Steve Fuller displays a most impressive title. He holds the Auguste Comte Chair is Social Epistemology, in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. If Fuller is not an expert, then I don’t know what an expert is.
After the British citizens vote to leave the European Union, the European Management Journal invites Fuller’s opinion on the matter. His essay is published in October 2017 (volume 35, issue 5, pages 575-580). The title catches my attention.
Why?
The title strangely aligns with features of the positivist and the empirio-schematic judgments, as formulated in Comments on Jacques Maritain’s Book (1935) Natural Philosophy.
“Brexit” is a phenomenon.
Management has a disciplinary language, revealing social epistemology. “The anti-expert revolution” sounds like a model. The phrase, “the unlikely leading edge”, reminds me of observation and measurement.
Curiously, Fuller model does not involve mechanics and mathematics. It consists only of words. Words have referents. But, in speech alone talk, a langue-based referent is projected into a parole-based word. So, it seems that langue-words are more similar to noumena than phenomena, because my own projection cannot be objectified.
So, how can words be like phenomena?
Saussure proposes a scientific definition of language. Spoken language consists of two arbitrarily related systems of differences, parole and langue. Parole consists in distinctly different and precisely timed sequences of formant frequencies. Langue may be modeled using the Greimas square. Yes, this is where the Greimas square comes in.
Each word has a different Greimas square. In this way, I may clearly conceive of langue-words as a system of differences.
Fuller’s argument yields six Greimas squares. The interactions among these squares adds richness to his thought.