I was hoping to compress the description of behaviors that are otherwise baffling (surprising, difficult to explain, high-entropy) but common.
Garden-variety believers of various woo (homeopathy, religion, etc.) and the observation that their beliefs apparently don’t control their anticipation too much;
academic postmodernists saying “reality is socially constructed” and “different things are true to different groups of people”;
that even in front of “serious” people who look like they should really know better (e.g. on job interviews) the usual advice is to show confidence and never say “I don’t know”, because to a large degree the setting works like a BS-generator-test;
the people who talk about “decolonizing science”, vaguely treat it as a conspiracy, and try to insult it by calling it things that carry negative affect in their culture.
The particular claim you quoted is that, since in the anti-epistemology it is assumed that statements don’t refer to anything, there is no difference between e.g. “being an astrologer” and “successfully pretending to be an astrologer”. People go up to you, ask “why did I stub my toe yesterday?”, you say “ah, it happened because mercury is retrograde and Jupiter is in the house of Gemini”, and if they think you sounded like what an astrologer is supposed to sound like, they walk away feeling satisfied but without having learned anything.
I was hoping to compress the description of behaviors that are otherwise baffling (surprising, difficult to explain, high-entropy) but common.
Garden-variety believers of various woo (homeopathy, religion, etc.) and the observation that their beliefs apparently don’t control their anticipation too much;
academic postmodernists saying “reality is socially constructed” and “different things are true to different groups of people”;
that even in front of “serious” people who look like they should really know better (e.g. on job interviews) the usual advice is to show confidence and never say “I don’t know”, because to a large degree the setting works like a BS-generator-test;
the people who talk about “decolonizing science”, vaguely treat it as a conspiracy, and try to insult it by calling it things that carry negative affect in their culture.
The particular claim you quoted is that, since in the anti-epistemology it is assumed that statements don’t refer to anything, there is no difference between e.g. “being an astrologer” and “successfully pretending to be an astrologer”. People go up to you, ask “why did I stub my toe yesterday?”, you say “ah, it happened because mercury is retrograde and Jupiter is in the house of Gemini”, and if they think you sounded like what an astrologer is supposed to sound like, they walk away feeling satisfied but without having learned anything.