Thursday, April 29, 2004

Yes, It Is Garbage After All


Large parts of academia seem to survive purely through their ability to generate paranoia. They produce reams of meaningless blather in the hope that people will be sufficiently intimidated by it not to point out it's total rubbish, lest everyone else laughs at them for being such an idiot. Of course, not everyone cringes:

Practitioners of this type of "pretend"social science try to make out that there is no such thing as knowledge, and that all opinions are equally valid. The claim is that all we have is "talk", though they prefer the word "discourse". You may have your discourse; someone else will have another. Science in all its forms is just another discourse, so they maintain. Being unwilling to undertake the demanding work that is science, they assert that one opinion is as good as another. If they were right, there would be very little reason to go to university.

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