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February 23, 2006

Interlocking theories and gibberish

Over at Wikipedia.org, I found an article that draws Castaneda and Thomas Kuhn together, concerning chaos magic:

The idea is that belief is a tool that can be applied at will rather than unconsciously. Some chaos magicians think that trying unusual, and often bizarre beliefs is in itself an experience worth having and consider flexibility of belief a form of power or freedom in a cybernetic sense of the word.

At one end of what I'm reading this week lies Castaneda, to whom applies what Borges's narrator of the story of Tlön observes of his friend, Bioy Casares, who seemingly comes up with the encyclopedia article on the imaginary land as, "a fiction devised by [his] modesty in order to justify a statement." At the other end stands Kuhn, explaining The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by means of scientists' dependence on paradigms.

Funny how the most entertaining stories are the fake ones. Kuhn knocks me out like melatonin. Yet he doesn't knowingly introduce fictions to justify his statements. Once you start introducing the fictions, where do you stop?

Posted by Mark at February 23, 2006 10:10 PM

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