Subject: RE: BHA: Structures are not things that are true or false, even if Hegelian Marxists say so
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 11:10:50 -0600
From: "Groff, Ruth" <ruth.groff-AT-marquette.edu>


Sorry about that -- my e-mail program doesn't seem to have indicated the quoted text.  Here's another go:


	Hi all,
	

	Mervyn wrote:
	Seems to me you yourself are assuming that only consciousness or
	language-like things can be true or false.
	

	I wrote:
	Yes.  The claim is something like that -- that it is the expression of propositional content that can properly be said to be true or false.  This is because (in my view) the concept of truth describes a relationship BETWEEN a claim containing propositional content and a referent. 
	

	Mervyn wrote:
	Is a mirage false? The thirsty traveller or other animal soon discovers
	it to be so, but it can be explained without imputing consciousness to
	the whole world.
	

	I wrote:
	I don't think that you believe social structures, even capitalist ones, to be an optical illusion.  I'm pretty sure I agree with Tobin.  It is the belief that water is there that is false.  
	

	Mervyn wrote:
	The notion that the (social) world itself, and not just our
	consciousness, can be false is at the heart of the marxian theory of
	ideology and of ideology critique, as the 11th thesis on Feuerbach
	testifies (cf PON section on ideology). Yet Marx didn't subscribe to
	either (a) or (b). Either his reasoning or yours, it would seem, has
	gone wrong somewhere....
	

	I wrote:
	I think that my point about the absolute idealist metaphysics into which the Hegelian claim that reality itself is true or false fits is in fact really important.  It is an interesting question whether and in what sense Marx, who, as far as I can tell, thinks that consciousness is (merely)a property of human beings, can adopt the language in anything other than a metaphorical way.  Bhaskar does not have this problem, of course, because the metaphysics of alethic truth shares the necessary features of absolute idealism.
	
	Ruth
	
	
	
	 

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