A scholar who is right somewhere wrongly assumes they are right everywhere

Evidence

I would not have spent two solid working days in working it out if I didn’t feel that it is vital for our project to make you think yourself about the whole situation. You and I agree upon the superiority of some parts of your intellectual work but you think because you are basically right somewhere you are right everywhere. Whereas I think that because you are right somewhere you overlook the fact that you are terrible in other respects, and the final reader will think that because you are outrageous in some part of your work where he can easily catch you, you are impossible altogether. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 669

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lazarsfeld’s critique articulates a general epistemic principle about how credibility gets judged by readers — one rightness doesn’t confer universal rightness.
• XREF: connects to: Knowledge out of proportion to real forces is invalid despite correctness. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 72

Broader Connections

• Knowledge out of proportion to real forces is invalid despite correctness. #exemplifies (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 72