Here part of my old exchange with Rosa. The same issue of the contradiction in "John is a man" came up in Kliman's exchange with her
Rosa gets CB Charles Brown charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Aug 23 09:48:11 MDT 2007 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I may be lliterate, but at least she admits I'm logical. CB ^^^^^^^ Logical Illiterates Strike Again A year or so ago I had the great misfortune to correspond with an irascible fellow who could not resist making ill-informed comments about my Essays, all the while refusing to read them. I refused to continue to correspond with him on that basis, and, it seems, he has been sulking ever since. Last year I had occasion to slap some materialist sense into him (here), but I fear that this incorrigible Idealist is beyond even my help. Despite several attempts to inoculate him from his own folly, Mr B has once again demonstrated that he is immune to the influence of modern logic, preferring his own brand of sub-Hegelian make-believe. Commenting on an argument of mine, he had this to say: "CB: The sentence 'John is a man' means John is both the same and different from Joe, Jack, Rosa, Charles... It is precisely the 'is' of predication that is a unity and struggle of opposites. The 'is' of identity 'He is John.' -- that is not a tautology. CB: This should be 'that is a tautology'." [Quotation marks changed to conform to the conventions adopted here.] This odd piece of reasoning was exposed for what it is here, and here. Despite this, Mr B hopes to neutralise my arguments by referring merely to his own not inconsiderable authority in this field -- that is, the field usually occupied by Popes and assorted dictators whose word is law. And in matters logical, that should be enough for us. It certainly is for Mr B. He now deigns to comment on the musings of my colleague Babeuf; here is an example of truly innovative historical materialism: "CB: Another fundamental activity was the raising of children. I'm thinking language/culture emerged between parents and children." It is reasonably clear that Mr B has shot from the hip again -- or rather shot from the holster and into his foot --, for if the above were the case, not only would parents and children confront each other like Pentecostal ecstatics, mouthing incomprehensible noises at one another, no two families would share the same idiolect. Communication between families would thus be impossible. In that case, 'culture', as Mr B sees it, would soon begin to resemble that cacophony which constantly sounds in his head. Now, in Essay Twelve Part One, I asserted that most Marxists give lip-service to the idea that language is a social phenomenon, but fail to think through the implications of that fact, and talk and write as if language were a private affair. Mr B has shown once again that when it comes to getting things wrong, he is keen to elbow his way to the front of the queue. How language can be social, but remain a family affair is perhaps another one of the 'contradictions' that still compromises his thought processes: "Before I had even heard of dialectics -- living in the a mental (sic) world of strict formal logic -- I started to 'run into' lots of contradictions and paradoxes. My own road to dialectics was a posteriori, not a priori." Mr B here confuses matters biographical with matters logical; unless --, of course, he thinks paradoxes are a posteriori. But, even if he were right, this otherwise commendable public confession of his own confused thought should not be read as mere humility. On the contrary, the road to Hermetic-enlightenment -- a path which all true dialecticians have to pass along in order to qualify as adepts (and the reasons for this are exposed here) -- elevates them way above the rest of us mortals. This means that if ever they regain power somewhere they can screw-up once more in a truly almighty and awe-inspiring manner. After all, they have a suitably screwy theory to help them on their way. But what is this? It is none other than our old friend Mr D, who volunteers a riposte so devastating I hesitate to post it here for fear it might affect the reader's sanity: "This is just stupid, even more stupid than the Trotskyist recitations of dialectics." Mr D, someone who is not known for his ability to string a clear argument together -- but a well-respected expert at drawing attention to that fact --, probably does not know that the material about which he is commenting has to be compressed into a three minute slot, and has to be kept to a level that makes it comprehensible to mere workers. And here he can be forgiven, for over the years, at his site, he has developed an enviable skill at repelling such lowly types, and to the extent that he has probably forgotten their limitations. One of which is that they find the mystical ideas he spouts incomprehensible. It's a good job then that we have substitutionists of his calibre to do their thinking for them. Now, we have already seen that Mr D takes exception to anyone who cannot compress a PhD thesis into a sentence or two --, a skill he taunts the rest of us with, since, as the sentence above reveals, he can squeeze several into a single line. He is, I am sure, working on doing the same with a single word. We wait with baited hooks... Mr B then posted a few sections from a summary Essay of mine, but the eagle-eyed Mr D swooped in for the kill, with yet more lethal prose: "This is all pretty juvenile leftism." Well, Mr D should know. But, it is rather unfair of him to pull rank, and complain that my words are juvenile when he still has his dialectical diapers on. And as if to prove it, he throws another toy out of his pram: "The entire history of philosophy to Rosa is a scheme, a ruse, duplicity." He might like to quote where I say this, or even imply it. But, accuracy is not Mr D's concern; we have seen that several times already. [Less charitable readers might be forgiven a snigger or ten here when they notice that Mr D thinks that the history of Philosophy can be a "a ruse, duplicity". Philosophy itself might be so described (but not by me), but how the history of that bogus discipline can be depicted thus is a question that perhaps Mr D's psychiatrist is alone qualified to answer.] Back to Mr B, for he is intent on providing yet more amusement. In response to that summary of my criticisms of Lenin's crass remarks, he bravely leapt to his defence (but the reader will soon see that Lenin would be better defended by his sworn enemies, if this is the best Mr B can do): "Anyway, the first thing I noticed is that this is from 'Philosophical Notebooks'. That means personal musings, talking out loud to oneself, unpublished personal thoughts. That doesn't mean they can't be criticized, but it also means we can't be sure what status Lenin gave them, but there's a good chance that he didn't publish them because he may have had criticisms of them himself. It's kind of cheating to attribute to them such a fundamental status in Lenin's arguments for his positions." So, with Mr B as his defence attorney, Lenin would be well advised to plead guilty and throw himself on the mercy of the court. Mr B should know (but I hesitate to praise him too much here) that Lenin's words are treated as gospel by practicing Marxists, and it is these I am addressing in my Essays, not armchair HCDs like him. However, if Mr B is right, and we can disregard Lenin's amateurish musings, all well and good, In that case, perhaps we should throw Hegel's Hermetic hodge-podge onto Hume's bonfire too? Since the latter's work reads like an extended April Fool's joke, who will miss it? But, how does Mr B handle the summary of my argument? Well, it is worth pointing out that the comment below was written after he had pointed out that Lenin was summarising his own ideas, and should not be treated unfairly because of that. No problem, Rosa's summary can be treated with disdain; after all consistency is not to be expected of someone who thinks reality is riddled with contradictions. "Also, the 'John is a man' discussion is not given in the discussion itself and inferentially by it being a personal diary, the logical status that Rosa gives it, i.e. that Lenin claimed to derive eternal truths and universal principles out of it. On the contrary, he seems to be discussing it as an example, not some kind of fundamental proof of the universality of dialectics. That's really cheating by Rosa. She portrays this example by Lenin as if he uses it in the opposite of the way he actually does. Can't remember whether I raised this with Rosa when she was here. I do remember she got pretty angry pretty quickly , started hurling insults pretty quickly when challenged. I realize she gets challenged a lot, so for her it was just the same old lunkheadism, but I mean, I really can't see where Lenin employed the 'John is a man' thing as fundamentally, can't see where he attempted to derive as much from it as she claims. She should start with an example from something published. When she uses an intellectual diary note, it could very well be that Lenin didn't publish it because he thought of some of the same criticisms of it that she did." Can anyone figure out what this muddle-head is trying to say here? Is there a an actual counter-argument in there -- anywhere? Now, Mr B should know that Lenin is here summarising an argument Hegel inflicted on humanity (one that had first appeared in Aristotle, but which assumed classical form in Aquinas and Buridan (references can be found in Essay Three Part One)), where he does try to derive everything from the nature of 'judgements' -- sentences of a certain sort -- where the "is" of predication is re-configured as an "is" of identity. Hegel uses "The rose is red" to show that the universe is fundamentally contradictory. Is it unfair of me to point this out? Perhaps it was even more unfair of Hegel to advert to his own logical incompetence in this way? [That argument, if such it may be called, is dissected here, and here.] In passing, Mr B notes I get angry very quickly. Here is how I explained why this is so (on the opening page of this site): How Not To Argue 101 This page contains links to forums on the web where I have 'debated' this creed with other comrades. For anyone interested, check out the desperate 'debating' tactics used by Dialectical Mystics in their attempt to respond to my ideas. You will no doubt note that the vast majority all say the same sorts of things... They all like to make things up, too, about me and my beliefs. 25 years (!!) of this stuff from Dialectical Mystics has meant I now take an aggressive stance with them every time -- I soon learnt back in the 1980's that being pleasant with them (my initial tactic) did not alter their abusive tone, their propensity to fabricate.... So, these days, I generally go for the jugular from the get-go. Except, of course, I do not get angry, I just go on the offensive. Mr B's earlier correspondence with me showed that he too was quite happy to make stuff up about my ideas (without bothering to check). But still he wonders why I become aggressive. In response, I'd post this quite rare picture of him, but even I am not that cruel: Based on a summary of my argument -- which even at 71,000 words represents less than 10% of the material I have so far published -- he thinks he has understood my work. Had he bothered to check (and you can stop that sniggering at the back; I am sure one day he will) he would have seen that I quote from published work, scores of times, right across the DM-spectrum. Indeed, I manage to show that every single dialectician indulges in the same sort of a priori dogmatics -- in private notebooks and published work -- as Lenin, Engels and Hegel. In fact, that is the only way they can make this loopy 'theory' seem to work. But, how does this super-scientist answer that allegation? "Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lenin give lots of other examples as the basis for their generalization rendering their claims a posteriori, not a priori." However, we can leave Marx out, for he is almost totally silent on this 'theory'. As for the rest, here is what I say in Essay Seven: To be sure, there are a handful of scientists who accept this and the other two 'Laws' as laws -- particularly those who hail from previous generations of the Communist Party (e.g., Bernal, Haldane and Levy, etc.), but it is quite clear that these comrades would have treated with contempt a PhD thesis that relied on evidence as weak as that found in this area of dialectics. Indeed, their acceptance of the adequacy of the 'data' in support of DM is somewhat analogous to a similar acceptance by scientists (who are also Creationists) of 'evidence' in favour of, say, the scientific accuracy of the Book of Genesis. In general, however, the examples usually given by dialecticians (like Hegel, Lenin and Engels) to illustrate their 'Laws' are almost without exception either anecdotal or impressionistic. If someone were to submit a paper to a science journal purporting to establish the veracity of a new law with the same level of vagueness, imprecision, triteness, lack of detail and overall theoretical naivety, it would be rejected at the first stage. Indeed, dialecticians would themselves treat with derision any attempt to establish, say, either the truth of classical economic theory or the falsity of Marx's own work with an evidential display that was as crassly amateurish as this --, to say nothing of the derision they would show for such theoretical wooliness. In such circumstances, those who might be quick to cry "pedantry" at the issues raised in this Essay would become devoted pedants, and nit pick with the best. Now, anyone who has studied or practiced real science will know this to be true. It is only in books on DM (and internet discussion boards) that Mickey Mouse material of this sort seems acceptable. And this is what I say in the Basic Introductory Essay: Anyone who has studied and practiced genuine science will know the lengths to which researchers have to go to alter even minor aspects of current theory, let alone justify major changes in the way we view nature. In stark contrast, and without exception, dialecticians offer a few paragraphs of trite (and over-used) clichés to support their claims. Hence, all we find are hackneyed references to things like boiling water, balding heads, plants 'negating' seeds, Mamelukes fighting the French, a character from Molière suddenly discovering that he speaks prose, and the like, all constantly retailed. From such banalities, dialecticians suddenly derive universal laws, applicable everywhere and at all times. Even at its best (for example, in Woods and Grant (1995), which is one of the most comprehensive defences of classical, hard-core DM to date, and Gollobin (1986), which is if anything even more comprehensive), we encounter perhaps a few dozen pages of secondary and tertiary information, extensively padded out with repetition and bluster (much of which is taken apart here). Contrary evidence (of which there is much) is simply ignored. This is indeed Mickey Mouse Science. As Essays Two and Seven show, the universal and eternally-true theses dialecticians regularly lift from Hegel go way beyond even the meagre evidence Engels, Lenin and Hegel offered in support. Mr B's parting shot: "With this initial seriously cheating move by Rosa, I have trouble getting up the energy to look at her further arguments." Well, what a loss to humanity! Please, someone e-mail him and tell him to "get" it up. Otherwise I will have no one to poke fun at. Word Count: 2710 Return to the Main Index © Rosa Lichtenstein 2007 Hits since August 14 2007: _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
