Quantentative and Squalortative

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Notes

¹ Hart (1963) listed about 7,000 new or nonsensical words from the total of almost 64,000 words that appear at least once in Joyce's deeply unintelligible book. This compares to about only one third of 1% of foolishness among the words in this article.

²In passages addressing methodological issues, Marx (1857/1970, 1847/1995) was relentless in his critique and reformulation of dichotomies.

³John Dewey (1916) tackled 38 separate dualisms in Democracy and Education (for a discussion of Dewey's assault on dualisms across seven decades of his work, see Flower & Murphey, 1977). Most of them are still with us. The escape from dualisms is a hallmark of most 20th-century philosophy: to the Marxism and American pragmatism already mentioned, we can add much Anglo-American analytic philosophy (e.g., Ryle, 1953; Wittgenstein, 1953) and virtually all continental phenomenology (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, 1944/1964; Schutz, 1962–1966). Many of the dichotomies questioned and dethroned by philosophers have been maintained, and even reinstantiated, whether by theoretical proclamation and/or methodological bias, in mainstream American social science, particularly in psychology (whether psychometric, behaviorist or cognitive), educational research, and social policy.

⁴The great anthropologist, Paul Radin (1933/1987), critiqued the “pretentious impressionism and … counsel of perfection” that sometimes dominate ethnography. He also addressed early disagreements over quantitative work in anthropology.