“It’s a form of intellectual arrogance practiced by people whose actual ability to vet claims in language is exceptionally weak. Like ‘giant truck/tiny p*nis’ syndrome, except the truck is truth claims and the p*nis is personal intellectual/scientific/medical authority.”

“This doesn’t depend on ‘education or not’. It depends on having developed a sophisticated ‘basis for evaluation’ or not, and you can have this in one domain (for example, law or surgery) and still not have it in ‘claims in language’ or Truth (a term that has become value-laden in our time).”

“I think that common people are deeply confused by certain features in language. On the one hand, they may subconsciously fear the possibility that ‘language can tell us what truth is’, violating our personal sovereignty… and, at the same time, be ‘absolutely certain’ that ‘they know how to properly adjudicate this problem’, which is the »compensatory behavior in cognition.”

— infraheard