,They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.
inner meaning of quote in 4-8 lines
pls reply it's an emergency
I giving 28 points
Answers
Explanation:
They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.” The most obvious reference here would be to obscurantist scholars in the humanities or certain highly-regarded
Answer:
“They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.”
The most obvious reference here would be to obscurantist scholars in the humanities or certain highly-regarded (by someone, apparently) artists whose art consists of getting on stage and masturbating with some rancid canned pasta, or something equally squalid and insipid. But I think it goes a little deeper than that. The obscurantists working in the humanities — and there are some — are only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath that lies, I think, most of the social sciences. It’s no secret that theories, or rather, “theories,” in sociology or psychology have nothing like the confidence level of the natural sciences. And even the natural sciences are far from perfect, although they at least make real progress in understanding phenomena.
The pretensions to “scientific” authority on the part of the social sciences are more social than intellectual in origin. I once opined here on Quora that psychology is not a science, and the first response from someone involved in psychology was that we must designate psychology as a science because getting funding for psychology departments is “hard enough already.” Oops, said a little too much there! Philosophers of science have endlessly complained that psychology (and related fields) are too beholden to our commonsense ways of talking about the mind, thus enslaved to a premodern conception of how humans work, but those philosophers are missing the point: the social sciences are about exerting institutional authority by defining what is and is not normal, and what is and is not “healthy,” not about making any kind of scientific discovery. This is not done consciously, of course, but is the outcome of certain social currents.
The social currents that gave birth to this go back to a fundamental feature of modernity, which is its insistence on a particular kind of instrumental rationality as the highest court of appeal. Thus, if we do not understand something in the same way we understand the natural sciences, in the same way we understand time dilation or the relativity of simultaneity or covalent bonds, then we must design a scientific field to understand it in the image of the natural sciences. Our social “sciences” will do for society what physics does for matter, and they cannot fail, because the relevant “science” is by definition the highest court of appeal and anything it cannot grasp simply isn’t there. To insist otherwise would be to set oneself against science, to return to superstition and the pre-scientific darkness that lay over the world before the dawn of modernity. The dirty secret, of course, is that the social sciences just aren’t science. But we cannot come out and say that, because to do so would imply that there are certain things we cannot grasp by means of science, and that would imply the total failure of modernity. You can accept that the social sciences are not science and still believe every word a physicist says about physics, but you cannot then claim that science comprehends everything in a manner analogous to the natural sciences, because you’ve already admitted that there is no successful science for certain things (e.g. society). And every time we’ve tried to make such a science, it fails.
Muddying the water to make it seem deep is the primary mechanism by which the social sciences stay afloat. Psychologists, for example, often point to Freud as the first person who realized that there was such a thing as unconscious mental activity (or a “subconscious”) but this is blatant hogwash; philosophers and writers for centuries prior would often mention — casually mention — the fact that most people are unaware of their own true motives. But Freud was the first person to discover the real trick here, which is to describe commonsense phenomena using some obscure terminology and then use that specious framework to build a “science” that we can then argue about and get paid for.
More importantly, however, muddying the waters lends authority. Someone who can talk incomprehensibly about things you don’t understand is intimidating and seems unapproachable, has some kind of authority that you don’t have. So we have a group of people who have the authority to define the terms for how everyone talks about society, about politics, about the mind, about language, about everything relating to human affairs. Now, mix this up with the fact that the social sciences are easily weaponized in a political sense (I suggest Googling “sluggish schizophrenia”) and you have your result: a pseudo-science of muddy waters, not controlled by anyone in particular but fought over by people with varying agendas. The muddy waters are there like a moat to circumscribe how we think, and they’re fought over by crocodiles with agendas.