From: "Huseyin Ozel" <OZEL-AT-econ.sbs.utah.edu> Date: Fri, 18 Nov 1994 18:34:02 GMT-700 Subject: Re: Chaos and dialectics Hello All, I am a graduate student at the Dept. of Economics, University of Utah, and trying to understand the relations, if any, between dialectics and the recent developments in natural sciences, for my dissertation. Therefore, the discussion on chaos is extremely helpful to me and I cannot resist the temptation to make some comments, however naive and irrelevant, about this issue. In a message dated nov. 15 Juan Inigo writes > In the first place, it depends on what one calls "dialectics." > I call dialectics the process of ideally appropriating the > potentiality of a real concrete form by reproducing the development > of its necessity through thought. Thus faced, a so-called chaotic > process shows to be the realization of a necessity that exists > as a possible potency, when the course of this realization has > possibility itself as its specific form of realizing itself. > This is the most developed general form of determination, that > is, of self-affirming through self-negation, and certainly a widely > extended concrete form of it that we must necessarily face with our > conscious action. I agree with this position, but I also think it needs some clarification. I believe this passage is not careful about a very important distinction, namely the distinction between ontology and epistemology. That is, what we know about the world cannot be identified with the world itself. Therefore, we should avoid what Bhaskar calls the "epistemic fallacy" which assumes that statements about ontology (about being) can always be reduced into statements about epistemology (about our knowledge of being), as in the empiricist tradition. On the other hand, however, we should equally avoid the "ontic fallacy", the compulsive determination of our knowledge of being by being itself, as in the 'dialectical materialist' "reflectionist" theory of knowledge. [on these fallacies, see Bhaskar's _A Realist Theory of Science_, 1975, and his latest book _Plato Etc._, Verso, 1994. (especially pp. 48- 9] Therefore, we should distinguish between the dialectics as a real process and the dialectics as a method, for they are not reducible to each other. In this regard, chaos theory seems to suggest that first, ontologically, dialectics may characterize a real process in nature, and second, epistemologically, chaos and complexity requires a rejection of strict determinism, or more appropriately what Bhaskar (again) calls "regularity determinism" which assumes "constant conjunctions" between discrete events, by allowing both necessity and contingency/accidents (bifurcation etc.), concepts not so distant from the idea of dialectics. Now it seems to me that this conception of both nature and natural science is consistent with Bhaskar's "depth" realism which argues for the "ontological depth" or "stratification", namely the experiences, events, and real mechanisms underlying these events and experiences are not generally reducible to each other. [on this position and the implications of chaos theory for social sciences, see Reed and Harvey, "The New science and the Old: Complexity and Realism in the Social Sciences" Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 22:4, 1992] But of course chaos/complexity does not necessarily imply dialectics, even as a method. Any comments? Huseyin Ozel ozel-AT-econ.sbs.utah.edu ------------------
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