Fuller
Biographic Data
| ID | 33378 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fuller |
| FAMILY NAME | Fuller |
| SIGNATURE | FULLER |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Warwick |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2190-6552 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 241 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 389 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 241 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Navigating the Future of Interdisciplinarity Through Heisenberg and Generative Artificial Intelligence
This ISR 50th anniversary reflection examines the future of interdisciplinarity from the standpoint of generative artificial intelligence's potential challenge to Heisenberg's open/closed theory distinction, which has influenced modern thinking about interdisciplinarity. The challenge is epitomised by Don Swanson's idea of ‘undiscovered public knowledge’
Analytic Philosophy’s Discovery of What It Can Be
Christoph Schuringa’s Social History of Analytic Philosophy is a lesser but worthy sequel to Gyorgy Lukacs’s comprehensive ideology critique of twentieth century philosophy in The Destruction of Reason . Like Lukacs, Schuringa identifies analytic philosophy’s weak critical sensibility with its bourgeois liberalism, which impedes its ability to address adequately class, gender, and race discrimination. Schuringa is most interesting when he turns t…
Smart Transcendentalism or Trained Incapacity? Response to Little
This is a response to Daniel Little’s review of my recent book, To Judge and To Justify: Profiles of the Academic Vocation . While Little’s recognizes that the book’s contents reflect my academic formation, he is disappointed that it does not conform to a certain view of the sociology of knowledge. In response, I accuse him of “trained incapacity” as a reader and proceed to elaborate what I call in the book “smart transcendentalism,” which orient…
Judging and Justifying Steve Fuller’s Orthogonality
Steve Fuller's recent book, To Judge and To Justify: Profiles of the Academic Vocation, serves as a point of entry for a dialogue on the intellectual enterprise of social epistemology. Sharon Rider begins by identifying and interrogating a handful of key concepts in Fuller's arsenal of provocative ideas, honing in especially on the notions of orthogonality and modal power as in tandem forming the engine propelling the project. She places Fuller's…
Is the path from aphorism to tweet the royal road to knowledge
Exercising Judgement in a Reality with Many Worlds
Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science presupposes a version of ‘many worlds realism’, which has impeded its ability to judge and justify the history of science. Moreover, such incapacity has the downstream effect of rendering the meaning of being human indeterminate in ways that make thinking and acting towards the future difficult. The chapter opens by observing the shifting philosophical developments in the 1950s–1970s, when Kuhn’s views gestated…
Catastrophe’s Justice
Classroom as Crucible in the Humboldtian University
This reply to Finn Collin’s critically sympathetic review of my Back to the University’s Future: The Second Coming of Humboldt, addresses some of the tensions involved in realizing “Humboldt 2.0” in today’s higher education environment. Its focus is largely on the academic’s sense of researcher as being one of learner. In other words, the Humboldtian sees research as the necessary complement to teaching, not something radically distinct from it
Neuromatic; or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain
The Epistemological Compass and the (Post)Truth about Objectivity
Massimo Dell’Utri proposes the idea of an ‘epistemological compass’, which he alleges provides a common intuitive sense of objectivity, the existence of which defenders of ‘post-truth’ positions would perversely try to deny. I argue that Dell’Utri’s choice of a compass – metaphorical or otherwise – is unfortunate because it is a device that presupposes that what appears plain to the senses is directed by hidden forces emanating from distant sourc…
Elise Bohan, Future Superhuman
The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind' is a line from Alexander Pope's influential 1717 poem 'Eloisa to Abelard', perhaps better known nowadays as the title of the 2004 film starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, in which two former lovers try to erase each other's memories from their minds.While the power of Pope's imagery occludes its exact meaning, the poetic pretext of a twelfth-century doomed romance between a nun and a philosopher -a rel…
The Fact of the Matter About the Post-Truth Condition
This article responds to Raphael Sassower’s critique of my recent A Player’s Guide to the Post-Truth Condition. It addresses his concerns that I do not align myself sufficiently with Foucault and Critical Theory more generally. The article points out that notwithstanding my indebtedness to these sources, one cannot properly understand the post-truth condition without taking seriously the robust sense of freedom that today’s two dominant ideologie…
AI and the future of humanity
Notes15 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2022.208555416 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ai-chatbots-naive-idiots-no-sense-of-irony-by-slavoj-zizek-2023-0317 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html
Shaken Not Stirred
The post-truth condition is just as much about naming a meta-game as winning it. This condition can be tracked across Western intellectual history from the Homeric epics to popular culture. The common thread is that players are more likely to succeed in this meta-game if they have a certain consistency of character, which Thomas More called “integrity.” The presence of integrity means that the historical losers have often had an advantage in defi…
Rorty Reframed
Richard Rorty is easily cast as the intellectual godfather of our post-truth condition. But unlike Nicholas Gaskill, whose article in Common Knowledge 28, no. 3, has engendered a continuing symposium in the journal, Professor Fuller sees Rorty's role as being to his credit rather than detriment. Rorty extended W. B. Gallie's idea of "essentially contested concepts" from the moral and political spheres to the epistemic, thereby rendering such term…
The Mind-Technology Problem
Clowes, Grtner and Hipolito (2021) have recently introduced the mind-technology problem. It is a legitimate metaphysical rival to the 'mind-body problem' because 'humanity' is a deeply vague concept. It is 'vague' in two senses: the set of qualities associated with being human is open-ended and the set of beings to which human qualities apply is equally open-ended. Of course, not everyone seems to believe this. Indeed, a broad church of natural l…
Symmetry in World-Historic Perspective
William Lynch has persistently questioned the politics underlying my appeal to science and technology studies’ flagship symmetry principle. He believes that it licenses the worst features of the ‘post-truth condition’. I respond in two parts, the first facing the future and the second facing the past. In the first part, I argue that the symmetry principle will be crucial in decisions that society will increasingly need to make concerning the incl…
The Social Epistemology of Scientific Dissent
William Lynch’s Minority Report is the most comprehensive and fair-minded attempt to give epistemic dissent its due in science that has appeared in recent times. Nevertheless, it remains too beholden to the scientific establishment as its epistemic benchmark. The sophistication of Lynch’s argument lies in the trading of counterfactual intuitions about whether suppressed dissenters would scientifically flourish even given an appropriate level of e…
After Brexit and Aukus’
Cultural Apocalypse, Western colonial domination and ‘ the end of the world’
China’s rise, the Asian century and the clash of meta-civilizations
Twitter and the aphoristic (re)turn in thought, knowledge and education
The article focuses on the resurgence of aphoristic expression, particularly in relation to Twitter, examining its impact on thought, knowledge, and education. Topics include the definition and ambiguity surrounding aphorisms, their role in philosophy across different cultures, and defense of Twitter as a medium for intellectual discourse, connecting historical and modern examples of aphoristic styles from Wittgenstein to contemporary criticisms …
Eurasianism as the deep history of Russia’s discontent
Schrödinger’s ‘What Is Life?’ As Postdigital Prophecy
Symmetry as a Guide to Post-truth Times
William Lynch has provided an informed and probing critique of my embrace of the post-truth condition, which he understands correctly as an extension of the normative project of social epistemology. This article roughly tracks the order of Lynch’s paper, beginning with the vexed role of the ‘normative’ in Science and Technology Studies , which originally triggered my version of social epistemology 35 years ago and has been guided by the field’s ‘…
The New Sociological Imagination
Steve Fuller examines the history of the social sciences covering most classic theorists and themes, to discover the key contributors to sociology and how relevant they remain today
Humanity 2.0
Social thinkers in all fields are faced with one unavoidable question: What does it mean to be human in the 21st century? This ambitious and groundbreaking book provides the first synthesis of histori
AI and the future of humanity
Notes15 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2022.208555416 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ai-chatbots-naive-idiots-no-sense-of-irony-by-slavoj-zizek-2023-0317 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html
Is there Life for Sociological Theory after the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics , Tradition s and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order , Cambridge: Polity, 1994, £12.95, viii H225 pp. Gibbons, Michael, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott and Martin Trow, The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies } London: Sage, 1994, £30.00, paperback £11.95, ix+179 pp. Giddens, Ant…
Why Science Studies Has Never Been Critical of Science
Research in Science and Technology Studies (STS) tends to presume that intellectual and political radicalism go hand in hand. One would therefore expect that the most intellectually radical movement in the field relates critically to its social conditions. However, this is not the case, as demonstrated by the trajectory of the Parisian School of STS spearheaded by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour. Their position, “actor-network theory,” turns out t…
The Normative Turn
Counterfactual reasoning is broadly implicated in causal claims made by historians. However, this point is more generally recognized and accepted by economic historians than historians of science. A good site for examining alternative appeals to counterfactuals is to consider "what if" the Scientific Revolution had not occurred in seventeenth-century Europe. Two alternative interpretations are analyzed: that the revolution would eventually have h…
The Knowledge Book
The Knowledge Book is a unique interdisciplinary reference work for students and researchers concerned with the nature of knowledge. It is the first work of its kind to be organized on the assumption that whatever else knowledge might be, it is intrinsically social. The book consists of over 40 alphabetically arranged entries on key concepts at the intersection of philosophy and sociology what used to be called sociology of knowledge but is now i…
A Path Better Not to Have Been Taken
Disciplinary Boundaries and the Rhetoric of the Social Sciences
In this paper, I argue that the rhetorical character of disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences provides an especially good context for examining the embodiment of knowledge as a source of worldly power, a topic typically neglected by epistemologists and philosophers of science, who still tend to think of knowledge as a politically indifferent or disembodied phenomenon. I start with what seems to be a technical problem in the philosophy of…
Knowledge
The theory of knowledge, or epistemology, is often regarded as a dry topic that bears little relation to actual knowledge practices. Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History addresses this perception by showing the roots, developments and prospects of modern epistemology from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to the present day. Beginning with an introduction to the central questions and problems in theory of knowledge, Steve Fuller g…
Intellectuals
This article surveys the problems facing the existence of intellectuals in the twenty-first century by reflecting on the historical and conceptual conditions that have enabled them to flourish in the past but less so in recent times. The first part considers several strands of contemporary philosophical and social thought that, despite their progressive veneer, have served to undermine the legitimacy of the intellectual's role. This delegitimatio…
Being There with Thomas Kuhn
Enchantment - Disenchantment-Re-Enchantment
Making Agency Count
A Step Toward the Legalization of Science Studies
In February 2005, the Thomas More Law Center of Ann Arbor, Michigan, sought my help as a 'rebuttal witness' for the defence in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a trial scheduled to begin early in the autumn of that year, which would be the first case to test the eligibility of 'intelligent design theory' (IDT) for inclusion alongside the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution in high school biology classes. As a rebuttal witness, my charge wa…
Making up the past
Neuroscience, Neurohistory, and the History of Science
This essay introduces a Focus section on "Neurohistory and History of Science" by distinguishing images of the brain as governor and as transducer: the former treat the brain as the executive control center of the body, the latter as an interface between the organism and reality at large. Most of the consternation expressed in the symposium about the advent of neurohistory derives from the brain-as-governor conception, which is rooted in a "biolo…
A Very Qualified Success, Indeed
Anthony Giddens as a Symptom of Sociology's Decline The Gulbenkian Commission on future of sciences has popularized idea that sociology is a discipline that has outlived its usefulness (Wallerstein 1996). According to this argument, sociology had made sense over previous 100-150 years, with ascendancy of Euro-American nation-states increasingly concerned with integrating diverse peoples in terms of various functions, to which standard-issue socio…
Making the University Fit for Critical Intellectuals
The author observes that ‘postmodernism’ in its most widely used sense was born of disillusionment with the university's role in state‐driven attempts at social control. Specifically, Lyotard saw the teaching function impeding the natural proliferation of research trajectories. And while he may have correctly identified the reactionary social role of the university in his day, the use of the curriculum to curb, reorient and channel research is no…
On regulating what is known
Public intellectuals in the age of viral modernity
This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Routledge in Educational Philosophy and Theory on 07/12/2021, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.2010543 \nThe accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version
The Critique of Intellectuals in a Time of Pragmatist Captivity
The ‘critique of intellectuals’ refers to a genre of normative discourse that holds intellectuals accountable for the consequences of their ideas. A curious feature of the contemporary, especially American, variant of this genre is its focus on intellectuals who were aligned with such world-historic losers as Hitler and Stalin. Why are Cold War US intellectuals not held to a similar standard of scrutiny, even though they turn out to have been ali…
The secularization of science and a new deal for science policy
Eurasianism as the deep history of Russia’s discontent
A quantum leap for social theory
I discuss the revolutionary implications of Alexander Wendt's Quantum Mind and Social Science for social theory. These center on the significance given to society as a possibility space in which observable social reality amounts to quantum decoherent states in the system. I discuss how Wendt radicalises social constructivism and goes considerably beyond Bourdieu's conceptions of society as a field. A signature feature in Wendt's theory, the state…
The 'Reductio ad Symbolum' and the Possibility of a 'Linguistic Object
About Science
On regulating what is known
Of Conceptual Intersections and Verbal Collisions
I argue that AI, as described by Slezak, is too diffuse an entity to score any direct hits on SSK. I begin by highlighting Slezak's affinities with positivism and internalist history of science, but then observe a dilemma in his attempt to seek refuge under the mantles of both Herbert Simon and Noam Chomsky: Chomsky's cognitive creationism is incompatible with Simon's programmed discoveries. Throughout, I attack the empirical testability of the A…
Back to Descartes? The Very Idea
At the risk of damning with faint praise, let me say at the outset that Woolgar's latest book is the rhetorically most effective attempt yet at keeping alive the Big Questions of classical epistemology which is no mean feat given the scaled-down, 'naturalized' expectations for knowledge that have attended the Age of Science Studies. Philosophers could learn a lot from a man (Woolgar) who seems to have become an intimate of Descartes' Evil Genius.…
They Shoot Dead Horses, Don't They
I argue that the success of Roth and Barrett's deconstruction of Pickering depends on the underdetermination thesis being interpreted as placing the burden of proof on the sociologist, to show what else (other than methodology) determines theory choice in science. By endorsing the underdetermination thesis, and thereby accepting this burden, the sociologists unwittingly play into Laudan's `arationality' assumption, which in turn cuts against thei…
Social Science and the Challenge of Relativism. Vol. 1, A Wilderness of Mirrors
Is Relativism Obsolete
Simon Says `Put Your Foot in Your Mouth
Is History and Philosophy of Science Withering on the Vine
Nearly thirty years after the first stirrings of the Kuhnian revolution, history and philosophy of science continues to galvanize methodological discussions in all corners of the academy except its own. Evidence for this domestic stagnation appears in Warren Schmaus's thoughtful review of Social Epistemology in which Schmaus takes for granted that history of science is the ultimate court of appeal for disputes between philosophers and sociologist…
Social Epistemology and the Brave New World of Science and Technology Studies
Disciplinary Boundaries and the Rhetoric of the Social Sciences
In this paper, I argue that the rhetorical character of disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences provides an especially good context for examining the embodiment of knowledge as a source of worldly power, a topic typically neglected by epistemologists and philosophers of science, who still tend to think of knowledge as a politically indifferent or disembodied phenomenon. I start with what seems to be a technical problem in the philosophy of…
Science and Its Fabrication. Alan Chalmers
The Rational and the Social. James Robert Brown
Being There with Thomas Kuhn
Essays on the Theory of Scientific Cognition. Jerzy Kmita , Jacek Holówka
Scientism
A Plague on Both Your Houses
Steve Fuller, A Plague on Both Your Houses: Beyond Recidivism in the Sociological Theory Debates, The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Winter, 1992), pp. 62-68
Cognitive Relativism and Social Science
Beyond Reason
Critical Notice
When Bloor's Knowledge and Social Imagery was first published in 1976, it was not the first time that a “strong programme” in the sociology of knowledge was treated to a hostile reception by philosophers. But never before has such a dialectically unproductive encounter with philosophers led to such a methodologically fruitful response, for, when an array of positivist, historicist, Popperian, and realist philosophers argued against Bloor and his …
Nico STEHR, Practical Knowledge
The Psychopathology of an Everyday Sociologist
Straightening out the Scientific Image Coping with Science . Gernot Bohme Making Science
A Method to Mirowski's Mad Use of Metaphor
Research Article| January 01 1993 A Method to Mirowski’s Mad Use of Metaphor Steve Fuller Steve Fuller Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (1993) 25 (suppl_1): 69–82. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-1993-suppl_1001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Steve Fuller; A Method to Mirowski’s Mad Use of Metaphor. History of Political Economy 1 January 1993; 25 (su…
Philosophy (180 works) · Sociology (179 works) · Epistemology (161 works) · Political science (125 works) · Law (101 works) · Philosophy (88 works) · Social science (66 works) · Politics (55 works) · Law (52 works) · Computer Science (51 works)