Date: Tue, 6 Jan 1998 02:05:41 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Marx a *naive* correspondence theorist!!



I suspect we are getting too far into the philosophy of mind here. I
thought I had left all that behind me. 

I had said, naive meant basically commonsensical.
> 
> This is a very ideologically tinted use of "naive", in-crowd professional
> philosophers' jargon. "Intuitive" might get the idea across better without
> the negative value charge.

Yeah, well, I used to be one of them, so some of it sticks, what can I
say. Some people find "intuitive" jargonistic and objectionable too.


I said Marx had little to say about theories of truth or reality. 
> 
> Justin is very concerned to quantify thought here. Perhaps Marx gave these
> topics *sufficient* thought?

Maybe for _his_ purposes. Not for ours, if we want to understand the concepts.

> Lenin was dragged into the field by
> the emergence of shameless idealism and subjectivism in the socialist
> movement, articulated by authoritative scientists and scholars.

As we must if we are to combat the idealists of our day, the pmos and
their ilk.

 Marx had
> other battles, first against the post-Hegelians and utopians like Proudhon,
> and later against the Duehrings of the radical movement. I see his
> sophistication as being a potential -- if he'd thought it necessary, he'd
> have grappled with this set of problems at length.
> 
Well, no doubt if he had thought about it he would have come up with
something. But Hugh basically concedes my point about Marx here.

>But I am, or was, more interested
> >these questions than Marx seems to have been.
> 
> Perhaps Justin could give us some historical reasons for his greater
> interest. Perhaps the class struggle, the crisis of proletarian leadership
> and the delayed revolution allowed bourgeois scepticism, pessimism and
> obscurantism to penetrate further into the socialist movement than ever
> before?? Making these things much more of an issue.
>
Maybe. In the very immediate sphere of my world, they were hot topics when
I was in grad school in philosophy.
 
> Is there any evidence that [Marx] *misunderstood* theories of truth, or
> stumbled and wavered in this area?
> 
No, but he says little enough about them. "Better to keep your mouth shu
and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubr." --Mark Twain.

> Justin misses my point. Assuming the existence of thinking and perception
> (let's call them mind), "thought" is just as much a mediated, objectified
> other for the mind as the "external world" is. 

Sure, if these means that we can be wrong about what we think and don't
understand thinking just in virtue of having a mind.

> the mind and "thought" aren't the same. The process is not the same as the
> product.

You seem to have a  Cartesian view of mind, the mind as a sort of substance
in which thought inheres as a property. This isn't my view. I don't think
there's anything more to mind than the processes of thought. I don';t see
any need to posit something other than the nrain in which these processes
inhere. 
> 
> >> The processes of thought, like the processes of
> >> feeling, are imperceptible and hidden to introspection.

Depends on what you mean by the processes of thought here. The laws taht
govern thinking, if any do, are discoverable only by science. But the
thoughts I think are discoverable by "introspection," viz., by having them.

> To what extent are the processes of the mind directly
> perceptible to it??

Reminds me of the joke about the two behaviorists who meet on the street.
One says to the other, "You're fine. How am I?"

> Justin seems to be putting all the processes into "brain", and all the
> products into "mind"? Is "thinking" the process or the product? If you
> abstract away the non-perceptible workings of the brain (the retina bit),
> how much of the mind is left? In other words, where are the boundaries
> between brain, thinking and thought?

Well, this is a really hard question. My answer was, when I was thinking
about this, that the mind is contingently identical with or constituted
from, physical processes of the brain, but qua mind, it doesn't have to
be. The mind I construe as modern computational functionalists do to be
the processes in our hedas taht mediates between sensory input and
behavioral output. I am less confident of these views than I once was.

> Observation is mediated, not in the raw. The objectification etc is a
> precondition for the mediation.

Everything is mediated, so what? I don;t know what you mean by
objectification.

> I do think that it's
> >an error to suppose that there are these things, meanings, tow hich we try
> >to fit our language. 
> 
> Depends how closely you tie meanings to propositions, doesn't it?
> Significant, purposeful behaviour can exist without propositions, but not
> meaningful, purposeful discourse.

I have defended this idea in print, so I can hardly object. But even if we
can think nonpropositionally, it doesn't mean that what we do when we talk
is try to express in language things called meanings that are seperate
from propositions. When we talk discursively, the contents of our beliefs
are propositional. When we think nonpropositionally, we represent states
of affairs in some say taht is the content of our beliefs, or perhaps the
content is something propositional, but represented otherwisel. Meanings
seperate from this we don't need.

> Anyone for semiology??

The notion you are getting is the sentence Schee ist weiss expresses
the same content as now is white, right? It's in a sense artibtrary
whether we express this content using German or English. That's right, but
it doesn't follow that there exist meaning that we try to put into language 

> >But knowing our minds is knowing individual things, which we can know
> >without knowing the laws that govern them.
> 
> I know my neighbour, but just how *well* do I know her?? To know her fully,
> I have to know a hell of a lot more than her as an individual thing. I
> have, in fact, to know the laws that govern her.

Well, OK, maybe. But so?

> >Well, the content of thinking is just thoughts. Purposes are thoughts, or
> >at any rate mental, as well.
> 
> I don't want to quibble but aren't purposes goal-driven behaviour? 

Behabior is what the pourposes explain. I'm inyended to write this, that's
a purpose. My writing this, that's the behavior.

Central
> nervous system, sure enough, but mind? Are instincts purposes??

Probably not. But maybe they can can exaplin why we form certain purposes.
 If it's
> just a question of definition, that purposes are goal-oriented thoughts,
> say, let's just define it and move on -- if we agree on the definition...
> 
OK, let's define it taht way.
> 
> Confidence isn't the same as the truth. Is there a belief in some Absolute
> Truth lurking here, by the way?

Yes. Although is wouldn't qualify trutha s absolute,a s if there were some
other sort. Truth doesn't come in degrees. It may be partial, but if a 
proposition is true, it's jsut true, and if it's not, then it's just false.

As tomy argument that perhaps there are truth indeoendent of language.

> Isn't this just saying that the universe contains within itself the
> potential for developing mechanisms such as language that are able to form
> propositions to which truth values can be assigned?

No, it doesn't deopend on even the possibility that language might come to
exist.

In fact that our logic language and maths are strictly
> constrained and determined by the external reality producing them and
> within which these products help us orient ourselves and navigate?

Well, no. Maybe our language is. But logic and math aren't. They don't
have to be useful, just consistent.

 Except
> of course that the way Justin states it: "even if there were no people or
> any sentient beings to have a language, it would still be _true_ that the
> earth is 93 million miles from the sun" assumes a truth with no observer,

Right.

 This seems very similar to some of the
> ideas Viraj F was expressing on M-Sci. Sort of external reality taking on
> attributes of sentience and mind -- half-way to God.

I don'y know what V was saying, but I'm not saying that universe thinks.
Just that if there exist propositions the way taht thgere exist numbers
taht they can be trur even if no one assigns them truth values or thinks
them or says them.

 While the attribution
> of all this to a reality without humanity or logically capable beings seems
> very like fetishism, I would agree completely that the universe is such
> that should a sentient thinking being pop up out of nowhere in our corner
> of it, if we hadn't evolved, and measure the distance between the earth and
> the sun, it would be the equivalent of 93 million miles.
> 
Well, the universe doesn't mesure the distance to be that, the distance
just is that. That's the way things are.

>Bolshevism has shot its bolt.
> 
> Pure ideology. Bolshevism (ie scientific revolutionary proletarian Marxism)
> is the only force that has ever succeeded in overthrowing a bourgeois state
> in a completely hostile imperialist environment (all the later
> non-Bolshevik led revolutions, such as the Yugoslav, the Vienamese, the
> Chinese and the Cuban were successful on the back of the Russian October
> revolution and in spite of their petty-bourgeois bureaucratic leaderships).
> None of the teeming hordes of anti-Bolsheviks on the lists here have ever
> demonstrated any realistic alternative.

Well, we're in a fix, aren't we, since the Bolshevik alternative is also
exhausted.

--Justin





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