Welcome to another instalment in Maxi’s Toolkit. In the toolkit I outline a number of epistemological techniques — or ‘epitechs’, tools for thinking — that will be of some interest to the discerning digital humanist in navigating a world of ever-increasing complexity.
In a better-, though more homogeneously, educated world where the average means to the expression of intelligence is (happily) increasing, the number of ways and instances in which intelligence can be misused is increasing in direct proportion. From the bottom to the top of the intellectual totem pole, opportunities for mistaken, indisciplined thinking are rife — and perhaps the most insidious attribute of inexact, corrupt, or misinformed thought is that such thought often goes unnoticed.
The toolkit is an effort to put more equipment at our disposal for identifying errors in thought — our own and others’ — and correcting them. Each piece devoted to a tool will usually be brief (unless the tool itself is highly complex), containing a definition, notes on application, and a short analysis.
You can find Vol.6 — on Systematic Intelligence, and how it rules a large part of our world — here. Today’s volume concerns the notion of vainferreting.
You know that scene in The Big Lebowski where the nihilists drop a ferret, duly noted for its winsome charms (albeit its winsome charms as a marmot), into the Dude’s bathtub, occasioning much physical discomfort and anxiety over the loss of precious minor extremities? That’s what I intend to do to you with this volume of the toolkit.
Vainferreting
Def. — An instance in which a sudden awareness of public opinion, and the vain desire to be thought of highly by one’s peers, warps one’s capacity for moral reasoning, prompting a change in one’s moral stance on an issue, or a change in one’s sense of what moral issues ought to be considered important.
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