Thesis, antithesis, synthesis

"sprechen sie Deutsche" is pretty much the only thing I remember from two years of German at GCSE. That and 'Ich habe zwolf jahre alt", which is less use now than it was which is not very much at all.

ich habe drei und zwanzig jahre alt, einen tiefgefroren bruder und ich spreche sehr klein, sehr scheiße

(we had to look up a random adjective once, and i chose 'tiefgefroren' (=deep frozen). never forgotten that, but it's proper useless )

swot

ich liebe dich. ah. ha.

TreeofJ:

If you do not like my off-hand manner with Posey, I should care.

I do not debate with rambling, poseurs who dissembled and fib.

I'd rather watch my toe-nails grow.

And if you (singly or collectively) think that this means I cannot respond to Posey, I do not care about that either.

I came here to debate dialectics, not feed his continent-sized ego.

You can act as his groupie(s) if you want; again, I careth not.

You can see the time and effort I am prepared to devote to debating dialectics in my sustained response to Wango/Fido -- my last post was over 10,000 words long.

Posey wants to post irrelevant comments about relevance logic (ironic or what?) -- most of which I would not disagree with --, so why he is regaling me with stuff I already know is probably something only his psychiatrist can tell us -- in the fond belief that I think Frege/Russell logic is the best thing since sliced Hegel (an allegation he made up, as I noted above -- he will find nothing at my site that says this, or even implies it -- I merely lionise its superiority over Aristotelian logic (since dialecticians generally think that this is all there is to Formal Logic) and to the syntactical mess you find in Hegel). But there is nothing in what I say that suggests it is a final truth, or that it captures all the inferences we can make -- indeed, I say the opposite in many of my Essays.

So, 95% of Posey's post is irrelevant, and since he is a fan or relevance logic, this suggests either that he really does not accept it, or that he does not understand it, or that it does not work.

The other 5% is based on the things Posey has made up, that is why he failed to quote any of my essays in support of his wild allegations.

For example, nowhere do I claim that the sectarianism in Marxism is caused by this whacko theory. I do say other things about the connection, but it is not as he would have you believe.

And his commitment to inference to the best explanation is equally shaky: he makes inferences to 'explanations' that have nothing to do with my ideas --; we might call Posey's approach to such reasoning, ‘inference to the best fib’.

So, those who think his post is a good one only do so because they have accepted his fibs as gospel (they even failed to note that he does not quote a single passage from my site in support of his fabrications).

Just about the only thing he gets right is my name.

And that is why I will only ever respond to him directly in the manner I have been doing.

But I am happy for him to continue to stalk me (this might say a lot about his attitude to women -- I'll leave that for the professionals to decide), and chase after me at RevLeft -- since his attacks have doubled the traffic to my site.

Way to go Posey!

That is precisely why I came here.

The other offensive things you say are as empty-headed as the rubbish Fido exudes -- and, as all here can now see, based solely your naive faith in this fibber.

[And I am a worker -- in full-time employment, and a union rep, too (unpaid).]

Si:

I'd call him a 'liar', but he and I actually share rather too many beliefs in common; so I opted for the milder 'fibber'.

You should be able to see from my reply to TreeofJ where Posey fibs, but he has been doing this for weeks now.

I pointed out a few to him earlier, but that just made him increase the rate at which he posted them.

I could see what a waste of time 'arguing’ with him was, so I have concentrated on what I came here to do: attack Dialectical Marxism, and publicise my site.

Inadvertently, Fido and Posey have helped me greatly to that end!

I can only hope they have the stamina to keep this up!

I have....

Her site is a massive jumble of very verbose essays. The requirement that a person must explicitly quote something from it, and she will only respond to that, is a pedantic and egotistical attitude towards online discussion.

i think it should be fairly clear from my essay that I think she doesn't have a clear understanding of the atomistic assumptions of empiricism and the problems this poses for radical social theory. i'll leave it to the readers here to infer how "relevant" this is.

if she disagrees with my characterization of the thrust of what she is saying or some position of hers, it is always open to her to respond by explaining herself. debates and discussions always have quite a bit of this, where someone interprets someone and then that person shows this isn't what they had in mind by clarifying, and so on.

I think the claim that dialectics has significantly contributed to Marxist sectarianism is a fair interpretation of what she says on her site. notice she doesn't say exactly what the "connection" is here. I think it isn't very plausible to suppose dialectics is a very good explainer of sectarianism.

But she'd rather exchange insults with wangwei (or whoever) than engage in a rational discussion. As she says on her website, her online method is to "go for the jugular from the get go".

my posting on revleft.com came about because of the many posts on that site by my old friend and comrade, Ed Clark, who posted under the moniker "redstar2000". revleft.com was down for quite awhile and I only recently realized that it had come back up.

her assertion that i was there because of her is perhaps a reflection of her "continent-sized ego". I think i've had roughly two posts on logic that responded to her, out of scores of posts i've made on that site.

why does she suppose that what i wrote in my essay above was only for her benefit?

Thank you treeofjudas. I spent a number of years teaching logic mainly to working class students, i had to learn how to explain clearly what logic was all while making as few assumptions as possible about what they might know.

One more point. Rosa says:

This comment is somewhat disingenuous, or is a form of backtracking without admitting such. As she has acknowledged in this thread, she never discusses inductive logic. And as is clear here in these latest posts, she disparages inference to the best explanation (the method of hypothesis and test, central to the empirical sciences). Thus the fact is, she greatly overemphasizes formal deductive logic over non-deductive reasoning, despite the importance of the latter to reasoning in every day life and the sciences.

On her site she does mention what she calls "alternative logics" and I suppose she'd consider relevance logic an "alternative logic." But the only alternative logics she refers to on her site are logics of deductive inference.

Thus the comment of hers i pointed out above only admits to possible limitations of FRL in accounting for deductive inference, but still, that fails to acknowledge my point that she fixates on, and exaggerates the importance of, formal deductive logic. This was in fact one of the failings of traditional philosophy that was continued by "Analytic Philosophy" but with some beginnings of a change in this regard in the past few decades, as a result of what is called the "naturalistic turn" in philosophy, a materialistic trend which tends to reject any hard and fast line between "science" and "philosophy".

ps.Rosa do you conceive of your style as 'popular' or do you really have so little grace?

SIMCP:

Do you complain that Das Kapital is well over 1 million words long?

I explain in Essay One why I have gone to such lengths in my endeavour to destroy this 'theory' once and for all.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2001.htm

You need to address those reasons, not ramble like Posey here.

Who, you will note, still cannot find anything I have written that supports his fibs.

Hence, my continual baiting of him.

And I respond for the third time: if you can't be bothered to read even the summaries of my ideas (that I have posted at my site), desist from asking me this question, for I will continue to reply in this manner.

Posey:

I refer the honourable stalker to my previous response to him.

Si:

You'd be better asking such stupid things of those who read Hegel, and dote on the 'popular 'style they find there.

Sorry JK, I missed this:

Yes, but I am not sure how this affects my point?

SIMCP:

The summary I pointed you toward is 20,000 words long; 1.5% of the material at my site.

So, it is a summary.

It is not possible to undermine a theory that has dominated Marxism for 150 years in a few pages.

Now, my aim is not to attack Hegel as such (I'd rather prefer to ignore him totally), but to undermine his influence on Marxists (the deleterious effects of which you can see in Wang's comments).

However, I will be dissecting Hegel directly (but only certain core ideas from the 'Logic') in Essay Twelve Parts Three and Four -- due out in 2008.

You will get a flovour of what I am going to say if you read this:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2008_02#Lawler

Which is a direct attack on Hegel (as interpreted by James Lawler, in the best account I have ever read of 'dialectical contradictions').

[Be warned, this is a 20,000+ section of a 65,000 word Essay.]

So you say, but you will need to substantiate this.

1) I see nothing of use in this mystical theory at all, except, perhaps, to provide more fuel for Hume's bonfire.

2) Marx abandoned Hegel (I do not care if he misunderstood him or not), as he himself says.

3) No, I will not explain my objections to Hegel here -- for reasons I have said many times.

Why are you perseverating on this?

what a laughable riposte. when's the last time you enjoyed writing? I can just imagine you, plodding phrase by tedious phrase through your war of attrition with the Hegelian Marxists, like Haig at the Somme - bon mots sent to die on the battefield, wave after wave, til the enemy is worn down and cedes the position - out of weariness, I should add, above all else...

"Hail, continual plodders, hail!
"Lengthen out the tedious tale,"
Pedant still in head and knee,
Dull, of humour not a trace,
Permanently commonplace,
Sans génie et sans ésprit!"

Another ruling class dilletante schweinhunde whose ideas should be purged from the movement, tainted as he is with the Romantics...

SIMCP:

He put his praise for Hegel pointedly in the past tense, and then followed that up with his declaration that he merely "coquetted" with Hegelian jargon, and then only in a few places in Capital.

That was after saying this:

Bold emphasis added.

Now, in this summary (which Marx calls the 'dialectic' method), not a single Hegelian concept can be found,

So, it is clear that Marx turned his back on Hegel, parodied him, and gave his approval to a summary that I (or any other anti-Hegelian) could have written.

The rational kernel then contains no Hegelian terms at all, or perhaps only a few with which one can join Marx, "coquetting" with them.

I'd go further and ditch even that.

I am not sure why you ask me about Hegel's references to Hume, though.

My reference to him was rhetorical -- I'd like to see all this ruling-class rubbish burnt.

And I recognise that most people cannot find time to read my Essays; but some can and do -- and they regularly send me positive feedback from right across the globe.

When this project of mine is finished (in about 10 years -- no exaggeration --, I have been at it now for 9), perhaps then I will write you a 500 word summary of why Hegel is crap (to use a Wangwei-ism).

I note you are happy to accept Hegel's verbosity, and Marx's easily out does my own.

I only mentioned those figures so that you would have some idea of the length of the essay you would be delving into, so that I could stop you over-taxing your short attention span.

And I can imagine what you'd say if I posted Essays just 1000 words long: 'how superifical Rosa is' (indeed, earlier versions of my work had been described that way). Whatever I did, you lot would moan, so I might as well please myself, and be done with it.

I aim to be as thorough as Marx was; if that is to admit to verbosity, so be it.

Si:

I guess roundabout the last time you outsmarted a carrot -- ten years ago, in that case.

Whereas you just bash away at the keyboard with that root vegetable you kept as a souvenir.

Like SIMCP, I continue posting here because the subject touches upon things I'm interested in. I've gotten worse insults than Rosa can dish out over the years.

I don't think Marx's social theory necessarily hangs on accepting the ideas of "dialectic in nature".

I'm going to quote bits from Rosa's (tediously long) essays but first I want to start by distinguishing two different ways of looking at human beings. The first is what I'll call the social theory of the person. On this view, humans are raised in social groups, in their families, they learn a particular language, are part of a certain people, their life is directly shaped by the class situation they're in. Workers find it necessary to group together and form collective organizations such as unions and struggle together, express solidarity with each other, to protect themselves against the classes that dominate them.

This means that the desires, beliefs, tastes, skills of someone will reflect these groups. The groups are part of that person's "identity", part of who they are.

Now let's contrast this with another view that i'll call the atomist or individualist theory of the person. This view was first articulated theoretically by bourgeois philosophers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, beginning in Britain in the 17th century. This was also the period of the emergence of the capitalist system, and the political movement of the early English capitalists to privatize the means of life via things like the enclosures movement, and to avoiid their traditional obligations, and traditional rights, of the peasantry under feudalism.

The individualist theory views the person as a fully formed social atom prior to society. This is why the social obligations and rights of the individual are then seen as a problem, something that must be explained by appeals to "enlighted self-interest" or fictions about "social contracts". This is falsified by the actual reality however because actual humans are formed with group identities and loyalties and these already provide them reasons for acting in accord with obligations to others...such as not crossing a picket line.

Now, I'd point out, what people here are probably aware of, is that the social theory of the person was a common presupposition of both Marxism and social anarchism (altho anarchism has historically been influenced at times by liberal individualist notions, so there is more ambiguity here).

David Hume's radical empiricist program was a complete working out of the atomist assumptions of individualism, applied to the world in general. Hume sees the unfolding of history as made up of discrete events with no real connections bertween them, a world of complete coincidence. He thus completely rejects any idea of causality or of anything real that corresponds to the "laws" of the scientists. His interpretation is that laws are more patterns or generalizations or correlations that we uncover among the sea of unconnected atomistic happenings.

In the 20th century Hume's atomistic metaphysics came to be mixed with the modern symbolic logic, developed by Frege and popularized by Bertrand Russell (i call it the
Frege/Russell logic -- FRL), and advocated by the logical positivists and other extreme empiricists. FRL also has atomistic assumptions, as I pointed out in a previous post.

I think one of the things that Marx liked about Hegel...and Aristotle...is that they saw the world as a world of real connections. Marx disagreed with the sort of atomistic metaphysics propagated by the radical empiricist program of Hume.

One of the things I disagree with Rosa about is that she confuses the project of ridding radical theory of "dialectics" in favor of ordinary eveyday language -- something I agree with her about -- with adopting elements of the logical positivist or extreme empricist program, such as her rejection of all talk about causality or forces, and her apparent adoption of the Humean view of laws or theories:

But it's well-known in the literature about "laws" that the Humean view of them as mere generalizations won't work. For one thing, it can't distinguish law-like properties of things from accidental correlations. It used to be remarked that the annual variation in deaths in India correlated exactly with variations in the numbers of engineering articles published in journals in the USA.

Also, Rosa's attack on the discourse about causality is inconsistent with her advocacy of the ordinary language of people in everyday life. It's also inconsistent with the language of everyday applied science. Here's a sentence from a textbook on electricity:

"An electrically charged body exerts a physical force on other bodies around it and can make them do work by moving or lifting them."

If you read the literature of climatologists about global warming, they'll say that water vapor contributes to the greenhouse effect but has a fairly constant effect over time, a natural variation, effected by things like seasonal variation in temperature. It's part of the "backgrond conditions" of explanations about climate change. but man-made greenhouse gases create what they call a "forcing" effect, that is, they change the underlying conditions of the climate.

Moreover, the way that law-like properties can be differentiated from accidental generalizations is thru the notion of physical or natural necessity. For example, let's say you're an electrician, or an electronic tech working on electrical equipment. One of the things you have to know is Ohm's Law which can be expressed by the formula

(OL) C = V/R

where R is resistance, V is voltage (pressure) and C is the current (amperage). An electronic tech will have his or her voltmeter handy to be able to measure these properties of circuits. If you change the voltage, but don't change the resistance, the result will be a change in the amps. This change is not accidental. The property denoted by (OL) is a necessary property of circuits. (In quantum mechanics there is a very tiny theoretical probabiliy of it not holding but this is of no practical importance.)

But Rosa rejects the langage of physical or natural necessity and the ordinary language of causality:

Another quote that exhibits Rosa's style:

it's true that anthropomorphism can lead to confusions in talk about causality. For example, the whole debate on whether humans have "free will" is shot thru with this. The idea is that if physics says that there is causal determinism of all the events that transpire, then people are "forced" to do what they do, and have no "freedom".

Even assuming that some physical, causal determinism is true, at, say, the micro-physical level, that doesn't mean you are "forced" to do something. Being "forced" to do something is defined by a social context. If a person puts a gun to your head and says "your money or your life?", we'd say you're "forced" to had over the money. That's because this person has set things up so that if you don't go along, there a big likelihood of something really bad happening to you, i.e. being shot.

Now we'd say an action is "free" to the extent it flows from your own beliefs and desires, is an expression of your own self-determination, your own self-management of your life. If, on the other hand, constraining social structures make your life the plaything of another group, as happens with the working class under class society, this is oppression and alienation, which is the opposite of "freedom." But whether you are oppresed or free in the sense just explained, both situations would be consistent with a micro-level physical causal determinism.

I don't know if such a determinism exists, but whether it does or not is completely irrelevant to "freedom" in the ordinary sense, and the way that radicals are interested in it. That's because, if we suppose you're "free" in the sense of self-determining, this just means your life flows out of your own purposes, your own plans, your own desires and thoughts, in cooperation with other people in your society. But this is compatible with the existence of some micro-level physical causal determinism. That's because "determinism" in that sense merely means that events emerge out of previous events in ways that would be explicable in terms of the structures and conditions in which they occur.

Another issue that Rosa touches on is that of talk about the traits or properties of things. Rosa seems to reject this talk. This is another case where I think her extreme empiricism contradicts her intent to defend everyday discourse of the population.

One thing that we do frequently is that we compare people and things. When we think they are similar, if asked "in what respect?" we might then list traits they have in common. This presupposes then the language of shared traits. For example, I could say truly, about my two cats:

(1) Gata's eyes are yellow
(2) Lucy's eyes are yellow

In logic "...is yellow" is called a "predicate". And "Gata's eyes" and "Lucy's eyes" are singular terms because they directly pick out certain things (a set of eyes in each case).

People sometimes have a hard time telling my cats apart, and that's because they look so similar. Their fur is all black, they have a similar cat morophology, and they both have yellow eyes. Now, from (1) and (2) I could infer that Gata's and Lucy's eyes share a feature, they're yellow. But this assumes that there ARE shared features. Shared features are what philosphers traditionally called "universals".

But Rosa seems to reject the talk of shared features. She doesn't seem to allow that there are properties we can refer to and talk about. She wants to only allow predication or attribution of features, as in (1)-(2) but not reference to the properties.

At least, this is how i interpret the following passages of hers:

I'm not certain what to make of this. But let me suggest a view about what universals -- shared features -- are that she doesn't discuss. This is the view that they are actual, contingently existing concrete entities that exist in the world around us and thus we humans, as part of our social communicative practice, develop and retain words to track these various properties. The features that words track can change over time, and has done so, based on our changing needs and interests. New words are coined and old words change their meaning. (This view of shared features or "universals" as existing in the physical world, observable by us, etc. was first suggested in the middle ages by the philospher John Duns Scotus.) Thus I agree with Rosa in rejecting either the Platonist view of univerals as existing outside space and time in some abtract realm (Plato's Heaven) or stuck in people's minds (as with the empiricists). It's just that she's overlooked an alternative view. I don't really care if she calls this "philosophy" or what. it doesn't matter what we call it. The point is that in our ordinary discussions and theorizings we do in fact talk about the properties of things.

She has a problem when she denies that a predicate such as "...is yellow" tracks or designates anything in the world. If so, why does it exist? How do we then account for the truth conditions of (1)-(2).

In my example of Ohm's Law above, I'll point out that the variables V, C, R range over attributes. Ohm's Law itself designates an attribute, an attribute that every electrical circuit necessarily has. But according to Rosa, we don't need words to designate shared traits. Or so it seems. After all, "current", "amperage" and "resistance" are "abstract terms".

To back up my earlier point about how she attributes sectarianism to the influence of dialectics I offer the following quote:

Continuing....

In trying to sell Wittgenstein to leftists, Rosa mentions things like his sympathies for ordinary people...which was real, despite his being from a wealthy family in Vienna...and his seriously considering moving to the Soviet Union in the '20s or '30s, which was probably due to his romanticizing the Soviet Union, as was common then.

What she doesn't mention is Wittgenstein's positivist connections. In the '20s/'30s/'40s there was a very influential philosophical trend called Logical Positivism. Like Rosa, the positivists attacked any and all "metaphysics" and "traditional philosophy". the trend emerged out of a group of intellectuals in the '20s, the Vienna Circle, which included Wittgenstein, as well as Otto Neurath, who was a Marxist.

The positivists aimed to marry an extreme empiricist interpretation of physics (e.g. as promoted by Ernst Mach) with modern symbolic logic. The positivists shared many views in common with other extreme empiricists of that era such as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper.

Altho Wittgenstein's later philosophical views change a bit, I believe he never really abandoned his positivist leanings.

Logical positivism is inconsistent with taking a realist view of theorizing and science. And I think Marx was definitely a realist. When he talked about "laws of motion" or "forces" i think he believed there were such things, and that we can improve our understanding of them through investigation and practical test.

I think that anti-realist views are an enemy of actual struggle because they promote scepticism and undermine commitment.

i thought you were arguing hegel was elitist in his jargon?

Posey:

I refer the honourable but severely bruised ego to my earlier response to him.

JK:

I was merely using this word ad hominen against Wang/Fido, who introduced this into the discussion (alongside my stalker, Posey).

I think that whatever one wants to say about Hegel, his being an 'elitist' is the least of his sins.

You will note that, even now, after ransacking a few of my essays, Posey here still cannot find a single quotation to substantiate his fibs.

SIMCP:

Well, I did not discriminate: not a single concept/term-of-art unique to Hegel (or later Hegelians) occurs in this passage, which Marx calls the 'dialectic method'

I am happy to accept his own description.

As far as Hegel's use of language is concerned, I am no more interested in that than I am in the mating habits of howler monkeys.

I am not the least bit interested in Hegel, except to help terminate his influence amongst Marxists -- in line with Marx's own trajectory.

Note that Rosa won't say what these alleged "fibs" are. I'll leave it to the readers to say whether the quotes I've provided here do substantiate my characterization of
some of her ideas.

The quotes will also point out that Rosa's style is vague and bombastic and filled with metaphorical language. This makes what she says hard to pin down. This style is inconsistent with her alleged advocacy of a reliance on ordinary language and a hard-headed scientific approach. That's because a person's claims can't be tested if they aren't stated clearly and can't be pinned down.

I'm also not especially concerned with the fact that it is Rosa that says these things. I'm interested in opposing extreme empiricist/positivist and anti-realist influence in radical theorizing, and she just happens to be a handy example.

Posey:

I refer the honourable, but visually-impaired, ego to my previous response to him.