I’m really surprised by the fields where you perceive this to be more frequent, especially philosophy and social activism. One would expect that in the humanistic fields this kind of bluff would be much harder to pull off, since you have less excuses to be obscure and not make sense.
Though I’ve seen bad reasoning in these fields, and also bad reasoning that nobody called because it was hidden by some amount of complexity. And in technical fields the bluff would have no chance at all to work on anyone save uninformed laypersons.
Could you perhaps provide links of examples of this? I think it would make the post clearer.
You seem to imply, with the part where the speaker can also opt to fall for his bluff, that this doesn’t apply only to the cases where the perpetrator is wilfully trying to deceive the audience.
If so, I feel that “bluff” might be a misnomer. The Incomprehensibility Obfuscation perhaps could be a bit more accurate?
When I was forced to waste my time and actually study post-Freudian psychoanalysis I think I’ve met a lot of this, theories I’d stare at for several minutes and just looked… empty, like the whole thing was a complex renaming system talking about nothing (not that I think Freudian psychoanalysis is in any way reliable or useful), but I think that most people working in the field would have some illusion of knowledge and understanding from it, so I’m puzzled if the feeling of “I don’t get what you’re saying but don’t want to look stupid” is the focal part of this process, or if it works better when you manage to give people arguments they don’t notice themselves to have not understood, or that are at least easy to remember.
One would expect that in the humanistic fields this kind of bluff would be much harder to pull off, since you have less excuses to be obscure and not make sense
I’m really surprised by the fields where you perceive this to be more frequent, especially philosophy and social activism. One would expect that in the humanistic fields this kind of bluff would be much harder to pull off, since you have less excuses to be obscure and not make sense.
Though I’ve seen bad reasoning in these fields, and also bad reasoning that nobody called because it was hidden by some amount of complexity. And in technical fields the bluff would have no chance at all to work on anyone save uninformed laypersons.
Could you perhaps provide links of examples of this? I think it would make the post clearer.
You seem to imply, with the part where the speaker can also opt to fall for his bluff, that this doesn’t apply only to the cases where the perpetrator is wilfully trying to deceive the audience.
If so, I feel that “bluff” might be a misnomer. The Incomprehensibility Obfuscation perhaps could be a bit more accurate?
When I was forced to waste my time and actually study post-Freudian psychoanalysis I think I’ve met a lot of this, theories I’d stare at for several minutes and just looked… empty, like the whole thing was a complex renaming system talking about nothing (not that I think Freudian psychoanalysis is in any way reliable or useful), but I think that most people working in the field would have some illusion of knowledge and understanding from it, so I’m puzzled if the feeling of “I don’t get what you’re saying but don’t want to look stupid” is the focal part of this process, or if it works better when you manage to give people arguments they don’t notice themselves to have not understood, or that are at least easy to remember.
You would think so, but all of modern sociology is a competition between authors to draft as many new words and crazy theories as they can. So much so that experts in a particular field of sociology can’t tell intentional gibberish from a valid article if the paper sticks to the standard form. See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97FuO-hEhQo