Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Because I can't lose this quote

From a comment over at Morgan's place the other day from someone that goes by Severian ... this (the last sentence, in bold) was priceless:

.... For instance: some philosopher raises an interesting, and valid, question about the epistemological underpinnings of science or math. Actual scientists, engineers, etc. don’t care, since 2+2 will still equal 4 no matter how many fancy words like “unfalsifiability” and “paradigmatic” you throw at it. But then some history professor gets ahold of it, and all of a sudden it becomes “’science’ is a social construction.” And then some English professor gets ahold of it it and it becomes “’science’ is just a social construction.” Then some Womyn’s Studies professor jumps in with “reality (gravity, whatever) is only a social construction”…

…and this, filtered through the pot-addled brains of several generations of pretentious, perpetually indignant undergrads, allows idiots like Behar and Whoopi Goldberg to blithely dismiss honest-to-god, slap-you-in-the-face facts that don’t fit their politics. And that, in turn, allows them to remain Smarter Than You, no matter how great the gap between your respective IQs or your relative command of verifiable data

And if you don’t believe me, that’s because you’re just in thrall to the reified paradigmatic hermeneutic cisgender phallocentric neo-colonial praxis.
Yes, those are all actually defined words (though I suspect many are neologisms
;-) ), and used in context.

I may need to use that in the future.

3 comments:

philmon said...

Next time somebody tries to bamboozle me with their academic jargon, I'll have to hit back with:

"Don't try to metagrobolize me with your neologisms."

tim said...

Hang on, let me go to dictionary.com first.

philmon said...

No shame in that, tim. I did ;-)