A Follow-Up on Epistemological Eddie

Some of you will recall this post in which I preemptively bitched out an apparent wunderkind who wanted to discuss epistemology with me.

In that post, I failed to clearly articulate what my issue with EE was. I was fairly certain that Eddie had no idea what epistemology was.

You know what?

I was right.

First, he wanted to discuss his electronically submitted exam. He maintained that he'd had "computer problems." I asked if he had the confirmation code that is given to every student at the conclusion of their session with our exam software. Nope. No code. I looked puzzled.

Second, he wanted to talk about his project in Bushwaristan. But he didn't. He kind of did. No, he'd never been out of the U.S. before. Yes, he was safe because he would be traveling with a member of the U.S. Armed Forces. No, he had no language skills. No...well...he wasn't really sure what he was going to do when he got there? But...well, he'd figure it out. It would be fine.

Thirdly, about Second Tier Author. STA wrote a book that's meant to give students a general overview of some of the theoretical trends in our discipline. Eddie wanted to critique STA's "generalizations" about particular authors. I pointed out that the "overview" style often gave us these generalizations. If you want specifics, you read the authors themselves and their critics. Then Eddie hemmed and hawed some and finally came up with "Well, how did Famous Author A and Famous Author B do their research?"

I looked puzzled. A & B are economic historians. I tried to say something intelligent about how economic history approaches various things, but I pointed out that I was not a historian of any stripe, and therefore I couldn't really answer this question well.

Eddie looked puzzled.

Finally he said "I guess...well...like when these guys get up in the morning, what do they do? Like do they go to an office or something?"

I commented, "I think you're asking about research methodology."

He said "Right! Yes."

I replied "What about this epistemology thing?"

He responded, "But epistemology IS methodology, right?"

Uh. Well. Hmm. Not in my discipline, no. At least he didn't mix up epidemiology and epistemology, I've had that happen before, too.