Beverly, thanks for reminding me of a ploy I would use to raise
awareness of the problems of the certainty of knowledge.
I would suggest that we take two facing pages of a book or an article,
then read it to find all the variations of the verb TO BE. We would then
underline -- with heavy underline -- all of those instances. Thereupon, we
would hold up the two facing pages to inspect them. From this exercise we
would derive "the bullshit index" for the article. The more dense the
clusterings of underlines the more nonsense we would expect from the text. We
simply don't have that kind of certainty of knowledge, and to declare that we
do -- by using the TO BE verbs -- is to mislead the reader.
Jim Mancuso
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