Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 23:18:33 -0800 (PST)
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: BHA: Bhaskar-curious & PLATO ETC. (2)


I found chapter 2 of PLATO ETC. to be pretty close to incomprehensible.
However, I found one special bit of asininity in it that I still can't
believe is there.

On p. 34 is the following paragraph:

"It is actualism that informs the twentieth-century self-referential
paradoxes too.  Suppose you are lost in Crete and you ask a Cretan the way
and in the course of his directions he ventures the he ventures the
observation that all Cretans are liars.  Both his directions and his
observation may be true.  Tendentially Cretans may be liars, but in this
particular open systemic case his statement may be actually true.  The
distinction between the levels of the real and the actual offers a clue to
the unravelling of the other self-referential and self-theoretic paradoxes,
which turn again on the distinction between the structure and the instance,
where the structure may be a totality characterized by an emergent
principle.  A book is a totality and it is characteristic of prefaces and it
is characteristic of prefaces for the author to absolve his referees or
colleagues of any responsibility for 'the mistakes that remain'.  There is
nothing paradoxical about the phrase in quotation marks."

Bhaskar then goes on to apply these notions to the set-theoretic paradoxes.
Wew are finally reassured we don't have to resort to Heidegger.

I must say I am stunned to read such an inept and amateurish
characterization of the Liar's Paradox.  Bhaskar has conflated a putative
real-world situation with its ideal logical form.  That is, the business
about Cretans is merely a narrative embellishment to illustrate the abstract
principle of self-referential and self-contradicting assertions.  The issue
is not that customarily all Cretans are liars, but one might be telling the
truth in this case.  The logical form of the argument is that all statement
by Cretans are falsehoods, X is a Cretan, hence all X's statements are false
including this one if this assertion is true.  A realistic real-world
situation of course, implies more than just the logical structure of
propositions, hence one would have to judge a real person's veracity by
criteria other than his verbal statements, but the logical form of the
paradox is what is at issue, and this nonsense about open systems and
actualism is a childish diversion.  I understand, I think, his general
complaint about actualism, but to apply it to logic and set theory is just
bizarre.  To treat of the relation between idealized abstract logic problems
and the logical structure of real-world scenarios would be interesting, but
Bhaskar completely conflates the two.  Does Bhaskar think he can get away
with anything just because he writes with such intentional and unnecessary
obscurity that nobody can understand him?  I'm beginning to think this whole
book is a hustle.



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