If William of Occam were alive today, and if he had the gumption to tackle the social sciences and humanities, I'm sure he would need more than a puny little razor to work his magic.I give you Occam's manure fork; the Occam's razor for today's academy.
3 comments:
Now Jef, I know how much fun it is for natural scientists (such as myself) to dump on social scientists (such as myself also, curiously enough) - but perhaps you should employ slightly more precise terminology WRT which part of the humanities you refer.
To lump all the humanities together as if they were all equally 'crapulous' seems somewhat unfair from my perspective.
There is a world of difference between what I consider to be:
1)fairly rigorous (evidence-based)fields such as history, psychology, anthropology and linguistics, and
2)pseudo-scientific (theory-based) fields such as law, ethics, theology, economics, and political science, and at the murky bottom of the list
3)the unintelligible (obscurity-based) i.e. modern sociology.
Category 1 is obviously 'scientfic' for all intents and purposes. Some of the areas in category 2, such as economics, have the 'potential' to become scientific in the future, while category 3... Well, you seem to have captured it perfectly in your cartoon.
All the articles which are linked to the page you have specified here fit firmly into category 3 of my crude epistemology.
Therefore your little sign should read "Sociology", but then again it could just be a clever example of Humbug using "breathtaking hypocrisy" (unfounded generalisation) to make a point :-)
I don't entirely disagree with your general epistemological ruminations Ben, there is an occasional edible apple amongst the horse droppings. But the most vigorous and shameless creators of horseshit may be found among historians, anthropologists, psychologists, educators etc. On the other side of the coin, some more empirically minded sociologists are doing good work. Anyway, as a satiric cartoonist I am engaging in the time-honoured practice of bagging anyone I feel like bagging.
Can't argue with that.
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