Claude Lévi-Strauss on pseudo-theory

Claude Lévi-Strauss has died at age 100. Here is The New York Times obituary.

The chapter on evidence corruption in my Beautiful Evidence opens with
this brilliant paragraph from Levi-Strauss:

First you establish the traditional “two views” of the question. You then put

forward a common-sensical justification of the one, only to refute it by the other.

Finally, you send them both packing by the use of a third interpretation,

in which both the others are shown to be equally unsatisfactory.

Certain verbal maneuvers enable you to line up the traditional “antitheses” as

complementary aspects of a single reality: form and substance, content

and container, appearance and reality, essence and existence, continuity

and discontinuity, and so on. Before long the exercise becomes the merest

verbalizing, reflection gives place to a kind of superior punning, and

the “accomplished philosopher” may be recognized by the ingenuity with

which he makes ever-bolder play with assonance, ambiguity, and the use

of those words which sound alike and yet bear quite different meanings.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris, 1955; London, 1961), 54.