Bubbleheads
Peggy Noonan is an honest bubblehead, because she admits that she’s a bubblehead. In a recent Wall Street Journal opinion page article, she touched briefly on the topics of “knowing”, epistemology, the “limits of knowing”, and presuppositions. However, she uses the friendlier, funnier word — to describe human knowledge limitations: Bubbleheads.
Peggy admits that people living in big cities, working for big media companies are particularly prone to the bubblehead syndrome:
Let me say of myself and almost everyone I know in the press, all the chattering classes and political strategists and inside dopesters of the Amtrak Acela Line: We live in a bubble and have around us bubble people. We are Bubbleheads. We know this and try to compensate for it by taking road trips through the continent — we’re on one now, in Minneapolis — where we talk to normal people. But we soon forget the pithy, knowing thing the garage mechanic said in the diner, and anyway we weren’t there long enough in the continent to KNOW, to absorb. We view through a prism of hyper-sophistication…And again we know this, we know this is our limit, our lack…But we also forget it… And when you forget you’re a Bubblehead you get in trouble, you misjudge things.
Tags: assume, assuming, bubblehead syndrome, bubbleheads, forgetfulness, forgetting, ideology, judgement, knowing, knowledge limits, knowledge management, presumption, presupposition, to know