Scholasticism
Name(s):
Scholastic thinking
Unworldly scholars
Nature
The tendency of experts to obscure their activity behind an artificial language or jargon resulting in a breakdown of communication, whilst dogmatically upholding the primacy of certain untested principles over concrete reality, reasoning only in endless syllogisms that avoid the examination of empirical data. Despite complete mastery of a discipline, that mastery does not enable those engaged in this form of thinking to say anything new beyond what can be expressed within the jargon of that discipline. The words used remain the language of old forms whilst the world to which they they supposedly apply is transforming into something entirely new. Knowledge of words thus becomes a substitute for knowledge of the world.
Incidence
It is claimed that much contemporary developmental thinking is in effect of a scholastic nature and out of touch with the realities of a world in crisis.
Claim
Here therefore is the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter. For words are but the images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture. (Francis Bacon).
Reduced by
Type
(F) Fuzzy exceptional problems