Comments on Steve Fuller’s Essay (2017) "Brexit as the Unlikely Leading Edge of the Anti-Expert Revolution"

By Razie Mah

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Razie Mah
• Release date: Oct 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781942824848

Razie Mah

See website for bio.

Book preview

Comments on Steve Fuller’s Essay (2017)

"Brexit as the Unlikely Leading Edge of the

Anti-Expert Revolution"

By Razie Mah

Published for Smashwords.com

2019

Notes on Text

This work comments on an article by Steve Fuller, published in the European Management Journal in October 2017 (volume 35, issue 5, pages 575-580).

‘Words that belong together’ are denoted by single quotes or italics.

Prerequisites: A Primer on the Category-Based Nested Form, A Primer on Sensible and Social Construction

Recommended: Comments on Jacques Maritain’s Book (1935) Natural Philosophy

Table of Contents

Manage This

Fuller’s Judgments

The Greimas Square

The First Two Applications

The Second Two Applications

The Third Two Applications

The Games of Intelligent Design and Brexit

Conclusion

Manage This

0001 Management begins by understanding the whole.

Therefore, the first task of management is to take a step back.

0002 When it comes to understanding the phenomenon of Brexit, a political crisis rocking Britain since 2016, the first task is to take a big step back.

I suspect that the editors of the European Management Journal had this in mind when they invited the opinion of Professor Steve Fuller, holding the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology, at the University of Warwick, in the United Kingdom.

Dr. Fuller has seen a lot. His first cited reference, Social Epistemology, was published in 1988 by Indiana University Press. This is before the European Union… er… unionized.

In 2017, Britain stands on the cusp of dis-union-ification, which is the reversal of the aforementioned unionization.

0003 But, I wonder, who is being unionized and disunionized?

Steve Fuller has an insightful