OK, jks, after suffering through Cornforth's MATERIALISM AND THE
DIALECTICAL METHOD, I can see why you hate diamat as you do. This sort of
literature corrupts everyone indoctrinated by it. But diamat doesn't have
to be that dumb. I've been defending a more sophisticated version of it on
the Internet since the early '90s, and my views have undergone modification
the more I learn. The revolution in logic occurred about the same time, I
think, as Engels was writing his stuff, but while the paths of the two
traditions have crossed at various points, the appropriate lessons were
never properly disseminated, if in fact, definitive conclusions can even be
drawn. When one dumbs down, the effect is not to popularize ideas but to
sabotage them. I detest the culture of simplemindedness promulgated by the
CPs, Trots, Maoists, and assorted Stalinists. A lot of smart people have
gone along with them, possibly by trading on the vagueness and ambiguities
of their doctrines, simultaneously politically intimidated by them. I
cannot stand Marxist-Leninists. Why haven't they all died off already?
I don't buy Carnap's argument. He claims that metaphysics is poetry, only
bad poetry. And I don't buy the notion that poetry is
non-cognitive. "Jabberwocky" is non-cognitive. Andrew Lang is
non-cognitive, I'm guessing. But a whole lot of poetry has gone to great
lengths to be cognitive. Nietzsche, whom Carnap supposedly valued, was not
merely a poet.
At 01:08 PM 8/17/2005 -0700, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
"Cognitively" meaningless, which does not mean utter
nonsense. Poetry is also cognitively meaningless for
the LPs, which means for them roughly you don't try to
assess its truth value by using it to generate
predictions about future observations. That seems
right, although you can get truths about human
"nature"/behavior from poetry, as Aristotle said. But
the LP's didn't even have to think that doing, say,
Hegelian metaphysics was pointless, just that it
wouldn't tell you about the way things actually are, a
notion they would regard as cognitively meaningless as
well. Metpahysics would be more like poetry -- a view
that, actually, I think Heidegger came to believe.
If the LPs themselves ever got around to that
historical or sociological analysis, I am not aware of
it, except in the form of crude polemics about bad
metaphysics. The closest exception is Reichenbach's
book on the Rise of the Scientific Conception of
Philosophy, which is a little less manifesto-like and
a little less polemical than Ayer's Language, Truth,
and Logic.
_______________________________________________
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
