----- Original Message ----- From: "Devine, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >1) "A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth." - Niels > Bohr > That's right. It's extremely unclear what Bohr was saying. For all we know, > he may be totally wrongheaded in the above statement. We can't assume _a > priori_ that he's accurate. We don't know how many beers he had had when he > said it. ================= If we can't assume apriori that he's accurate, we can't assume he's apriori inaccurate. The statement was made in the context of attempting to come to terms with the wave-particle duality in quantum theory not a pub crawl. > >This statement, perhaps, gets us quite a bit closer to one of the main > issues N. [Nagarjuna] was trying to deal with. How many inconsistencies in > dialogue do we allow before our sense of the Other's > epistemic-communicational integrity begins to create problems for further > dialogue?< ================== How many contradictions, over a period of time of your choosing, before you dismiss other people with the assertion that they're illogical because they disagree with you? > > The quote from Whitman seems to say that he's admitting to irrationality. > That's no reason why we should be irrational. Unless you're arguing that > he's an authority who should be emulated? ================ Contradicting oneself is not necessarily a sign of irrationality. Have you never contradicted yourself? Because if you haven't your the smartest person who's ever lived. > I don't think that we should expect poets to be logical (in an Aristotelian > way), since two key things about poetry are its explicit ambiguity and its > evocation of emotions. Writing poetry has an important role in society > that's very different from thinking scientifically or clearly; we shouldn't > insist that it be logical or illogical. (Similarly, we shouldn't insist that > those who want to understand the world should be poets.) =============== Explicit ambiguity is a manifestation of paraconsistency. Why isn't poetic ambiguity a form of eliciting action in the exploration of clarity in communication with the reader-hearer as a complementary approach to the rigors and rhetorics of scientific discourse? Science is written to elicit emotions as well, no? > I don't interpret Hegel's Logic as the same kind of "logic" as that of > Aristotle; I don't see it as contradicting Aristotle, either, since they can > play different roles in helping us to understand the world and figure out > how to change it. ================ Hey, you're getting the hang of paraconsistency. Why the "..." around logic? > Rather, I see the Logic as an empirically-oriented heuristic and also what's > nowadays called a "model" of history (with Hegel having an idealist vision > of empirical reality). > > Ari's logic, on the other hand, is _not_ empirically-oriented, but is > instead an attempt to deal with internal mental processes, clarifying them. > Empirical content comes from the outside. > > For Marx, the phrases "contradictions of capitalism" and "the negation of > the negation" are both part of his social theory, i.e., his abstract > socio-economic (i.e., empirical) description. The former refers, to my mind, > to conflicts inherent in the social-structural set-up that characterizes > capitalism in the real, empirical world, while the latter refers to the end > of such conflicts by changing -- abolishing -- the structure. The fact that > Marx uses interesting prose doesn't make him illogical (in Ari's sense). ================= I know what they are. On the other hand if we are under no obligation to agree with KM's prose and his assertions of contradictions are themselves internally contradictory.............What does it mean to say he's representing a feature of the social world if the conflicts can be described-explained in idioms that are different from his own? > > > Ian: >It would seem we are left with two, possibly more, options: > > >1) Hegel's analyses of contradictions was internally contradictory and > those contradictions were fatal to his project of understanding whether true > contradictions existed, or:< > > it's also possible that the word "contradiction" means something different > in different contexts, just as many or even most other words do. (As noted > above, this phenomenon of varied meanings with context includes the word > "logic.") That is, though the spelling is the same, "contradiction" means > something different for Aristotle than it does in an empirically-oriented > heuristic. > > > >2) Hegel's analyses of contradictions was internally consistent and the > project of attempting to understand and explain true contradictions in the > spirit of Nagarjuna and Hegel should continue precisely because they would > be of immense possible relevance for understanding social conflicts that > cannot be reduced to communicational practices and modes of analyses that > tacitly assume the LNC [law of non-contradiction] and the LEM [law of the > excluded middle].< > > If we interpret Hegel's dialectical vision along the lines of heuristic, an > empirical theory, or a model, the LNC and LEM aren't especially relevant, > since not all heuristics, theories, or models are deductively derived. The > LNC and the LEM, in other words, are at a completely different analytical > level. (As a partial analogy, stuff from quantum physics is at a different > analytical level from stuff in the study of animal behavior.) > > > >Are the contradictions of capitalism simply reducible to the illogicality > of the agents-classes in the economy and their unintended consequences or > are there irreducible conflicts of interest that cannot be explained away by > asserting that agents are illogical? If the latter, then we might be better > off significantly relaxing the LNC and the LEM.< > > It's not the agents that are "illogical." (I never said they were, for one > thing.) As noted in the phrase "unintended consequences," what's logical for > an individual can be illogical for the aggregate (or vice-versa). Similarly, > the "irreducible conflicts of interest" do not arise from the alleged > "illogicality" of individual agents. > > Significantly relaxing the LNC and the LEM seems to be embracing illogical > thinking (at least in the sense of Aristotle). Why do we need to reject > Aristotle when (as far as I can tell) neither Hegel nor Marx did so? (I'd > say instead that they _demoted_ Aristotle relative to the exalted throne > that the deductive rationalists put him on.) =================== No one said to reject Aristotle, you're slipping into Aristotelian mode when you say that. It's precisely because the contradictions of capitalism cannot be mapped adequately with Aristotelian logic that exploring paraconsistent logics may be helpful. If the phenomenon are non-Aristotelian then we're probably going to be better off using non-Aristotelian maps and explanations. > A common conceit among economists is that Ari-style deductive reasoning is > the _only_ way the human mind should work in order to understand and change > the world is wrong (a symptom of "autistic economics," etc.) But what I was > trying to say was that Ari-style logic still a cleaned-up, ideal, way of > thinking, a way to avoid being muddled. That's what "ideal" means here; it > doesn't say that it's either Ari's way or the highway. =============== It's Becker's way or the highway and Becker's way looks a hell of lot like Ari's way to me. > I don't care about "budging" such scum, even though Rumsfeld used to be my > Congresscritter. Rather, the point is that if these folks are revealed as > (1) breaking simple logic, as with demanding that Iraq prove a negative; (2) > making up or falsifying empirical evidence, as with pushing the lie about > the Kuwaiti incubators; and/or (3) presenting partial perspectives that rule > out or leave out important empirical or logical points, as with > systematically "forgetting" that the worst evidence against Saddam comes > from the period when he was a US ally, then their perspectives and policies > can be discredited in the eyes of _working people_, the people that really > matter. That is, the argument with Rummy is to expose him publically as a > fool, a knave, and an imperialist murderer. The point is to undermine the > drive toward war. ================ Golly, I never knew that. > though I don't think that poetry should be dumped, I don't how an assertion > by a poet can be evidence for anything. In any event, all he does is to > admit to being irrational (in Ari's sense). That's no reason why anyone else > should be irrational. ================ Again, contradicting oneself is not necessarily evidence of irrationality. WW and the rest of us are under no obligation to use Ari's sense logical-rational as the normative baseline for rationality, that was what WW was getting at. > > >If it is generally impossible and possibly undesireable for us to be > logical all the time in the same manner that opponents of homo economicus or > homo neoclassicus claim that we cannot possibly be 24-7 econometricians, > just how many contradictions do we allow others and social life in general? > Paraconsistency is, amongst other things, a substantive plea for epistemic > tolerance of a fairly wide ranging sort.< > > I NEVER said that we should be logical (a la Aristotle) "all the time." =============== And I NEVER said that you did. <snipping, because I detect, possibly erroneously, obtuseness on your part. If you don't know what Russell's paradox is I'll take the liberty of asking that you look it up as it's one of the most important results of 20th century mathematics-logic. Feel free to refuse.> Ian
