Thanks for your input. So far the best published critique I've seen is that of Zeleny:
Zelený, Jindrich. Paraconsistency and Dialectical Consistency [corrected from original, which appeared in From the Logical Point of View (Prague), Vol. 1, 1994, pp. 35 51]. http://tomweston.net/zeleny.pdf Zeleny articulates my objections far better than I did. He also reveals the best of the Eastern bloc philosophical heritage, one which we must take care not to lose. I took a breif look at teh book DIALCETICAL CONTRADICTION with articels by Narski etc. Didn't have time to read any of it, but the source material later cited by Marquit is here. This is the sort of stuff that should be popularized, not the lame intros to diamat I've criticized. -----Original Message----- From: Jim Farmelant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sep 18, 2005 12:24 PM To: [email protected] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [email protected] Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] [marxistphilosophy] Graham Priest vs Erwin Marquit (2) On Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:54:33 -0400 Ralph Dumain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > The upshot, I think, is that even if Priest can prove Marquite wrong > in > arguing for contradictions in 'the same respect', that one point > does not > render his analysis of the issues involved any subtler, nor does it > lead to > interesting arguments and conclusions. The argument is to one point > > only--the admission of contradictions into formal logic. And so? That's pretty much my take on Priest. At most what he does is show that you can have viable systems of formal logic that admit contradictions. He attempts to show that Hegel and Marx can be understood as having been dialetheists but he leaves unclear what would follow if we accept his conclusions. Is our understanding of Marxist dialectics in any fundamental way changed if we choose to agree with Marquit or opt for Priest? Certainly other philosophers before him have attempted to understand or model dialectical reasoning in terms of formal logic. Even A.J. Ayer in his *The Central Questions of Philosophy* briefly made the argument that perhaps Hegel's dialectical logic could be understood in terms of a multivalue logic. Lofti Zadeh is noted for his fuzzy logic and fuzzy set theory (which Priest regards as dialetheic) which likewise admits contradictions. And some Soviet philosophers like Gorskii were interested in fuzzy logic for that very reason. But in the end what follows from this does not seem very clear. Concerning the interpretation of QM which both Marquit and Priest are concerned with, it should be noted that the founding fathers of the Copenhagen Interpretation, Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, while insistent upon the dialectical character of their interpretation were equally insistent that this did not entail formal logical contradictions. In fact Bohr maintained that his principle of complementarity showed how it was possible to embrace dialectically contradictory interpretations of subatomic phenomena (waves v. particles) without leading to logical contradictions. That seems to be Marquit's position too whereas Priest seems to think, that contrary to Bohr, the Copenhagen Interpretation does not eliminate logical contradictions from its portrayal of quantum mechanics. Interestingly enough, some of the critics of the Copenhagen Interpretation have said much the same thing, using that as a basis for rejecting it. Priest on the other hand takes this as showing that it is possible to have a physical theory that admits logical contradictions without being invalidated for that reason. Jim F. Ralph Dumain's The Autodidact Project http://www.autodidactproject.org The C.L.R. James Institute http://www.clrjamesinstitute.org _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
