Worst use of "methodology", 2017
FBI profiler commenting on a series of murders: "They were all done with the same methodology."
"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
If words are prone to misuse in English, maybe it is a problem of English and not the speaker.
ReplyDeleteThe issue in this case I think is the desire to sound fancy: "methodology" sounds more "scientific" than does "method."
Delete"Agile" has killed countless otherwise doable projects.
ReplyDelete