Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 21:50:32 +0000
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: Re: capitalist social structures are false, Ruth


Hi Dick

Put it this way: it was bound to come up--whether truth and falsity are 
in the world or just in your head or at any rate your theories; an 
ontological vs epistemic conception of truth. I was surprised from this 
point of view to see Ruth espousing Alston, whose approach from what I 
know is ontological.

Mervyn

"Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu> writes
>Hi Mervyn,
>
>Is this thread about "alethic" truth and falsity?
>
>Dick
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Mervyn Hartwig [mailto:mh-AT-jaspere7.demon.co.uk]
>Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 4:27 AM
>To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: Re: BHA: Re: Re: capitalist social structures are false, Ruth
>
>
>If Marx is being invoked, he surely ungainsayably held that the wage
>form is false and that the wage form is not the same as (not exhausted
>by) beliefs about it. I.e. the source of beliefs, not just beliefs, is
>false.
>
>In more fundamental support of Phil's position, cf the Marxist Chris
>Arthur, _The New Dialectics and Marx's *Capital*_, p. 165:
>
>~~~~~~~
>His [Hegel's] concern is with truth (the usual philosophical topic) and
>since truth is the whole, only the whole truth retrospectively explains
>the transition [from Being to Becoming]. But if we deconstruct Hegel's
>dialectic, a certain 'prejudice-for-truth' is revealed. Occluded is
>another possibility: a world of falsity, where everything is inverted.
>This would be a 'downward' spiral, the concretisation of nothingness,
>the apotheosis of the false, insofar as 'Being' is denied, and demoted
>to the other of 'Nothing'. No doubt such a hellish dialectic, in which,
>contrary to the vision of 'the whole as the true', the whole is the
>false, could not occur to Hegel. But it is precisely the case in
>capitalism, we argue. Living as we do in the belly of the 'rough beast'
>born in Manchester, this possibility must be taken seriously. ~~~~~~~
>
>Cf Bhaskar's concept of the 'demi-real'.
>
>Mervyn
>



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