Curse these confounded academics and their thinking about things, use of specialist research methods, and not taking common stereotypes at face value!
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Curse these confounded academics and their thinking about things, use of specialist research methods, and not taking common stereotypes at face value!
Yeah well, maybe my image is biased by what I see in technology and hard science. I deal with the R&D colleagues quite a lot, and for some reason those who be a habit of "defending" their area of expertise by saying stuff like that, also defend it by not sharing information, and generally act like nervous fools trying to make their area of work as exclusive and intransparent as possible. Those guys are regarded with some disdain even by their peers in R&D. Those who use exclusive language just don't want or can't find easier words to explain complicated concepts and that's a bad thing, not a good thing, in hard sciences or engineering. Our fields of expertise are complex and difficult to understand but of we want to contribute positively to projects and the company's operations in general then we need to use clear, unambiguous and nonexclusive language to explain what we do.
I don't know how it is in the humanities - you guys produce immaterial output after all, not material output, so the language you use is part of what you produce, not just part of the explanation. But don't your concepts also profit from being explained in clear and simple language wherever possible? And complex relationships being explained in the simplest way possible? Not like the way medical doctors cloak everything they do in secret language but more like the way things are explained in a radio show, or a lecture?
@JodelDiplom:
Of course there are people in the 'soft' sciences who make their texts purposefully as dense and opaque as they can (one of the few viable criticisms of the Frankfurt School in my opinion) but there is also a point beyond which making things less complicated makes them less true. It is a balancing act.
And that also goes for feudalism or democracy.
Of course there are people in the 'soft' sciences who make their texts purposefully as dense and opaque as they can (one of the few viable criticisms of the Frankfurt School in my opinion) but there is also a point beyond which making things less complicated makes them less true. It is a balancing act.
And that also goes for feudalism or democracy.
It seems like an inherent part of the left-brain / right-brain dichotomy, where the hard sciences try to use clear definitions and numbers to narrow down the possibilities and theories into as small a set as possible (using their own discipline's set of technical terms bordering on a "secret language"), and the "soft" sciences seem to blur the distinctions and boundaries at every turn, because almost everything has a direct or indirect effect on practically everything else, and all of the definitions are subject to constant change and debate as social norms themselves change over time. The one set of sciences is primarily about facts and figures, the other more about feelings and relationships.
Personally, I'm more of a "hard science" person (electronics engineering technician), with a touch of artistic flair (bass player), although I have no clue how this relates to the days of the knights. Then again, I was in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA - featuring full armored medieval combat) briefly, so perhaps I could be called a "knight for a day", except that I didn't have much of a fief to support me (a few square yards of urban blight).
Personally, I'm more of a "hard science" person (electronics engineering technician), with a touch of artistic flair (bass player), although I have no clue how this relates to the days of the knights. Then again, I was in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA - featuring full armored medieval combat) briefly, so perhaps I could be called a "knight for a day", except that I didn't have much of a fief to support me (a few square yards of urban blight).
How do you give a 'hard' definition of a thing that spans 500 years and several thousand squarekilomters though?
It seems to be one of those cases where a 'hard' description would be, more or less, the thing itself.
It seems to be one of those cases where a 'hard' description would be, more or less, the thing itself.
That's precisely why "feudalism" is such a disputed term: It's not clear (hah) that it is clear, nonexclusive, or particularly accurate. At most it tends to devolve into weird associations (IE: "it is feudalism if it makes the person in question have warm fuzzy feudalism feelings") which isn't particularly useful.
That has literally nothing to do with it at all.