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

On Tue, 6 Mar 2001 wwagar@binghamton.edu wrote:

> > 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.  

The answer to this question hinges on the definition of truth, which I
deal with below.

>       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.

You are defining truth as an epistemological system derived from a
completely unhindered view of the world (assuming that such a view is
possible at all, an assumption that depends on the supposition of a
perfectly objective world observed by an omniscient observer; the
corollary to this definition is that since we can't have this view,
anything goes.  I define truth as right conduct in a universe which we
participate in but don't control or even have a privileged perception of.
This is precisely why ethics, and not epistemology forms the basis of
philosophy (in its original sense, not in Ayer's diminished one).

> > 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.

What I mean by "wrong" is that there simply isn't any basis under a
positivist system for interpreting qualitative statements.  Your
differentiation between Nazism and socialism is senseless in terms of
positivist thought (Ayer would call it the "boo/hurrah theory of ethics").
The supposition that one utopia is better than another rests on the ethics
of intention:  what sacrifices are legitimate en route to the "better
utopia" is a meaningless question, since the supposition that the end
state is better than the present cannot be falsified (there's a positivist
concept!)  An ethics of action, on the other hand, addresses the questions
of means and practicability.  In my view,  Wallerstein recognizes
this distinction , and for this very reason proposes to replace utopia
with what he calls "utopistics".

> > 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.

> I agree that irony is a poor principle for the
> organization of social life, but who is propounding irony?  Not I, sir.

I didn't say you were.  I was just denying that my critique of positivism
stemmed from a postmodern position, because I find both equally
problematic (though for different reasons).

> 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.

Since I see truth as a question of action and not not perception, I am not
tyrannizing anyone with my claims.  When the form under which I try to
undertake that action is reduced to an epistemological dogma, THEN it
becomes tyranny.  The absolute prohibition against the asking
of existential questions is a form of tyranny as well.

-- 
Boris Stremlin
bc70219@binghamton.edu