From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Tue May 21 2002 - 21:21:35 MDT
[rhinoceros 3]
Do I need a source for that?
[kharin 4]
Given that all you have done on this thread to date is to assert a theory for which you have provided no evidence and no references*, then yes, I'd say you'd need to cite some sort of source.
[rhinoceros 4]
Chosing a complete and tested set of ideas from some books respected by the kind of people that I try to communicate with is not my style. Wouldn't it be more practical if you just punched a hole in my assertions?
Talking about references, this is becoming a more and more subtle matter, especially in the age of the Internet. Too much memetic noise. Recently, I stumbled upon a Web page presenting the results of an experiment of "cloud busting" using Wilhelm Reich's "orgone energy". Some people allegedly willed the clouds to dissipate.
http://www.fpc.edu/pages/Academics/behave/psych/web95-1.htm
Everything looks perfectly scientific, except that "I don't like" the results. They just don't fit in with everything else I know. Being skeptical about such things, what am I supposed to do with that? Should I spend some days to investigate the author. No, I will just call her a liar and possibly keep a note just in case. Dishonest, huh? But I have a life to live.
Now, about the article that started this discussion, what am I supposed to do when I see the names of several people that I have hardly heard of briefly mentioned and *dismissed*? Should this change my point of view? Time is not enough, and I need to hear a good argument before bothering to check a reference, and it is not my style to argue through references either.
So, I stand with my initial theory (not that anyone should care) which I have formed through whatever I have read, thought, and experienced up to this time. I think anyone can find evidence for that, even in the high-school history books, and it makes perfect sense. The study of history in time and place indicates a close connection between the material terms (means and mode of production) and the social ideas (about state, authority, ownership etc). The study of the history of science also indicates a primary role of the material terms in the evolution of science. Material terms and ideas evolve together in a convoluted path, but it seems to me more reasonable to assume that the material terms have the priority. These patterns appear while the individual entities (people or institutions) go about their business as befits each (of course, not randomly).
Any good counter-argument would be welcome. If not anything else, I would know against what I have to argue.
[rhinoceros 3]
Doesn't every scientific attempt try to find a pattern or another in reality.
[kharin 4]
Without evidence of experimentation, controls or peer review I'm not sure that we can actually refer to what you're proposing as scientific per se. However, that's not the question. The question is whether trying to deduce patterns of human behaviour based on apparently the same principles as brownian motion is either philosophically or scientifically valid to start with. As Jerry Fodor observed about Edmund Wilson:
"It is, after all, entirely possible to doubt that 'art, ethics and religion' are primarily in the business of explaining things: not, anyhow, in anything like the way that geology and biology and physics seek to do. In which case, it's hard to see how the putative unity of scientific explanations could be a model for consilience between science and 'the humanities'."
[rhinoceros 4]
I was not talking about anything like brownian motion, but... Huh? A reference!
[rhinoceros 3]
I would say that my point of view was some revised form of historical materialism. I just removed some parts about ultimate destinations and final solutions and replaced some of the specifics.
[kharin 4]
I was rather under the impression that teleological principles were essentially intrinsic to historical materialism, with it being largely determinist in character. What exactly does a non-telelogical form of historical materialism hold as its main tenets?
[rhinoceros 4]
I can tell you about the one I was talking about. It is just what I described, plus a more generalized theory of conflicts to provide the dialectic antithesis, plus transgression (hyperbasis) instead of synthesis for the third Hegelian dialectic step, minus the final triumph of a class or another which would end history and make this scheme inelegant. I hope I did not forget anything important.
There is still a degree of causality from a higher point of view (I reserve the term determinism for concepts like Laplace's Demon). Where does it come from? The people act freely, but whatever they do, they are always within the constraints of their desires and the available means.
[rhinoceros 3]
But one might arrive at similar conclusions through other paths too.
[kharin 4]
Such as?
[rhinoceros 4]
Toynbee's diagrams, for instance.
---- This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25497>
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