[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: George Resich's *How the Cold War
From: Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED] There are a number of questions balled together. While I think that the competence/performance distinction as originally conceived forestalled working out the actual relation between the two (perhaps premature at the time) and thus equated psychology (competence) with the linguistic formalism, I fail to see how linguistics is merely logic. Would you call generative phonology a form of logic? My area of interest is not generative but rather articulatory phonology, hence the interest in someone like Piaget (but also see Guattari on 'faciality'). The competence-performance distinction seems to me to be a classic psychologization of the structuralist langue-parole distinction. I think phonology is the least-worked-out segment of the generative programme because it leads to things like abstract sub-lexical units and processes without reference to articulation and phonetic reality. At least other portions of the programme attempt to refer to and analyze actual language (but not actual phonology as realized in speech). The phonology of the generative approach isn't human, in other words. If phonology is subsumed by the greater category 'grammar', and if Chomsky is right, then I guess phonology becomes a form of logic. I don't think Chomsky is right. On the broader question of logic, you wouldn't want to revert to the psychologism of the late 19th century, would you? There have been attempts to avoid both psychologism and Platonism--Popper, the Soviet notion of ideality, etc. I would want to avoid any psychologism that becomes overly formalist and platonist. Frege was worried that psychology would undercut the reality of his logics (I believe Husserl was the superior thinker, and that Meinong arrived at some possible conceptual solutions to Frege's problem). I think linguistics should want to stop using logic to undercut the reality of the actual psychology that controls language use. C. Jannuzzi Fukui Japan ___ 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
[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: George Resich's *How the Cold War
A few follow-ups for C. Brown and A. Mani 1. Mostly for C. Brown. I understand the term Robisonade better now. However, isn't it a problem that ALL psychology would be guilty of this, including developmental psychology. At least Piaget's take on developmental psychology holds for social reality extending into the invidual's development (certain things happen to the psychology of the individual which then prepares him to see the world differently, but all the time the world is pressing in on the developing individual). 2. I guess for any who are interested: is the linguistics of human/natural languages more a matter of formalism (logic) or psychology? When I use the term 'linguistics' I have 'natural' languages in mind. When I use the term 'formalism' I have an extended concept beyond maths in mind, since the formalization of content is crucial to all social sciences and psychology. Formalism, then, is not strictly limited to 'formal linguistics' (and I might add the generally accepted 'connection' between Chomsky's largely abstract formal approach and Pinker's experimental psycholinguistic approach is totally obscure to me). I guess one question for discussion is whether or not, formal linguistics as it follows from Chomsky and Halle is really more about logic than it is about psycholinguistics. Earlier I called it an epistemologically naive psychologization of structuralism. Which then brings us back to the ultimate question: is logic something that results from human psychology or something that exists outside it? (Which also seems to bring me back to one of the first things I posted to this list). C. Jannuzzi ___ 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
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: George Resich's *How the Cold War
At 04:56 PM 7/25/2005 +0900, CeJ wrote: .. I guess one question for discussion is whether or not, formal linguistics as it follows from Chomsky and Halle is really more about logic than it is about psycholinguistics. Earlier I called it an epistemologically naive psychologization of structuralism. Which then brings us back to the ultimate question: is logic something that results from human psychology or something that exists outside it? (Which also seems to bring me back to one of the first things I posted to this list). There are a number of questions balled together. While I think that the competence/performance distinction as originally conceived forestalled working out the actual relation between the two (perhaps premature at the time) and thus equated psychology (competence) with the linguistic formalism, I fail to see how linguistics is merely logic. Would you call generative phonology a form of logic? On the broader question of logic, you wouldn't want to revert to the psychologism of the late 19th century, would you? There have been attempts to avoid both psychologism and Platonism--Popper, the Soviet notion of ideality, etc. ___ 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
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] RE: George Resich's *How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science
At 06:47 PM 7/19/2005 +0900, CeJ wrote: I'm wondering if the cold war actually transformed anything. And is there really much more to say on the topic after Lakatos, Feyerabend, but also the post-structuralists? What does this mean? More interesting to me has always been LP-related but not pure LP. For example, Wittgenstein's foray into the philosophy of psychology. One totally underestimated philosopher of science was the non-LP Jean Piaget, a Swiss who wrote in French. Piaget was quite interested in a unity of sciences and even wrote a monograph about it (which we never studied in university philosophy of science class back in the early 80s, but whose main name, Kuhn, later acknowledged a debt to Piaget). Interestingly enough a quick search of the Marx-related web yielded a typical Piaget piece about the LPs! I might add, cognitive science could sure use a review of the likes of Wittgenstein, Piaget, and Vygotsky. Here is just an excerpt that focuses on the LPs--the part about Chomsky is QUITE good. I really like the end sentence of the excerpt, so much I'll quote it here too, for those who aren't going to read what follows or surf to the site: The part about Chomsky is not good at all. More comments below addressed to the Piaget essay. If indeed we find logical structures in the coordinations of actions in small children even before the development of language, we are not in a position to say that these logical structures are derived from language. This is a question of fact and should be approached not by speculation but by an experimental methodology with its objective findings. A good position to take. The first principle of genetic epistemology, then, is this - to take psychology seriously. Taking psychology seriously means that, when a question of psychological fact arises, psychological research should be consulted instead of trying to invent a solution through private speculation. Philosophy of language is mostly speculation, n'est ce pas? It is worthwhile pointing out, by the way, that in the field of linguistics itself, since the golden days of logical positivism, the theoretical position has been reversed. Bloomfield in his time adhered completely to the view of the logical positivists, to this linguistic view of logic. But currently, as you know, Chomsky maintains the opposite position. Chomsky asserts, not that logic is based on and derived from language, but, on the contrary, that language is based on logic, on reason, and he even considers this reason to be innate. He is perhaps going too far in maintaining that it is innate; this is once again a question to be decided by referring to facts, to research. But is this an accurate characterization of Chomsky's position? This doesn't sound right to me. It is another problem for the field of psychology to determine. Between the rationalism that Chomsky is defending nowadays (according to which language is based on reason, which is thought to be innate in man) Where does Chomsky claim that language is based on reason? The second reason is found in Godel's theorem. It is the fact that there are limits to formalisation. Any consistent system sufficiently rich to contain elementary arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency. So the following questions arise: logic is a formalisation, an axiomatisation of something, but of what exactly? What does logic formalise? This is a considerable problem. There are even two problems here. Any axiomatic system contains the undemonstrable propositions or the axioms, at the outset, from which the other propositions can be demonstrated, and also the undefinable, fundamental notions on the basis of which the other notions can be defined. Now in the case of logic what lies underneath the undemonstrable axioms and the undefinable notions? This is the problem of structuralism in logic, and it is a problem that shows the inadequacy of formalisation as the fundamental basis. It shows the necessity for considering thought itself as well as considering axiomatised logical systems, since it is from human thought that the logical systems develop and remain still intuitive. Good point. The third reason why formalisation is not enough is that epistemology sets out to explain knowledge as it actually is within the areas of science, and this knowledge is, in fact not purely formal: there are other aspects to it. Good point. In his conclusion to this volume, Beth wrote as follows: The problem of epistemology is to explain how real human thought is capable of producing scientific knowledge. In order to do that we must establish a certain coordination between logic and psychology. This declaration does not suggest that psychology ought to interfere directly in logic - that is of course not true - but it does maintain that in epistemology both logic and psychology should be taken into account, since it is important to deal with both the formal aspects and the empirical aspects of human
[Marxism-Thaxis] RE: George Resich's *How the Cold War (CeJ)
6. RE: George Resich's *How the Cold War (CeJ) Message: 2 Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 23:01:01 +0900 From: CeJ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: Marxism-Thaxis Digest, Vol 21, Issue 17 To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu snip PiagetThe second reason is found in Godel's theorem. It is the fact that there are limits to formalisation. Any consistent system sufficiently rich to contain elementary arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency. So the following questions arise: logic is a formalisation, an axiomatisation of something, but of what exactly? What does logic formalise? This is a considerable problem. There are even two problems here. Any axiomatic system contains the undemonstrable propositions or the axioms, at the outset, from which the other propositions can be demonstrated, and also the undefinable, fundamental notions on the basis of which the other notions can be defined. Now in the case of logic what lies underneath the undemonstrable axioms and the undefinable notions? This is the problem of structuralism in logic, and it is a problem that shows the inadequacy of formalisation as the fundamental basis. It shows the necessity for considering thought itself as well as considering axiomatised logical systems, since it is from human thought that the logical systems develop and remain still intuitive. This interpretation of Godel's theorem is not correct. The theorem is contextual, within a Semantic Domain of a type (a formal notion), the theorem speaks of limits to formalisation. Now that domain is actually very narrow and there are lots of logics outside the domain. There are many papers which deal with non-Fregean FOPL in particular. Most of mathematics (in SOPL usually) is quite unaffected by Godel's theorem in particular. There has been a severe paradigm shift in formal linguistics since the development of logics (1970+) capable of dealing with vague, imprecise and uncertain knowledge. Those are more relevant in the discussion. Snip Charles Jannuzi Univ. of Fukui, Japan A. Mani Member, Cal. Math. Soc ___ 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
