On Sun, 1 Feb 2004, Carrol Cox wrote:
> And those theories increasingly remind me of what Stephen J. Gould and
> others in the field of evolutionary biology have labelled "Just So
> Stories." The beauty of Just So Stories is that as long as they have
> literary coherence, they cannot be challenged (except by another equally
> foolish Just-So Story) nor can they usefully explain anything. This
> incapacity is related to their internal coherence, which is achieved by
> creating a world inside the poem <g> which is hermetically sealed from
> contamination from the outer world. One can write critiques of them as
> poetry, but there is no way to discuss their propsitional adequacy.
>
> Carrol
It's interesting to me that it takes an English prof to point this out. --What is it about sexuality that encourages such confidently epoused statements on the basis of such limited and anecdotal "data"? By the logic of this thread, Doug's next issue of LBO should leave out the messy data about the money supply and the Fed rate: he could tell stories about this guy who really wants to work (or this other guy who hates his job) and then engage in fanciful speculation about how that's related to the budget deficit or the war in Iraq!
Miles