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Thank you to whoever made sure this news.ycombinator article title included "A review of Errol Morris's critique". It was not super obvious from the article it
by mherdeg 8y ago
Thank you to whoever made sure this news.ycombinator article title included "A review of Errol Morris's critique".
It was not super obvious from the article itself online that this article is a book review.
I thought the author was actually himself proposing some specific theory about truth (or science) (or whatever) and was getting really really frustrated wading through all the storytelling trying to find the specific theory that was being advanced.
Finally I realized it was a book review and that extra piece of context helped give the article (which is fun to read) some semantic meaning.
(I guess I take a different and much more naive view of the history of science and related fields, which is that (a) people are pretty smart, (b) people mostly make the best scientific decisions they can with the best info and ideas they have at the time, (c) a useful way to think about the history of science involves trying to reason about what people were thinking at the time and what was normal for them. Having read this book review I genuinely can't tell whether that's a Kuhnian or a Kripkean or a Morrisean Kripkean view or whatever.)