ext_74402 ([identity profile] anosognosia.livejournal.com) wrote in [community profile] talkpolitics 2011-02-06 04:24 pm (UTC)

Sure, but I don't think that is the meaning of technical here. We're surely after a distinction about specialized knowledge. If one wants to go to wikipedia, for, say, when and where Plato lived, how to spell his name, who his famous student was, and what books are attributed to him-- well then that would probably work out for you. I take [livejournal.com profile] badlydrawnjeff to similarly be implying something like this when he allows wikipedia to be a sound resource for "uncontroversial subjects." But if you went to wikipedia for the epistemology of Plato's Theaetetus, it's most likely you'd have read something that was completely at odds with the gamut of academic consensus, broadly construed. This isn't an accidental distinction. You need a certain sort of preparation to think critically about what the epistemology of Plato's Theaetetus might reasonably be, a sort of preparation you don't need to know if it's reasonable to say he was a Greek philosopher who taught Aristotle. It's a sort of preparation which demarcates the former sort of claim as specialized, or, in the idiom used in the OP--technical.

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