Re: Kralori

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 02:46:41 GMT

Peter Metcalfe:
> >> Greg seems to think that this pattern was real and became
> >> complicated as the different worldviews meeting each other
> >> in the storm age.
>
> >I thought that Greg, who has indeed been expounding quite a bit on
> >such lines of late, has presented it specifically as being a GL view.
>
> I understood that it was a GL discovery rather than a "view".

To paraphrase Robert Bolt, as you like, it does not change its authority...

As I've said, I'm not saying it's not 'true', though I do question what 'level of truth' it can be said to have. Not, IMO, an exclusive, pre-eminent level of truth higher than that of the traditions it seeks to explain (henceforth refered to for convenience as Stevemartinism), but true on some level nonetheless. With, of course, some unknown amount of _making_ it true involved...

My earlier example of the Kralori draconism is a case in point: it was true enough to be magically effective ("I shall just gently apply this mythic crowbar -- then if that doesn't work, strike it over the head with same, repeatedly"), but false enough to come to bits along with the other GLers. The evidence in this case is clearly mixed as to the truth of the 'fifth view', if you judge success by 'results': but then, the same could be said about the first four, too...

Not that this isn't the sort of extremely crude metric of research success that we academics bitch about endlessly, mind.

Cheers,
Alex.

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