Of course, there are sometimes occasions when there is real “bunk” that genuinely needs to be brought to light, but more often than not debunking is a process of question-begging derisiveness, the sort of sardonic bubble-pricking found in works such as Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians17 or in car-manufacturer Henry Ford’s famous dismissal of history as “more or less bunk.”†† It would be fair to characterise Lewis’s view of logical positivists in this way: he thought they were short-circuiting philosophy with pre-emptive scorn, failing to rise to the level of mature debate about substantive
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