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June 6, 2007
But you see, dear, it's COGNITIVE
Language Log is always interesting, but today Mark Liberman really helps.
It's not my imagination - people really do fall for bad arguments with a top-dressing of brain science, complete with a chart of examples. Liberman asks the uncomfortable question:
There's a potentially embarrassing question for each group: are the experts better able to see through such displays of authority symbols? In some cases, I (unkindly) suspect that the "experts" might be worse than the novices -- sometimes expertise is little more than the learned ability to be distracted by artfully-deployed symbolic smokescreens. (But not in my field, nor in yours, of course...)
Posted by CrankyProfessor at June 6, 2007 7:30 AM