I’m so happy we can now add “epistemic closure” to the list of terms that have both a technical meaning in philosophy and a different meaning in popular conversation. Much hilarity results from imagining Jonah Goldberg muttering “I know I have hands. I know that if I have hands, I must not be a brain in a vat…but I don’t know I’m not a brain in a vat! Dammit!“
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26 comments
April 24, 2010 at 11:13 am
Charlieford
I was with you till you went off on that tangent about the Value Added Tax . . .
April 24, 2010 at 11:43 am
jazzbumpa
Well, now you’ve piqued my curiosity, and I want to see the whole list
Cheers!
JzB
April 24, 2010 at 1:57 pm
NM
The ones that come to mind are “begging the question” and “moral relativism.”
April 24, 2010 at 2:10 pm
ari
May I broaden the list to include terms that have specific meanings in an academic context and very different meanings when used by the hoi polloi? Yes? Thanks. Then I’d include “cognitive dissonance” and maybe “historicize” (which, I suppose, is more a question of different connotations than different denotations).
April 24, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Daniel Lindquist
“Realist”, “idealist”, “materialist”, “rationalist”, “pragmatist”, and “utilitarian” can all go on the list.
April 24, 2010 at 4:34 pm
Jer.k.
Whatever thing in a vat Jonah Goldberg might be, it wouldn’t be a brain.
April 24, 2010 at 5:04 pm
NM
“Hedonist” is another pet peeve.
April 24, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Charlieford
I’d like to see “systematically” go away.
April 24, 2010 at 5:13 pm
Kieran
“Unpacking”, but for terrible reasons and in the opposite direction.
April 24, 2010 at 7:03 pm
dana
It’s been pissing me off all week. Especially because it’s not a phrase that regularly comes up in non-philosophical contexts; it sounds like they wanted something that sounded smart and looked up other words for “knowledge” and “closed.”
At least with “begging the question” or “the exception proves the rule” there are good reasons for the (mistaken) non-technical usage. This one just screams “I’m trying to be smarter than I am.”
April 24, 2010 at 8:32 pm
TF Smith
Yes, but have you booked your stateroom on the Spain and Portugual riverboat cruise yet?…
A week on a boat with Dick Morris sounds like the seventh circle on a bad day…
April 24, 2010 at 8:50 pm
ben
Just today Barry Stroud said that he knows that there are mountains and that he therefore knows there’s a mind-external reality, and if anyone knows something about the skeptic it’s him.
(This only mildly misrepresents what actually happened.)
April 25, 2010 at 4:59 am
Charlieford
“I’m trying to be smarter than I am.”
Isn’t that a good thing?
Perhaps you meant, “I’m trying to seem smarter than I am”?
April 25, 2010 at 5:15 am
Matt
“Realist” has several different meanings within the academy, even, depending on whether you’re talking to a philosopher (several sub-meanings there, even), a law professor, or an IR professor. (The latter two are somewhat related but not the same.) The same goes for “positivism”, where it means something different, and has different origins, in legal philosophy and philosophy more generally.
“Deconstruct” is another example of the general point. I have to admit that I don’t really know what deconstruction in the formal sense means, but I suspect it’s something quite different from what, say, Keven Drum means when he says he’s going to “deconstruct” something.
April 25, 2010 at 7:44 am
matt w
And “analysis”! I see all these people calling themselves “analysts” who couldn’t take a limit to save their lives, let alone carry out an epsilon-delta proof. Do they even know that if they’re doing a complex analysis it should be half imaginary?
April 25, 2010 at 8:10 am
ben
That’s not what analysts do, matt.
April 25, 2010 at 8:29 am
kid bitzer
“philosophy”
April 25, 2010 at 10:22 am
md 20/400
Linguist
April 25, 2010 at 11:17 am
silbey
Revisionist
April 25, 2010 at 4:02 pm
pv
Thanks for reminding me I’m only mildly stupid (there’s a lot I don’t know, but I’m willing to look it up) rather than totally stupid (I won’t understand it when I do look it up). When I read about this “epistemic closure” discussion, I looked up the concept to understand it, and kept thinking “OK, I think I understand this…sort of…but what does THIS have to do with what they’re talking about? I guess…um…Maybe it’s…OK, I’m totally stupid.” Back to only feeling mildly stupid, which is good. OK, I’m probably totally stupid, but not quite as stupid as I thought.
April 25, 2010 at 4:53 pm
Daniel Lindquist
“(This only mildly misrepresents what actually happened.)”
How mildly? Was it spoken in propria persona?
April 25, 2010 at 6:00 pm
ben
It was in propria persona, but he said immediately afterwards that of course it wouldn’t satisfy the skeptic and wasn’t meant to (something that had come up earlier).
I confess that it was warm and I was tired and sitting in a comfortable chair, so I don’t remember what he said about skepticism earlier on.
April 25, 2010 at 7:38 pm
Mario
“aesthetics” is also on that list.
April 27, 2010 at 5:47 am
TF Smith
Maybe Jonah’s a brain in a vat in a comfortable chair…
April 27, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Vance
In the Times, Sanchez admits repurposing the term.
April 28, 2010 at 2:11 pm
Vance
Off the (expired) topic, the New Yorker has finally caught up with Eric.