Aw: Re: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Recently published: Hitler and Abductive Logic

Fri, 10 Jul 2015 10:48:10 -0700

 
Edwina, I see the problem of my formulation: I didnt mean "use" in the sense of "apply", but in the sense of "misuse" or "take advantage of": To misuse the elements of logic in a way, that makes a false abduction look like a proper conclusion (for laypersons of logic)- eg. because all agents of contradiction are subsumed under "conspirants".
Best,
Helmut

"Edwina Taborsky" <tabor...@primus.ca>
 
Helmut - if you use the scientific method and lie about your data and conclusions then, you are NOT using the scientific method.
 
Hitler used all three fallacious (and common to us all) methods of 'fixing belief'. The a priori emotional pure visceral appeal to the romantic idealism of the pure volk, the tenacity of repetition about the economic and political crisis of the time and the sense that Germans were victims; the tenacity of assurance that such a pure volk exists and the 'authority' of the past and the romanticism of the past heroes and era, and the yes, romanticism of violence - and  eventually, of course, pure military and outside-of-the law authority.
 
Nothing scientific at all about fascism or Hitler's political tactics.
 
Edwina
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, July 10, 2015 12:50 PM
Subject: Aw: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Recently published: Hitler and Abductive Logic
 
Now I am wondering, which of the four methods of fixating belief did Hitler use? According to Ben Novak it is like this, I think: He was tenacious, but that is not the main point. He used authority, but that is not the main point either. Also he took advantage of apriorian ituition and instincts, but neither that is the main point. The main point is, that he used the scientific method, but not in a proper, but in a mendacious way. And it is scary how it was working, how a false abduction is able to immunize itself against contradictions. So I think, that Ben N., by showing this mendacios mechanism, has contributed much to making the scientific method more secure. Edwina wrote about sweeping generalizations, which dont stand up to scientific scrutiny, but are widely believed. Perhaps people believe it, because they do not have the means or the energy for scientific scrutiny, and want to believe something. But if they would know about this mendacious mechanism, maybe they would stop to think before believing. The fact, that this mechanism exists, is not a proof against any conspiracy theory, but an abduction in this respect. But that does not matter, because if one abduction can make people believe, another abduction can keep them from believing the first, possibly false abduction.
Best,
Helmut
 

 "Stephen C. Rose" <stever...@gmail.com>
 
The fact that we disagree on the way things are is encouraging as I think we agree more than you might perceive on many basics. We have had different life experiences And nothing I suggest ever is more than about a degree or two removed from things that would contradict. Above all I believe in the power of conversation along with what I understand to be continuity and fallibility.
   
On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 12:10 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:
Well, Stephen Rose, you are more 'rosy-viewing' than I am. I don't think that the scientific method is any more secure now than in the past. Nor do I see a general reduction in violence or poverty.  Instead, I see an increase in a sense of entitlement (which is utopian in itself!) and sweeping generalizations about eg, the climate, diseases, and so on - which don't stand up to scientific scrutiny but are widely believed.
 
Edwina
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, July 10, 2015 11:44 AM
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Recently published: Hitler and Abductive Logic
 
And scientific method's hold on the present is more secure than in the past and there are arguments to suggest that there is a factual basis for assuming both a general reduction of violence and a reduction of poverty. Certainly both of these positives have been denoted utopian in the past, but they should become more and more subject to the very method Peirce venerated. Merely because Peirce adduced three modes of error does not substantiate their capacity to overcome one mode which constitutes truth. 
   
On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 11:28 AM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:
Utopianism, which is an imaginary perfection of life, is basic to the human imagination. You can see that in our fictional tales - whether from Homer to fairy tales to romance novels to Batman films to James Bond to our political and economic ideas of the current era. 
 
But fascism isn't the only type of utopianism. The other main type is socialism, which is equally focused on 'everyone behaving the same'. The difference from fascism is that socialism focuses on a future ideal, while fascism focuses on a past ideal (as in the pure volk of Germany and also, of current Islamic fascism)....and socialism focuses on a future state (if we all share everything and all have the same amount of wealth...).
 
We are, as humans, all subject to hate, irrationality, mob behaviour and susceptibility to false promises. We've seen that in every nation on earth- and that includes our own and in recent times. Therefore - we are not 'condemned to repeat the past' for this behaviour is never confined to our past. We are condemned to be aware that irrationality is a basic emotional capacity in ourselves. There is only one scientific method, but there are three methods of irrational belief in Peirce's work.
 
Edwina
 
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, July 10, 2015 10:18 AM
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Recently published: Hitler and Abductive Logic
 
All Edwina says is fine. My only caveat is that the tendency of what she calls utopianism (that assumption needs some proving I think) is not necessarily in a fascist direction. Fascism requires what she suggests -- a sort of blindness to reality. It's result is hate, irrationality, mob behavior and susceptibility to false promises. I believe that because of what Peirce rightly put together we can achieve incremental progress by means of reasonable moves forward. Based on a growing body of evidence. I do not as I have said before believe that we are condemned to repeat the past.  
   
On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 10:03 AM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:
Ben, thanks for your comments.
 
With regard to the use of such terms as 'mystery, magical, and luck' when referring to the rise of Hitler, I consider them all similar in that they suggest some non-factual or illogical causality to his rise. My point is that such explanations are, of course, not explanations and that Hitler's rise to power - as well as that of any demagogue - is explicable. And - it can happen again and elsewhere.
 
In Canada, and I imagine in other countries, one does not register to vote, and need not register for nor belong to any political party. Voting 'registration' is primarily but not solely via taxation information.
 
As for the rise of Hitler, as a nationalist fanatic, racist and demagogue, (see his autobiography written at a young age!) ; i.e., his conversion as a fascist, one can see in his early education and life (Wm. Shirer The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) his personal movement into this ideology. I think the real focus is on the rise of fascism;  it was by no means foreign to the German/Austrian sentiments of the time. (eg, 1913 in Vienna). ; See W. Shirer and see also R. Eatwell: Fascism, a History; and R. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich; and R. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism. See also a discussion by Jean B. Elshtain, 'Sovereignty: God, State and Self. ). I'd consider that F. Hayek's 'The Road to Serfdom', another examination of how and why people move into a utopian ideology.
 
How could a majority of a population move into fascism, the utopian ideology of a perfect volk...with its primordial, pure Will which, as pure to the volk, must triumph. We see fascism in the preachings of various political leaders of the current era both here and in other countries. And people listen to and accept it! The question then becomes - what is the critical threshold when fascism becomes dominant and drowns out/prevents other discourse and the voice of established law and ongoing critical reason?  We see, in Germany, its rise due to many 'leaders' - not just Hitler.
 
And then, we must acknowledge that fascism is not unique to one era and one man, but, we are all susceptible to a 'Fixation of Belief' by irrational means.
 
Edwina
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Ben Novak
Sent: Friday, July 10, 2015 8:56 AM
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Recently published: Hitler and Abductive Logic
 
Dear Edwina:
 
You have made a number of interesting points. Most of them have been addressed rather well by Ben Udell. But let me add a few points that I think will  be helpful to many others on the list.
 
First, it is important that one read the book or dissertation, rather than for summarizing its salient points, for one main reason. The book involves the application of Peirce's theoretical structure of abduction to facts. Therefore, the book is not the presentation of a theory, whose salient points can be summarized and presented in bite-size form for others to critique in theoretical terms and argue over principles, definitions, and soundness of syllogisms. Rather, in this case, the "devil is in the details." 
 
In this respect, I think that the work should be of particular interest to the members of Peirce-L precisely because it involves the messy world of facts, in other words, it is an experiment of seeing whether certain theories can actually explain certain facts. It is like the situation when a scientist claims to have established something by experimental methods; one must meticulously go over each step of the experiments to see whether the result holds.
 
In this respect, Eco and Sebeok's The Sign of Three is very instructive.They wrote that book because their studies of Peirce had introduced them to several other scholars who noted the presence of Peirce's adductive logic in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. They therefore set out to show how this form of logic pervades the work of these two giants of the detective story genre. In that case, in order to see if their premise holds, one must not only read Eco and Sebeok's book, but must also be familiar with the works of Poe and Doyle. A lot of work.
 
Second, I don't think that I am making more of a mystery of Hitler than is warranted. Almost every major historian has shouted out that the facts of Hitler so far constitute a major mystery. That was the thesis  of Ron Rosenbaum' book, Explaining Hitler, which he boldly states: "Hitler has escaped explanation."
 
I set out to deal with one part of the Hitler mystery, specifically, what there was about him that enabled him to succeed. It seemed that simply to say he was lucky is not an explanation. First because he was the most unlikely of people to have any success in politics. He was a high school dropout, a denizen of the poor houses of Vienna, had shown no signs of leadership through four years of war in which any sign of leadership was sought to replace the high mortality of line officers. More importantly, however, one must keep in mind that he was not a citizen, and could neither vote nor hold office. 
 
Finally, he built up his political movement from scratch not once, but twice.He took the tiny DAP from a stammtisch organization and built it into the largest force in Bavaria in four years. Then came the Putsch, and he was imprisoned, the party declared illegal and all its assets seized, and he was convicted of treason. No one believed that he could be any further trouble. But he said he could be back on top in a few years, and within five years after he was released, he was the leader of the second largest party in Germany. To say it was luck alone is to believe that lightning strikes twice in the same place....
 
This brings up another fact that is disconcerting. Many people believe that Hitler succeeded because of his oratory. But he built up his party the second time under a complete ban on public speaking, effectively from November 1923 till spring of 1927 in Bavaria, and until 1928 throughout the rest of Germany,during which he gave only one public speech in February 1925, which is the speech that got him banned again from public speaking. Yet his party grew by leaps and bounds during this period from a party of one, to 49,000 dues-paying members in 1927, and to 78,000 members and almost 3 percent of the vote in 1928. This calls out for explanation.
 
(Understand that in Germany at this time, one did not register for a party as we do in the US when one registers to vote. Every German was automatically registered, but one had to actually go to Party headquarters to join, and that meant paying dues and being required to perform organizing services. So, building an army of 49,000 dues-paying, hard working election organizers in two years was no small thing. My point it that this was done when Hitler was forbidden to give public speeches, so it cannot  be because of his oratory.)
 
Well, my point is that this process has not been explained. My book offers to provide at least one part of an explanation.
 
Again, I agree with you that this is different from the usual discussion on Pierce-L where abstract issues can be discussed. My original announcement was simply that there was now a book trying to apply Peirce's theory of abduction to an historical event, with the idea that people on the list might be interested to know that. Of course, I hoped that someone would actually  read it and critique it. But if you choose not to read it, that is a fair choice.
 
Thanks for responding,
 
Ben
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 11:36 PM, Benjamin Udell <bud...@nyc.rr.com> wrote:

Tom, yes, this is the kind of thing where I speak of rephrasing. Fresh from a first reading of 3/4 of the thesis, my impression was that Ben N. was attributing more originality to Hitler than seems established. Still I think Ben N. is on to something. Mainstream German politicians were offering practical programs, while Hitler was offering a Big Explanation of Everything and avoiding proposing solutions to particular problems.

Best, Ben U.

On 7/9/2015 11:15 PM, Ozzie wrote:

Ben ~

Thanks for your helpful summary ("Ben N. is saying that Hitler was the first leader to invite the public to follow a pattern of abductive inference like in a detective story ...")

Both for sport and to attain positions of leadership, Greek orators at the time of the Peloponnesian Wars invited the general public to form, accept and act on abducted hypotheses. The logical tales spun by Hitler were based upon resentment, which places him among the demagogues.

Regards -

Tom Wyrick

On Jul 9, 2015, at 8:37 PM, Benjamin Udell wrote:

Edwina, Ben N., list,

I've been reading the online version of Ben N.'s thesis. I found that I could not save it to my computer without first opening it online, and in order to save it computer, one has to move one's mouse over some buttons in the upper right-hand corner of the view pane till a little tool tip says "Download".  I'm convinced that visual design of computer programs these days is largely done by sadists.

Anyway, I've been reading it, it's two PDFs, and I'm half-way through the second one. It really is very readable, and that involvement of Hitler does add a certain electric current to the discussion of abductive inference. It's not a labor to read, and it's quite interesting. There are a number of technical errors (as Ben N. warns) evident to a Peirce scholar, but these can be corrected without damaging the thesis.

In response to Edwina, I'd say that Ben N. does not present Hitler's rise as having a magical or mystical element, rather a mysterious element that requires explanation. He makes a case that many scholars think that there are some very difficult questions as to who Hitler was and how did he get so far. I'm no historian and hadn't read a book on Hitler since I was a teenager. So far, I'd say that the case is not made clear enough to the general reader that Hitler didn't just get lucky in the sense that some party had to come out on top or, in the classic formulation, "somebody has to be the king of France." Ben N. outlines some argument that luck wasn't such a big part of it, but it's not clear to me yet. On the other hand, I don't think that Ben N. is relying on a "Great Men" theory of history - he says that Hitler might have made very little difference in other times and circumstances.

Insofar as everybody uses abductive inference, Ben N. perhaps doesn't bring out clearly enough the difference between Hitler's use of it and others' use of it, instead he talks about how Hitler was the first leader to use it. I think I know what Ben N. is getting at, but I'd phrase it more carefully. Ben N. is saying that Hitler was the first leader to invite the public to follow a pattern of abductive inference like in a detective story (Who Murdered Germany?), and that Hitler relied for credibility on the justificatory plausibility and complex cohesion of an untested hypothesis that would take a long time to verify. Well, there's more to it, which it would be foolish of me to try to summarize. I'd ask, is Ben N. so sure that Hitler was the first such leader? Many other regimes have 'explanations' that they give to their people, sometimes involving the idea of hidden forces behind events.

Anyway, I'm enjoying reading it. One can certainly say that Ben Novak has made a serious effort, deserving of more attention than what some rather pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey stuff has received occasionally on peirce-l.

Best, Ben

On 7/9/2015 7:12 PM, Edwina Taborsky wrote:

Ben, I'm going to disagree with your view that in order to discuss the basic issue of your book, namely, your attempt to correlate the rise of Hitler with abductive logic - that it requires that we either buy your book or read it.

I think that on a Peirce-list, the members ought to have a reasonable reading knowledge of Peirce's works, but I don't think that a research topic dealt with by a member requires that members of this list read that member's work. My view is that it is incumbent on YOU, to provide members with a reasonably thorough precis of the salient points of your argument.

 

With regard to the points you have so far provided, my concern is that you seem to be trying to imbue Hitler's rise to power with some 'magical' or mystical element.

For example, you claim that when his party took power, German politics consisted of 28 parties - why was Hitler's dominant? In Canada, at the federal level, there are 26 political parties - and there is nothing particularly magical or surprising that only three are dominant. There are about 30 minor political parties in the US. Only two-three are dominant.

Second, my concern is your method of explaining this history. You seem to be using what is known as the 'Great Man Theory' of historical analysis, which examines history by focusing on the charisma or whatever of some singular causal individual. I consider this a weak analytic frame; I prefer the 'long duree' framework of the 'Annales' school (eg, Braudel), which considers infrastructural causality such as the population size, economic mode, technological capacity, trade relations etc...rather than individuals.

As for fascism, it is an ideology of the mind, i.e., it is not rooted in pragmatic reality but in a notion of utopian purity of the past, such that 'if only we returned to that pure mode', then, all would be well. It is now rampant in the Al Qaeda (from the 19th c!) and ISIS of the MENA. There are, I maintain, population and economic reasons for the refusal of these populations and governments to deal with the pragmatic problems of the area and the  resultant retreat into fascism.

Same with Germany of the 1930s. And, once an infrastructure is set up, e,g, National Socialism's Third Reich, it is extremely difficult to move out of the rhetoric and back down to hard reality. That requires an external intervention. Certainly, internally, some tried to stop Hitler -

As for Hitler being logical - what??? I think some examples would be helpful. His behaviour around Stalingrad was hardly logical.

Is the popularity of various cult figures, of wealthy preachers, of  due to their being logical? Or for some other reason(s)?

What is abductive about Hitler's 'reasoning'?

Again, my view - and I say it is my view - is that the onus for explanation of a topic is not to have readers buy your book or read it online, but for you to explain key points to us - and then, explain why you align it with Peircean theory.

Edwina

----- Original Message -----
From: Ben Novak
To: Stephen Jarosek
Cc: Stephen C. Rose ; Peirce List
Sent: Thursday, July 09, 2015 5:12 PM
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Recently published: Hitler and Abductive Logic



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