From: shmage-AT-pipeline.com
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 1998 00:33:45 -0500
Subject: Re: M-TH: Dialectics and Paraconsistent Logic


boddhisatva (<kbevans-AT-panix.com>) writes:

>.....As for Monty, I think we may have gotten signals crossed, so I'll
>phrase this a a restatement rather than a rebuttal.  I said that the
>problem as stated precluded the possibility of Monty's picking: 1. The
>curtain you originally pick. and 2. A curtain with a car.  My point was
>that a knowledgeless Monty could, through a random pick, give you the
>knowledge needed to improve your odds.  I only say this because someone
>brought up the question of what Monty knows beforehand.  If you pick a
>curtain and Monty *accidentally* picks a curtain that has a goat, you
>still get the same 66 percent chance of winning the car.  This happens,
>not because Monty was constrained, but because by chance he happened to
>help you in the same way as if he was constrained.
>
>
>
>        For whatever reason he does it, it seems to me that if Monty opens
>a goated curtain, I should switch my original choice.  Two thirds of the
>time (that he opens a goat curtain) he will have shown me where the car
>is.  He can't help it.  The point is that I, by picking before Monty does,
>improve my odds of getting the car from 50 to 66 percent but only in the
>event that he picks a goat curtain.  Logically, there seems to be no
>impact from my picking a curtain and neither opening it nor telling Monty.
>It seem to be no different from approaching a stage with two closed
>curtains.  Probabilistically it matters, but if and only if Monty happens
>to open a goated curtain.  In that case chance has precluded the same
>cases as the premise precludes.  It has to, because the strategy always
>works at 66%.

I'm afraid you've completely obscured what is a very simple problem.  I
suggest you settle the matter for yourself by a quite trivial experiment.

Take three cards--say the Fool and the aces of wands and pentacles.
Shuffle them and lay them out face down.  Choose one.  Now, as Monty, turn
over one of the other two.  If the Fool turns up, you lose.  If it doesn't,
change your choice to the card "Monty" didn't turn over.  If that one is
the Fool, you win--if its an ace you lose.  Repeat long enough for the law
of large numbers to convince you that you will win one time in three
overall, and one-half the time when "Monty" doesn't turn up the Fool.


>p.s. - To bring this back to Marxism, it seems to me that there may be a
>probabilistic way to resolve the debate between those who argue that
>labor-value is determinative and those who argue, as I have, that
>use-value is determinative.  It would be something along the lines that
>labor-value factors constrain the universe of market choices which the
>consumer uses to value a good.  Of course, use-value factors would do the
>same thing to labor valuation.  If anyone can come up with such a thing I
>would be happy to modify my use-value position.

Perhaps a short excerpt from something I wrote long ago will clarify this:

"The commodity then, taken in itself, has two opposite characteristics:
*utility* and *price*, *use-value* and *exchange-value*.  In Marx's
Hegelian terminology the commodity's *value* constitutes the "identity" of
these "opposites", because as *value* it no longer appears as a thing in
itself but is now apprehended as the product of a definite amount of social
labor (in the Hegelian dialectic *opposites* are not to be thought of as
the terms of a logical contradiction or paradox but as poles of a dynamic
logical *process*).  In the case of the commodity, abstract utility,
usefulness *as such*, is the fundamental category, the initial pole.  The
coat is produced as a coat.  But when it enters the market as a commodity
offered for sale, its seller regards it simply as a sum of money to be
realized by the sale--its utility has been negated, its form changed from
use-value to exchange value, though it remains a real coat all the time.
When it is bought by the final consumer it becomes an object of utility
again and loses its commodity form.  Thus, sale to the user is "negation of
negation."  This process has given the category of use-value a new meaning,
raised it to a higher level than the original "utility" that was abstracted
from in the offer of the coat for sale.  The social process of sale has not
merely provided the purchaser with a useful article--it has also influenced
the allocation of social resources to the production of coats, and thereby
helped to determine the *value* of the subsequent output of coats.  Thus
the Marxian category of *value*, despite the opinion of a number of
commentators, is not derived through *abstraction* from use-value but, on
the contrary, involves use-value at least equally with exchange-value.  As
Engels wrote (in 1843!) "*Value is the realation of production costs to
utility.*"




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