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The following sentence is a GRE style text-completion sentence, where you must fill in each blank from only one of three enlisted options.

It is telling that some scientific ideas that were once (i) _______ have recently garnered (ii) _______ the intelligentsia, for who knows which ideas now considered (iii) _______ might one day upset the prevailing paradigms.

(i) forgotten
ridiculed
protected

(ii) disapprobation from
currency amongst
scorn from

(iii) overtly elaborate
patently false
beyond reproach

The answers given are ridiculed, currency amongst and patently false respectively.

I am struggling to understand the part of the sentence after the comma

for who knows which ideas now considered (iii) _______ might one day upset the prevailing paradigms.

What does this mean? That there are ideas that sometime in the future will upset the prevailing, accepted view? How does this clue help to decide what answer goes in option (iii)? Without this, I'm also unable to answer the first two blanks.

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    "For" in this sentence is a conjunction. Think of it this way, with the conjoined part first: Some ideas now considered nutty may change our thinking in the future. After all, some ideas we find reasonable today used to be considered preposterous.. – Xanne Nov 16 '17 at 9:46
  • IMHO, "for" is not a great conjunction in this context. "so" or "therefore" would be better. Does that help you understand it better? – Barmar Nov 16 '17 at 17:23
  • @Barmar I disagree. The second clause (after "for") is the reason for the first clause ("It is telling ..."). Admittedly, it's not the reason for the fact that some previously rejected ideas are now accepted, but it it the reason why that fact is telling. – Andreas Blass Nov 17 '17 at 2:31
  • Ahh, I see that I was interpreting it backwards. I thought it was using past paradigm shifts to suggest that future ones are likely. But it's saying that we know future shifts will happen, and that informs us about why they happened in the past. – Barmar Nov 17 '17 at 5:29
  • The sentence is saying that there are existing ideas which are currently regarded as false or disproven which may be re-examined, found to be true, and provide insight. This specifically excludes from the discussion new theories and insights. An example of this could be the steady-state model of the universe which was prevalent in the 1950s until replaced by the Big Bang theory mainly as a result of work by Hawking and Penrose. If the steady-state theory were to be re-examined and found to have more validity than previously thought it would be an example of this sort of thing. – BoldBen Aug 7 '20 at 1:07
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You can understand from the clues "now considered" and "might one day" that you have contrast here. So, since the second part says the ideas upset the prevailing paradigms in the future, the very same ideas must not upset them now. As the prevailing paradigms do not welcome viable new ideas (they will upset them), you should search for a negative word. Both "overtly elaborate" and "beyond reproach" are positive. The only negative one is "patently false."

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i ridicule ii currency among iii patently false

This means there is at present a ridiculed idea that sometime in the future will upset the prevailing, accepted view.

How does this clue help to decide what answer goes in option (iii)? When the idea is re-examined, and found to be credible, it usurps the current one.

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