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

On Tue, 6 Mar 2001, Boris Stremlin wrote:

> On Mon, 5 Mar 2001 wwagar@binghamton.edu wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Boris--
> > 
> >     Since I do not believe that "truth" is accessible, I don't accept
> > the Kantian phenomenal-noumenal distinction, and I cannot see the denial
> > of truth claims as a truth claim.
> 
> The point isn't the Kantian distinction (I used his terminology since we
> were talking about phenomena), but the separation of knowledge (in your
> sense) from truth, which is what makes positivist claims possible.  I just
> made the distinction using Marxian terms (do you agree with his
> statement?); I could just as easily have done it with Weberian ones.

        I don't find Marx's statement useful.

> Secondly, suppose someone tells you that their perception of reality is
> grounded on divine truth (as revealed in a particular text, experience,
> whatever).  Since you don't believe in truth, on what other basis do you
> deny the validity of their experience (and wouldn't a denial take us back
> to the law of 3 stages?)?

        What do you mean by "validity"?  If they had the experience, they
had it.  But I would not accept any truth claim based on it, any more than
I would accept a truth claim based on natural law philosophy or 
evolutionary biology, which disposes of all three of Comte's stages.  

> >  I identify not with Popper but with the
> > late A.J. Ayer.
> 
> I must admit to not being familiar with Ayer's work, but a cursory glance
> at the _Encyclopedia of Philosophy_ (Macmillan:1967) does little to change
> what I've said.  Quoting now from the "Ayer" article by D. J. O'Connor:
> 
> He adopts Hume's division of genuine statements into logical and
> empirical, together with a principle of verification which requires that
> an empirical statement shall not be counted as meaningful unless some
> observation is relevant to its truth or falsity.  This starting point has
> drastic and far-reaching results.  Metaphysical statements, since they
> purport to express neither logical truths nor empirical hypotheses, must
> accordinlgy be reckoned without meaning.  Theology is a special case of
> metaphysics; affirmations of divine existence are not even false, they are
> without sense.  For the same reason, value statements in ethics or
> aesthetics fail to attain the status of genuine statements and are exposed
> as expressions of of emotion with imperative overtones.  The a priori
> statements of logic and mathematics are empty of factual content and are
> true in virtue of the conventions that govern the use of the words that
> compose them.  The tasks left for philosophy after this withdrawal from
> its traditional boundaries are those of solving by clarification the
> problems left untouched by the advance of the sciences. (vol 1, p.230)
> 
> According to this account, Ayer indeed draws distinctions between logical
> and empirical truth, and adjudges other areas traditionally under the
> purview of philosophy as either failing to meet his criteria of truth, or
> ruling them out of bounds altogether.  In other words, the distinction
> from Comtean positivism is not significant with regard to this discussion.
> How one founds an ethical theory on this basis is beyond me (Graham
> McDonald, author of the Ayer entry in the newer Routledge _Encyclopedia of
> Philosophy, alleges that "Ayer was puzzled as to whether we were morally
> responsible for our actions or not" (v.1, p.617).

        I identify with Ayer (and with Marx, for that matter), but I do
not buy into every word he wrote.  In this instance, I simply prefer not
to use the term "truth," whether applied to logic or to empirical
research.  For me, truth is what an omniscient creature or creator would
know, i.e., the way things really are, and were, and will be.  In that
sense, Ayer would say that truth is inaccessible and any statement
purporting to represent "the" truth is cognitively meaningless.

> > So I base no value claims on sensory data or on some
> > alleged noumenal realm.  What is "good" is whatever people happen to
> > believe is good.
> 
> And after this I'm the postmodernist?

        You tell me!  You said some approving things about postmodernism,
but whether you are a postmodernist is for you to tell us.

> >  My hope for humankind is that in due course a consensus
> > will evolve on the matter of goodness, a consensus based on nothing more
> > than a will to agree, and a consensus, moreover, that will probably keep
> > changing as human evolution continues.

> So what exactly is wrong with the
> so-called dystopians (those whose utopias you happen to find distasteful),
> especially if they come up with a way to create a consensus (by killing
> off dissenters and engaging in bioengineering, e.g.?)  Won't they be
> justified before History (as they consistently claim)?  How does one
> adjudicate between utopias except on the basis of force?  Given the
> irreducibly complex (and ultimately inexplicable) origin of values, what
> hope is there for an evolution of consensus?

        What do you mean by "wrong"?  A utopia for me is a society that is
radically better than our own according to my value judgments, which are
neither "right" or "wrong" as a matter of cognition.  Since my value
judgments happen to be shared by millions of other people around the
world--we're talking about democracy, a socialist system of relations of
production, civil liberties, and more--I can hope that a global consensus
will eventually form around these preferences.  But obviously consensus by
itself is not what I would call good.  The Nazis had a fair amount of
consensus going for them in the German Reich of 1939, and it was a
consensus formed around preferences that I would call evil.  Can I "prove"
that the Nazis were "wrong"?  Of course not.

> >     On a related matter:  when I used the word "prophecy" in my
> > previous e-mail, I did mean "prediction," not a proclamation of the good
> > or a condemnation of the bad.  So I see my book not as prediction, but
> > as, without any claim to truth or divine inspiration, the imaging of what
> > I believe to be good and bad futures for humankind, given what we know of
> > human capacity and the environment of the solar system.  Earth, Inc. is a
> > dystopia;  Red Earth is a utopia;  and the House of Earth is a better
> > utopia.  Since I would define a "utopia" as a radically better
> > organization of society than what now exists, not a "perfect" society,
> > there can indeed be utopias and better utopias.
> > 
> >     I wonder if we're all that far apart?  I have never believed that
> > postmodernist theory is anything more than a ratification in the most
> > arcane possible language of three great early-to-mid-20th-century
> > movements of thought:  atheistic existentialism, logical positivism, and
> > historico-cultural relativism (= Historismus).
> 
> I offer no assessment of your characterization of postmodernism, since I
> can't really claim much familiarity with its corpus.  In fact, the whole
> issue is a red herring in this context:  if you notice, I have not once
> cited a name belonging to the postmodern canon in my argument.  Instead, I
> have cited world-systemists, Marx, Prigogine, and writers like Latour who
> are very critical of postmodernism.  My understanding of positivism is
> also shaped by writers like Eric Voegelin, who is very much identified
> with pre- (rather than post-) positivist currents of thought.  I don't
> think that the reduction of reality to text is superior to its reduction
> to phenomena, and I don't think irony is a terribly good principle for the
> organization of social life.

        As I understand postmodernism--and I don't cite its canon either--
it is not a reduction of reality to text but a reduction of perceptions of
reality to text.  I think that's an interesting way of saying that we have
no access to "the" truth, as I have defined truth.  I equate it very
roughly with the cultural relativism of a Boas, the denial of the
scientific status of ethics by an Ayer, or the opacity of l'en-soi as
described by a Sartre.  I agree that irony is a poor principle for the
organization of social life, but who is propounding irony?  Not I, sir.
I am simply attacking the tyranny implicit in any attempt by anybody
to impose on others a vision of the good based on truth claims or based on
cognition of sensory data.  So I am a moral Marxist but not a scientific
one.