File spoon-archives/seminar-14.archive/marx-bhaskar_2001/seminar-14.0102, message 16


Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2001 21:34:27 -0800 (PST)
From: Victor Rosado <skygoya-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Language and the epistemic fallacy


Dear List:

  Below I would like to connect Bhaskar's critique of
the "epistemic fallacy" with Marx and Engels in a
brief discussion of Language.  
  Language is trendy these days but I think overrated.
 I think you guys would agree.     
----
  I was trying to think of contemporary examples of
the epistemic fallacy.  I think poststructuralists do
a good job of commiting it. 
 Someone like J. Derrida would argue that everything
is determined, expressed, and filtered through
language.  Nothing exists outside of language because
our knowledge can only be expressed by and in terms of
language.   Foucault would say that language is
knowledge, knowledge is power.  
  Essentially we have a neo-idealism that collapses
the world into our knowing of the world; what we call
knowledge is structured and is realized by the matrix
of language.

Marx and Engels anticipated this form of idealism in
the German Ideology:
"One of the most difficult tasks confronting
philosophers is to descend from the world of thought
to the actual world. Language is the immediate
actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given
thought an independent existence, so they were bound
to make language into an independent realm. This is
the secret of philosophical language, in which
thoughts in the form of words have their own content.
The problem of descending from the world of thoughts
to the actual world is turned into the problem of
descending from language to life." 

Hope everyone is well.

Yours,
Victor


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