Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Angry Thought Germs

I think this is pretty interesting. In general, I find this kind of strategy interesting, though often dangerous. The general strategy is: abstract away from the most important aspects of something in order to think about some structure that's normally ignored. Abstracting away from the content of thoughts and arguments is a mistake if you do it too much, but, IMO, enlightening in this case, handled well. I'm not sure the assertions made in the video are true...but some of them strike me as such at first glance. Seems like it's worth a look, I say.
(The strategy in question goes wrong, for example, in the "strong program" (aka "strong programme"...the British spelling seems to have been adopted as orthodox, even in the States sometimes) in the sociology of belief (aka the "sociology of knowledge" or "sociology of scientific knowledge"). Those folks abstract away from the content of beliefs for reasons similar to those in the video...but then refuse to come back out of the rabbit hole, thus crashing into incoherence. So don't do that sort of thing...)

1 Comments:

Blogger Pete Mack said...

Clearly the video is utterly wrong, as my ideas are correct and those other guys are total idiots.

5:58 PM  

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