lj enlighten me

[dubdobdee]

who has read steve fuller's book on kuhn and is it any good?

fuller seems a bit of a massive twit based on his online behaviour, even tho he often riles people i quite like seeing riled: i can't work out how much this is my knee jerking basically

Comments

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

Based on his blog I am pretty sure he's trolling the world, or an idiot.

[koganbot]

Sterling Clover's read it*, which I hypothesize is one of the reasons that he and I failed to significantly communicate on the Kuhn thread; he was coming at me with Fuller's Kuhn rather than Kuhn's Kuhn.

*Unless it was some other attempt to debunk Kuhn, but I think it was Fuller's; my guess is that you've got better things to do with your time; that, of course, is an uninformed guess, but not necessarily a ridiculous one.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

my reason for being interested is pretty much a "sociology of good and bad trolling" -- i want to get my head round the buttons he's pushing, and formulate a more general sense (or theory?) of what's at stake

so it's part of the broader project, but yes -- it may well be a timewasting one...

[koganbot]

Well, one of my insights (or "insights") is that if we're not willing to learn from bad writers and bad people we narrow our range (which is why I think it's crucial that my Department Of Dilettante Research be in an "open space"); but how to learn, so that the attempts don't get us into a quagmire, is a question that's not so easy to answer. There's also triage: the squeakiest wheel may not be the one you most need to be spending your time on (so maybe there's a Fuller type who's much better than Fuller). The one review I read of the Kuhn book made the complaint I've made about SR: the reviewer claimed that Fuller didn't engage the substance of Kuhn's ideas, rather thought it sufficient to nail Kuhn for his associations and social stances. But that anti-Fuller piece that Alan linked paradoxically made me more not less interested in Fuller (though not much interested in Fuller). My educated guess here is that Fuller is someone who is threatened more by Kuhn's idea of normal science than by Kuhn's idea of incommensurability. But anyway - in regard to use of dubdobdee's time - Kuhn's idea of normal science is provocative itself, and I don't recall you discussing it.

In regard to trolls, the majority of trolls have very conventional ideas.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

thank you for introducing me to this guy. he goes in the sack with John Gray

and i see AC Grayling had the same initial response here!

http://newhumanist.org.uk/1856