Re: positivism (was Re: "rise of china" and wst)

Boris--

        I wasn't laughing at you, believe it or not.  I was entertained,
but also enlightened.  In many ways you hit the proverbial nail on its
proverbial head.  The whole problem with the futurist endeavor from the
get-go has been an incorrigible tendency to project the past into the
future.  No matter how many whizzes, bangs, and sharp left (or right) 
turns we introduce into our anticipations, the echo of the past is loud
and clear.  The last hundred years have included the global triumph of
capital (Book the First), a vast experiment (USSR) in a would-be socialist
commonwealth (Book the Second), which came unraveled more or less
peacefully, and many of the same kinds of technological and cultural
exploits imagined for the House of Earth (Book the Third).  So, to that
extent, A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FUTURE is the last hundred years transposed
into the next two hundred.  If you see it as a work of prophecy.  I don't
however.  For me it is an exhibition of utopias, both "bad" and "good."

        But I am not a disciple of Auguste Comte.  I am more of a logical
positivist.  The rejection of truth claims is not a truth claim by any
stretch of the imagination.  It doesn't say that sensory data can give us
truth.  It says that sensory data can give us knowledge, which is an
entirely different animal.  And that knowledge is subject to infinite
revision as more data come into view and more logics and theories are
contrived that enable us to arrange and rearrange the data in more ways.
Nor would I have any use for the notion of "laws" once we pass from the
observation of inanimate nature into the worlds of life, mind, and
society.  Even inanimate nature is so massively complex that I might be
reluctant to speak of "laws" if I were a physicist.

        Cheers,

        Warren

On Sat, 3 Mar 2001, Boris Stremlin wrote:

> On Fri, 2 Mar 2001 wwagar@binghamton.edu wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Boris and All--
> > 
> >     Ha, ha!  That's the best (negative) criticism of A SHORT HISTORY
> > OF THE FUTURE I have yet seen.  I intend to cite it routinely in future
> > discussions of that venerable book.  My only defense is that Wallerstein
> > himself saw it very differently, but so what?  The last 100 years
> > transposed onto the next 200!  Bravo!  Maybe that's why historians should
> > keep their idiographic hands off the future!
> 
> Glad to be of service, whether entertainment or (God forbid) a source of
> insight.
> 
> >     Of course WST is contested terrain.  Along with everything else.
> > Even I am corrupted by postmodernism, or why would I deny that the future
> > can be predicted?  In my courses, I even offer the argument that the
> > future cannot be predicted for the same reason that the past cannot be
> > predicted.  But that's not quite fair, because I do, at the back of my
> > positivist mind, believe that a God could do both.  Also please recall
> > that positivism in its original sense incorporated a flat denial of
> > metaphysical inquiry.  Down with omniscience, teleology, truth claims.
> > Not suitable hunting grounds for mere human beings, who have only their
> > eyes and ears and noses and the tools of logical discourse.
> 
> Isn't the rejection of truth claims and the supposition that knowledge can
> only originate on the basis of sensory perception also a truth claim?
> Here, in a nutshell, is the positivist credo, apparently still unchanged
> from the day it was first stated:
> 
> "In whatever way we study the general development of the human intellect,
> whether according to the rational method or empirically, we discover,
> despite all seeming irregularities, a fundamental Law to which its
> progress is necessarily and invariably subjected.  The content of this Law
> is that the intellectual system of man, considered in all its aspects, had
> to assume succesively three distinct characters: the theological, the
> metaphysical and, finally, the positive or scientific character.  Thus man
> began by conceiving phenomena of every kind as due to the direct and
> continuous influence of supernatural agents; he next regarded them as
> products of various abstract forces, inherent in the bodies, but distinct
> and heterogeneous; and, finally, he restricts himself to viewing them as
> subject to a certain number of invariable natural laws which are nothing
> but the expression in general terms of relations observed in their
> development."
> 
> Comte said this back in the 1820's, and I guess it's only natural (or
> should I say in accordance with the Law) that  an author of _Building the
> City of Man_ still seeks a divine affirmation for his belief in the
> Law of 3 Stages as the foundation for "truth claims" today.  
> 
> But I guess this belief conflicts with the corrupt postmodernist claim
> that the future cannot be predicted, after all, so bless you for that,
> Warren.
> 
>