Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 02:52:03 -0600
Subject: Re: PROBLEMATIZE THIS!


Leo:

>Now I am
>just not sure that I know with enough precision what Rahul is trying to get
>at with the term 'the inversion of causality' to be entirely certain of what
>he is saying. My suspicion is that his formula is a reductionist misreading
>of certain 'post-modernist' ( really discursive) notions of history. My
>position is: Certainly events take place separate from their representations
>in historical narrative, but do these events have meaning without the
>interpretative frame of the historical narrative? (And what depending upon
>what we may mean by existence, that too can depend on representation; an
>historical event of a century ago simply does not exist for us without a
>representation.) No doubt, there is some quality of the event prior to the
>representation which places limits on how the event can be plausibly
>interpreted, on what meanings can be given to it, but that is different, I
>would contend, in saying that it determines, in some causal way, the
>representations. There is no event-in-itself.

You're doing it again, Leo. In this case, I think it derives rather from
the fact that I try to distill out of the inchoate mess of postmodernism
some coherent set of ideas. This is as perilous an exercise as biblical
exegesis and not half as fun, but it seems a necessary prelude to my
emerging, sword in hand, to slay the dragon.

About reductionism. It is my intention to rescue a sensible reductionism
>from its fashionable opprobrium, but what you're accusing me of is vulgar
reductionism -- of course, nobody admits to being a vulgar reductionist any
more than they'd admit to eating babies.  I am ready to state categorically
that almost the only people I have ever seen who apply the cardboard vulgar
reductionism that is so justly reviled are in fact the same people I am
attacking. No serious scientist is stupid enough to do so, although
occasionally overzealous and underthoughtful students fall into such traps.
I'll give a single example from the realm of lit crit. I once sat in a pomo
lit crit course for a couple of weeks until the repeated need to purge
every morning forced me away. We read an article on psychology and the
novel, or some such thing, in which I found the following gem (my
reconstruction):

As a result of Freud's work and that of his successors, we now have a view
of consciousness as merely the tip of the iceberg, an epiphenomenon of the
churning of some vast morass of concepts, feelings, and disjunctions that
we call the subconscious. Since a book is the product of a human mind, a
book should be viewed similarly, as something with far more beneath the
surface than on it.

There is no other phrase for this mode of reasoning than vulgar
reductionism; if Y is a product of X its structure must be isomorphic with
that of X. No crude reductionist baby-eating physicist would ever come up
with such nonsense. Furthermore, the conclusion is obviously wrong. A book,
like any attempt at coherence, represents an ordering, simplification, and
most importantly selection of a small part of one's thoughts. This
naturally has the result that meaning of a book flows much more
mechanically from its explicit content than the meaning of one's thoughts
flows from their surface appearance. While the subconscious may be far
vaster than the conscious, with the considerable majority of books,
excluding a few that explicitly try to duplicate this kind of structure
(and usually can achieve only a mechanical, not an organic, facsimile), the
situation is much the reverse.

I tried to explain this to the professor at the time, but, although she had
given us all the standard nonsense about openness and lack of hierarchy
blah blah, she shut me up very quickly. This was also the first class in
many, many years in which I was told that I should raise my hand and wait
to be acknowledged. Even in my undergraduate physics and mathematics
courses, such an idea would have been laughable; no professor would have
dreamed of requiring it.

A semantic problem: You say that the event does not determine in any causal
way its representations. This is imprecise. There is a causal connection
between the event and its representations, which, like all causal
connections, runs one way. The connection, however, is not deterministic. I
think this is what you meant anyway, but great confusion is cause by
conflating causality with determinism.

My view here is very simple, but it has yet to be shown to be inadequate.
Yes, we can not perceive events of the past except through a
representation, but the event really occurred and occurred in a certain way
and, although that fact does not allow us to determine some absolute truth
that sits above all human motives, it is a continual constraint on the
representations of the event and can, by analysis of various structural
factors, occasionally provide criteria by which to judge the
representations. This last point is important, but must be applied just as
carefully as Marx's concept of false consciousness; a heavy-handed
mechanistic application will quickly lead to absurd dogmatism. What I am
saying is that we can do more than simply judge representations of an event
by how they agree with other representations of the same event; with
assiduous study of history at large we can disentangle various principles
and structural relationships from the mass of events which then help us to
judge further. This technique is fraught with danger in all the historical
sciences, even evolutionary biology, but so much more so in the history of
society itself. What should guide us in this matter is roughly what should
guide the  evolutionary biologists. Briefly:

1. Do we have plausible causative mechanisms to account for various of the
connections and structures we posit?

2. Can we perform retrodictions, i.e., the prediction of facts from the
past that were not previously known?

3. Do things hang together reasonably? Must we always postulate inherently
different mechanisms whenever we try to understand a new case? Entities
should not be multiplied needlessly.

I'm sure there are a few I haven't mentioned as well.

Rather than setting up an absolutism akin to that of Christian theology,
dethroning it and then pronouncing the end of all standards of truth and
objectivity, we start, as always in science, by methodological doubt. If
this program is followed through in the proper manner, we can achieve for
certain ideas, interpretations, and facts, certainty beyond a reasonable
doubt while around them is a collection of conceptions ranging from pretty
good surety to mere plausibility. We believe some of the proclamations of
science not because science is an emanation of Absolute Truth, but rather
because we tear it down relentlessly and repeatedly before we accept what
remains standing.

I think you don't exactly disagree with me here, but you are disposed to
grant something more than complete triviality to the pomo-type thoughts on
the matter. I view them as a superstructure of absurd absolutism (of their
own kind) hanging very far detached from a base of trivial observations
that we got started long ago trying to circumvent the best way we know how.
I recall a post on the list last summer sometime when I was arguing with
some silly pomo about science. If I can dredge it up, maybe I'll repost it.
I think treating these people as if they've discovered something is not
only unwarranted but extremely dangerous.

Rahul

Later on I may tackle some of the objections to my straightforward
formulations, but I can't really take any of them I have seen seriously.




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