As an undergraduate Philosophy and Classics major at the University of Pittsburgh in the late 1970's-early 1980's, I had the good fortune to take an honors seminar with Adolf Grunbaum on religion and science. Professor Grunbaum taught me many things in that seminar, not the least of which was how to read Freud both critically and appreciatively.
But the lesson that has been the most consistently useful to me in the decades since I took that class is one about the nature of scholarship: that it is a disciplined way of making sense of the world. Discipline involves asceticism--or, resistance to temptation. The scholar is one who resists the temptation to make claims about the world that lack adequate evidentiary warrant.
Of course, such an assertion requires further elaboration, for what constitutes evidentiary warrant for any given claim is subject to scholarly argument and dispute; and even where there is general agreement among scholars as to what constitutes evidence, there is still plenty of room to argue about what constitutes evidentiary adequacy. Grunbaum taught me to be sensitive to all of these vagaries of scholarship and many more besides.
In the end, scholarship involves the cultivation of habits of circumspection and reticence. Circumspection and reticence are the soul of scholarly tact.
