Chomsky's observations about "real science" vs. postmodern literary theorists reminds me of the way M2Cers and SITH sayers at the Interpreter Foundation (and Scripture Central, FAIRLDS, etc.) discuss their own assumptions, inferences and theories as if they were facts.
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Noam Chomsky on the pseudointellectualism of postmodern literary theorists.
"If you look at what's happening, I think it's pretty easy to figure out what's going on. I mean, suppose you're a literary scholar at some elite university or an anthropologist or whatever. If you do your work seriously, that's fine, but you don't get any big prizes for it. On the other hand, you take a look over in the rest of the university, and you got these guys in the physics department and the math department, and they have all kind of complicated theories, which, of course, we can't understand, but they they seem to understand them. And they have principles and they deduce complicated things from the principles and they do experiments, and they find either they work or they don't work.
"And so that's really impressive stuff, so I want to be like that too. So I want to have a theory in in the humanities, you know, literary criticism, anthropology, and so on. There's a field called 'theory.' We're just like the physicists. They talk incomprehensibly, we can talk incomprehensibly. They have big words, we'll have big words. They draw far reaching conclusions, we'll draw far reaching conclusions. We're just as prestigious as they are.
"Now if they say, well, look, we're doing real science and you guys aren't, that's white male sexist, bourgeois, whatever the answer is. How are we any different from them? Okay. That's appealing."
It’s annoying when Chomsky is right
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