Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 07:20:53 -0400 (EDT)
From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: BHA: logical norms


Hi all,

Thanks Gary for the inspired review of this section!

I wondered if you, Gary, or if any others, might have anything further
helpful to say about the relationship between dialectical thinking and the
"logical norm of non-contradiction."  I've probably just been reading too
much straight philosophy recently (a real possibility), but I don't think I
get it.  

It seems to me that in Gary's example (thank you Gary!) what is being
described is a reality in which there are (at a minimum) two different
things going on, two different, and in some sense opposite, forces at play
-- one tending in one way, one tending the other way.  

I don't understand how or why this is a problem for the norm of logical
non-contradiction.  Why should the rule of p or not-p, in relation to
propositions, foreclose the identification (no pun intended) of real
complexity in the world?    

Perplexed in Toronto,
r.

[Gary's helpful example:
>It is only epistemological dialectics that 'typically' violate the logical
norm >of non-contradiction.  
>
>An example would be helpful here.  Alas there is none within the text.  If
>anyone can supply one I will be grateful. Let me have a very tentative go
>myself, first.  I have a student friend investigating cultural reproduction
>with the Vietnamese diaspora here in Brisbane. This community seems to be
>marked by the successful reproduction of the Vietnamese culture, above all
>through the mediation of the discourse of anti-communism. However the
>student is working on the heuristic that at the same time, there are
>cultural sites which are eroding the reproduction of the master discourse -
>anti-communism. So the assumption is that it is both raining and not
>raining. In other words she is proceeding with a logical contradiction as a
>heuristic.]


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