Where I come from, M, it's called "graduate school" . . . . But I'm curious about the Epistemological Gulag. Is that where they ship you off to the wilds of Berkeley or Ann Arbor with a half dozen other zeks and make you construct an argument with your bare hands? "You have nothing else to live in until you get it built, so get cracking." Cruel Ukrainian guards stand around smoking cheap papropsi and fingering their Nagant revolvers as you toil among the eucalyptus trees (or, in Ann Arbor, the pines), while tenured professors sneer at you from the comfort of the clubhouse and the junior professors drive you night and day with remorseless logic.
Epistomological Gulag dialog. "What did you get?" "Six years." "For what?" "For nothing." "Liar! For nothing they give you a a Masters degree and two years. You must have done something bad to get six! That probably means you are getting the PhD -- nine ounces in the back of your brain. Keep away from me -- I don't like you politicals, you are all bad news. I am going to construct a quiet theorem in formal semantics. I can never hope to get out alive, but if I keep my hands clean and pretend to believe in the external world, maybe I will get a tenure track job in Arkanasas."
jks
> Mikhail Simkin
> ---
> http://www.ee.ucla.edu/~simkin/
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "andie nachgeborenen"
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
> >
> > And what kind of Gulag is that? One where the
> secret
> > police pick you up for doubting the existence of
> the
> > external world, take you into a cellar where you
> face
> > hungry graduate student TAs who studied with
> Robert
> > Brandom, Richard Boyd (actually a commie!),
> William
> > Alston, and other realists, and are subjected to
> > ruthless dissection of your premises?
> >
> >
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