Date: Fri, 12 Apr 1996 14:09:27 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: 'sociality' once agin


On Fri, 12 Apr 1996, J Laari wrote:

> Sorry, I had to look at older posts. When told that
> 'humanity is predicated on sociality' you asked "sociality
> is predicated on ... what?" And I answered that it doesn't
> predicate on anything. We could say, of course, that it
> predicates on reproduction of species but then again in
> order to be able to produce goods necessary to life we have
> to learn that production which implies sociality. This way
> we simply end into circular reasoning, I believe. Perhaps
> Justin could help us out?
> 

Obviously there are two main sorts of approaches to this sort of thing. If
you think there is a hierarchy of explanatory dependence, either it
involves an infinite regress, or it just stops somewhere, either
epistemologically (that's all we know so far) or ontologically (that's
just the way things are). So you might think that everything is somehow
"predicated on" the Grand Unified Theory, if you're a reductionist, or
just that, say, sociality is a brute inexplicable fact about people on
which whatever propertties ytou are interested in depens (if you're not a
reductionist). Incidentally the infinite regress of explanation is not,
per se, an objection to the notion that you don't stop, not without ana
argument that there's something wrong with infinite regresses.

The other approach is to say that circles become virtuous rather than
vicious if you make them large enough. This is probably a dialectical
approach. You point out a lot of mutual dependencies and interconnections,
and if there are enough of them to make a complicated, coherent,
systematic whole, it's not an objection to the whole you've constructed
that somehow here, A depends on B and there, B depends on A, as long as
they go through enough interesting steps in between. I suspect this
describes our actual epistemic situation. Whether it describes the way the
world is is a big topic.

You all are using terms in a very lose way. I don't understabd your
"predication" relation or what the things being predicated on each other
are supposed to be. Certainly sociality has plasible evolutioinary
explanations, for example, if by tahtis meant our tendency to live in
groups. But it could meana  lot more than that.

--Justin




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