies. Moreover, one could take one specific discipline say the one that goes by the name of 'developmental theory' (in economics/sociology), and see how the MITS in it has changed over the years, say from the 1950s to the 1990s.

For all we know, it might then turn out that in constructing these evanescent MITS we are actually looking down into a deep well and seeing our own reflection at its bottom.