Ian had written :>>>He [Nagarjuna] invites us to explore that which is neither irrational nor embraces the law of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle. To the extent those issues make contact [with] d-t [i.e., double-think], via associative psychology, yes he would assert the need to *understand* the multiple meanings of double-think.<<<
I replied:>> please explain, with an example.<<
Ian now says:>I'll give examples first and then attempt explanation:
>1) "A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth." - Niels Bohr
>Is the above assertion true, false or undecideable within two-valued logic? Surely we would need more context, but what if giving the large context means further exposition of the history of quantum theory and it's brushing up with the limits of two valued logic? Clearly I can't do that here.<
That's right. It's extremely unclear what Bohr was saying. For all we know, he may be totally wrongheaded in the above statement. We can't assume _a priori_ that he's accurate. We don't know how many beers he had had when he said it.
>2) "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself [I am large, I contain multitudes]" Walt Whitman
>This statement, perhaps, gets us quite a bit closer to one of the main issues N. [Nagarjuna] was trying to deal with. How many inconsistencies in dialogue do we allow before our sense of the Other's epistemic-communicational integrity begins to create problems for further dialogue?<
what are you saying here? the jargon-to-signal ratio is a bit high to allow comprehension.
The quote from Whitman seems to say that he's admitting to irrationality. That's no reason why we should be irrational. Unless you're arguing that he's an authority who should be emulated?
> What happens when we tacitly assume the law of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle as a norm of discourse and, more importantly, as norms of adversarial communication. Are those who would assert that relaxing or breaking those tacit norms thereby "written off" as irrational?<
I don't think that we should expect poets to be logical (in an Aristotelian way), since two key things about poetry are its explicit ambiguity and its evocation of emotions. Writing poetry has an important role in society that's very different from thinking scientifically or clearly; we shouldn't insist that it be logical or illogical. (Similarly, we shouldn't insist that those who want to understand the world should be poets.)
The idea that "I am large, I contain multitudes," if I remember correctly, is an empirical assertion, something about Whitman sharing the human essence, i.e., sharing characteristics with all other people, and therefore being connnected with them. FWIW, it makes sense to me (something about species-being).
I had written: >>>> I'd agree with Marx. There aren't any true contradictions in logic (though they do exist in illogical thinking).<<<<
Ian writes: >Okay, then how do we explain Marx's extensive use of Hegel's Logic which clearly relaxes and breaks with that assumption? Even more importantly if there are true contradictions, yet not of the kind that Hegel supposed, are they of any use for a future of political economy that makes use of such a term as "the contradictions of capitalism" and "the negation of negation"?<
I don't interpret Hegel's Logic as the same kind of "logic" as that of Aristotle; I don't see it as contradicting Aristotle, either, since they can play different roles in helping us to understand the world and figure out how to change it.
Rather, I see the Logic as an empirically-oriented heuristic and also what's nowadays called a "model" of history (with Hegel having an idealist vision of empirical reality).
Ari's logic, on the other hand, is _not_ empirically-oriented, but is instead an attempt to deal with internal mental processes, clarifying them. Empirical content comes from the outside.
For Marx, the phrases "contradictions of capitalism" and "the negation of the negation" are both part of his social theory, i.e., his abstract socio-economic (i.e., empirical) description. The former refers, to my mind, to conflicts inherent in the social-structural set-up that characterizes capitalism in the real, empirical world, while the latter refers to the end of such conflicts by changing -- abolishing -- the structure. The fact that Marx uses interesting prose doesn't make him illogical (in Ari's sense).
Ian: >It would seem we are left with two, possibly more, options:
>1) Hegel's analyses of contradictions was internally contradictory and those contradictions were fatal to his project of understanding whether true contradictions existed, or:<
it's also possible that the word "contradiction" means something different in different contexts, just as many or even most other words do. (As noted above, this phenomenon of varied meanings with context includes the word "logic.") That is, though the spelling is the same, "contradiction" means something different for Aristotle than it does in an empirically-oriented heuristic.
>2) Hegel's analyses of contradictions was internally consistent and the project of attempting to understand and explain true contradictions in the spirit of Nagarjuna and Hegel should continue precisely because they would be of immense possible relevance for understanding social conflicts that cannot be reduced to communicational practices and modes of analyses that tacitly assume the LNC [law of non-contradiction] and the LEM [law of the excluded middle].<
If we interpret Hegel's dialectical vision along the lines of heuristic, an empirical theory, or a model, the LNC and LEM aren't especially relevant, since not all heuristics, theories, or models are deductively derived. The LNC and the LEM, in other words, are at a completely different analytical level. (As a partial analogy, stuff from quantum physics is at a different analytical level from stuff in the study of animal behavior.)
>Are the contradictions of capitalism simply reducible to the illogicality of the agents-classes in the economy and their unintended consequences or are there irreducible conflicts of interest that cannot be explained away by asserting that agents are illogical? If the latter, then we might be better off significantly relaxing the LNC and the LEM.<
It's not the agents that are "illogical." (I never said they were, for one thing.) As noted in the phrase "unintended consequences," what's logical for an individual can be illogical for the aggregate (or vice-versa). Similarly, the "irreducible conflicts of interest" do not arise from the alleged "illogicality" of individual agents.
Significantly relaxing the LNC and the LEM seems to be embracing illogical thinking (at least in the sense of Aristotle). Why do we need to reject Aristotle when (as far as I can tell) neither Hegel nor Marx did so? (I'd say instead that they _demoted_ Aristotle relative to the exalted throne that the deductive rationalists put him on.)
I had written:>> okay, you don't think that you can explain this "paraconsistent or dialethic logic" here, given time constraints and the like. But is it the pretty much the same as fuzzy logic? If so, all these people are saying is that the purity of Aristotle-style logic does not apply in the complexity of the empirical world. I'd totally agree. There's a clear difference between our efforts to think logically (in Aristotle's sense) and the real world.<<
Ian:> Paraconsistent logic overalps with but is not reducible to fuzzy logic as far as I can tell at my current level of studying the two.<
okay.
>> In any event, Aristotelian logic isn't real (empirical) as much as _ideal_ (as with math and other abstract forms of reasoning). We _want_ to be logical, even though it's typically impossible to be totally so (not only because of the complexity of the external world but also because of the nature of human brains). Clearly Aristotelian logic must be complemented with other aspects of philosophy and empirical study.<<
Ian:>Well, I'd quibble with regarding it [Ari-style logic] as an ideal if it needs extensive complements from richer logics <
A common conceit among economists is that Ari-style deductive reasoning is the _only_ way the human mind should work in order to understand and change the world is wrong (a symptom of "autistic economics," etc.) But what I was trying to say was that Ari-style logic still a cleaned-up, ideal, way of thinking, a way to avoid being muddled. That's what "ideal" means here; it doesn't say that it's either Ari's way or the highway.
Just as deductivist rationalism is incomplete, so is inductivist empiricism. Deduction/rationalism and induction/empiricism need to be synthesized. The dialectical way of looking at matters is required for such a synthesis, to my mind. (Among other things, the deduction/induction and the rationalism/empiricism dichotomies are false dichotomies, since one can't do deduction without induction, and vice-versa.)
>and if those logics are deployed to significant political and economic advantage over those who don't, how would we go about mitigating those forms of conflict if the parties to substantial disputes reach impasses?<
I don't understand this.
>Clearly this a problem economists are familair with when disputes don't hinge on "merely" empirical arguments over various statistics etc., no?<
Right. In econ, there are competing theories that affect the nature of the statistics, etc. (The old saying was that it would never happen that a Chicago economist would be convinced by Yale evidence (i.e., Tobin stuff) or vice-versa.) But I don't see how this kind of reference to empirical/statistical issues fits with the discussion at hand. It seems to come out of the blue.
> Machine Dreams [by Philip Mirowski] has some excellent passages on whether or not there is futility in using game theory in order to outsmart an opponent that is of relevance to what I'm struggling to get at. <
Game theory clearly has its limits. But that doesn't say it's useless. (What's really wrong is when people apply game-theoretic reasoning without seeing the limits, in imitation of Gary Becker's bogus efforts to apply the pre-game theory version of neoclassical economics to all issues. Similarly, the problem with Nash equilibrium isn't the concept as much as the way it's usually applied.)
me: >> This ideal [of Ari-style logical thinking] is important: we should demand logical thinking where possible. Imagine that a Bushwacker spokesclown defends the war on Iraq. I say "that's illogical" so the clown responds that it's "paraconsistent or dialethic logic and you wouldn't understand it." Would I accept that? no, because if the clown wants to convince me, he or she must employ clear thinking.<<
Ian: >Then again, if you met Richard Perle or Rumsfeld in person do you think no matter how logically consistent you or they were that you would budge each other's position if the dispute cannot be reduced to illogicallity?<
I don't care about "budging" such scum, even though Rumsfeld used to be my Congresscritter. Rather, the point is that if these folks are revealed as (1) breaking simple logic, as with demanding that Iraq prove a negative; (2) making up or falsifying empirical evidence, as with pushing the lie about the Kuwaiti incubators; and/or (3) presenting partial perspectives that rule out or leave out important empirical or logical points, as with systematically "forgetting" that the worst evidence against Saddam comes from the period when he was a US ally, then their perspectives and policies can be discredited in the eyes of _working people_, the people that really matter. That is, the argument with Rummy is to expose him publically as a fool, a knave, and an imperialist murderer. The point is to undermine the drive toward war.
>>There is no sound-bite reply to Marx' assertion other than the assertion of excontradictione quodlibet -- from a contradiction every proposition may be deduced-- is not *necessarily* true.<
me: >> I don't understand this. Please explain.<<
Ian:> See the Walt Whitman quote above. <
though I don't think that poetry should be dumped, I don't how an assertion by a poet can be evidence for anything. In any event, all he does is to admit to being irrational (in Ari's sense). That's no reason why anyone else should be irrational.
>If it is generally impossible and possibly undesireable for us to be logical all the time in the same manner that opponents of homo economicus or homo neoclassicus claim that we cannot possibly be 24-7 econometricians, just how many contradictions do we allow others and social life in general? Paraconsistency is, amongst other things, a substantive plea for epistemic tolerance of a fairly wide ranging sort.<
I NEVER said that we should be logical (a la Aristotle) "all the time."
Epistemological tolerance (i.e., the acceptance that no-one really KNOWS the truth) doesn't contradict Ari-style logic at all. It's only for idealist people who believe that "the rational [logical] is real and the real, rational" that there's some sort of contradiction between Ari-style ideal logic and epistemological tolerance.
I had written: >>>I'd say that logical thinking is defined by the absence of contradiction. (I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, though. Do you have a clear example of a "true contradiction"?)<<<
Ian:>Russell's paradox of sets.<
which says what?
> The Bohr quote above.... <
As I said, without content the Bohr quote is meaningless, evidence for nothing. You might as well quote the Maharishi...
me:>> ... my discussion of Marx's idea of real-world contradictions was at a very high level of abstraction (in order to contrast logical contradictions with societal ones). Bringing in "irreducibly pluralistic social world with agents capable, at best, of paraconsistent> reasoning and deliberation and coordination strategies" ... shifts the discussion to a much lower level of abstraction. That's okay, since the all-important empirical world is clearly at a lower level of abstraction, but it may result in missing the point or avoiding the question, i.e., the nature
of contradiction in Marx's theory.<<
>The above reply simply requests that abstraction be thought of as a hierarchy, a kind of metaphor of space. Why must we embrace the notion of hierarchy in order to render differing
abstractions intelligible? Why is the empirical world a "lower level of abstraction"? <
It's not really a metaphor: higher levels of abstraction involve _more_ abstraction, i.e., leaving out more empirical detail, while lower levels includes more empirical detail and so involve less (lower) abstraction. (It's not saying that higher levels are "better," except to an inveterate idealist.)
In any event, there's nothing wrong with metaphor (while, in fact, human thinking seems impossible without it).
>This is yet another one of the issues that Paraconsistent logic brings to our attention via it's critique of set theory, a hierarchical theory par excellance and in the mind of Cantor, the ladder to the Absolute.<
since you never explained so-called Paraconsistent logic, it can't help us in any way. (why the capitalization? is it some sort of Abstract Form or are you writing in German?)
>If there is no logical Absolute then we are free, while still being consistent, in relaxing the use of hierarchy as an organizing principle for our abstractions.<
You never showed that there is "no logical Absolute" [why the caps?]. In any event, I wasn't arguing that there exists a logical absolute. Rather, my point was that there exists something called logical thinking (a la Ari) should should be part of a clear analysis of the world, along with empirical research, and dialectical heuristics.
me: >> In my missive I explicitly rejected the =
non-binary planet. <
I don't understand the last bit (after cynical), but it's interesting that you see "paraconsistent logic" as possibly describing actual human thought processes. If this kind of logic is what I think it is (akin to fuzzy logic), that's exactly where it belongs. Ari's logic isn't about how people actually think, but paraconsistent logic could be. Of course, there's already a lot of stuff that's been done about constrained rationality and the like, so the paraconsistent model of human thinking might be re-inventing the wheel.
Jim
