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 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ --- from list seminar-14-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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