Word: expert
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Hume represent the spirit of the age he lived in?" Our hero replies by opening his essay with, "David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, brought empiricism to its logical extreme. If this be the spirit of the age he lived in, then he was representative of it." This generality expert has already taken his position for the essay. Actually he has not the vaguest idea what Hume really said, or what he said it in, or in fact if he ever said anything. But by never bothering to define empiricism, he may write infinitely on the issue virtually without contradiction...
...long run the expert in the use of unwarranted assumptions comes off better than the equivator. He would deal with our question on Hume not by baffling the grader or fencing with him, but like this: "It is absurd to discuss whether Hume is representative of the age in which he lived unless we first note the progress of that age on all intellectual fronts. After all, Hume did not live in a vacuum...
...this point our assumption expert proceeds to discuss anything which strikes his fancy at the moment. If he can sneak the first assumption past the grader, then the rest is clear sailing. If he fails, he still gets a certain amount of credit for his irrelevant but fact-filled discussion of scientific progress in the 18th century. And it is amazing what some graders will swallow in the name of intellectual freedom...
...body from the bottom of Poucha Pond, were to take the stand to promulgate his theory that the girl probably lived, breathing in an air pocket, for some time after the accident? Under Boyle's strictures, Kennedy's attorneys would not have been permitted to produce expert testimony to challenge Farrar's thesis or his qualifications. Meantime, every news story from Edgartown would recirculate the Farrar version, enveloped this time in the dignifying aura of a legal proceeding...
...these standards, he characterized President Taft as "passive-positive," Truman as "active-positive" and Eisenhower as "passive-negative." Lest anyone accuse him of showing partisanship, Barber listed, along with Nixon, under the heading of "active-negative" a man whose "style failed him" and who knew "the disorientation of an expert middleman elevated above the ordinary political marketplace"-Lyndon Baines Johnson...