![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It's the people who claim not to have a personal agenda that I find most disturbing.
My agenda is to make you question all "conventional wisdom" (which is neither), "common sense" (ditto) and perhaps even "shared reality".
Reality is not what the teachers taught. Reality is what you can get away with.
Now some things that are widely agreed on might be true. The earth does indeed spin around the sun. But the proper attitude is skepticism toward "received truth". Ideas have a way of coalescing into "reality bubbles". Pretty soon, you're using the same little linguistic shortcuts and bon mots as the people around you and you stop thinking about certain things. Science was developed originally as a way of countering this coalescence by formalizing skepticism but it too has formed reality tunnels of its own.
Thus one must write with quotes (called scare quotes sometimes, that name must have been invented by a staunch defender of conventionalism), in order to separate "Science" from science, "Reality" from reality, and most of all, "Truth" from truth.
My agenda is to make you question all "conventional wisdom" (which is neither), "common sense" (ditto) and perhaps even "shared reality".
Reality is not what the teachers taught. Reality is what you can get away with.
Now some things that are widely agreed on might be true. The earth does indeed spin around the sun. But the proper attitude is skepticism toward "received truth". Ideas have a way of coalescing into "reality bubbles". Pretty soon, you're using the same little linguistic shortcuts and bon mots as the people around you and you stop thinking about certain things. Science was developed originally as a way of countering this coalescence by formalizing skepticism but it too has formed reality tunnels of its own.
Thus one must write with quotes (called scare quotes sometimes, that name must have been invented by a staunch defender of conventionalism), in order to separate "Science" from science, "Reality" from reality, and most of all, "Truth" from truth.
