Problem in the philosophy of meaning

 The Problem in the Philosophy of Science - Meaning

Economics, political science and the other social sciences imitate the natural sciences.  The differences between nature or natural objects, and human beings who can use information to adapt or adjust to ongoing concepts and language does not however get discussed. Natural objects - the sky, clouds, soil, oceans, etc., cannot internalize or accommodate human concepts like truth, logic, or understanding.  Philosophy of science, i.e. philosophy of biology or philosophy of sociology, evaluates ideas and knowledge in the context of the differences between natural science and social science. 

The philosophy of science and the philosophy of the social sciences both address the problem of the difference between our language or statements about natural and social objects - object being whatever is intended - and our experience, perceptions, or how we construct and produce knowledge.

Wittgenstein’s leading idea in the Tractatus was that propositions – that is, statements asserting facts, such as ‘it is raining’ – are a picture of what they describe. This is Wittgenstein’s ‘Picture Theory of Language’, or as he himself called it, his ‘Theory of Logical Portrayal,'

“We can say straight away: Instead of: this proposition has such and such a sense: this proposition represents such and such a situation. It portrays it logically. Only in this way can the proposition be true or false: It can only agree or disagree with reality by being a picture of a situation” (Notebooks)

He added later: “The great problem round which everything I write turns is: Is there an order in the world a priori, and if so what does it consist in?” (Notebooks p.53)

By “an order in the world a priori,” Wittgenstein meant an order that we could know to exist in the world without reference to our experience of the world. He felt forced to conclude that there is such an order, for it is this order that is pictured or logically portrayed by the relations between the symbols of a proposition.

The second big idea in the Tractatus – which the logical positivists ignored - was the thought of an unutterable kind of truth that ‘makes itself manifest.'  Hence the key paragraph 6.522 in the Tractatus,

“There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”

In other words, there is a categorically different kind of truth from that which we can state in empirically or logically verifiable propositions. These are instances which indicate what something is not.

Wittgenstein’s intention in asserting this is precisely to protect matters of value from being disparaged or debunked by scientifically-minded people such as the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle, and later the technologists and technocrats.

He put his view beyond doubt in this sequence of paragraphs:

“6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is value which is of value, it must lie outside of all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.”

In other words, all worldly actions and events are contingent  - ‘accidental’ or senseless, but matters of value are necessary, for they are ‘higher’ or too important to be accidental, and so must be outside the world of empirical propositions.

“6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.

6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental.”

You should be aware that the Vienna Circle appropriated LW’s Tractatus which caused a conflict. LW quit Cambridge and took up as a school-teacher! Not until 1926 did LW agree to meet with only certain Vienna Circle members: Schlick, Neurath, and Waisman. Once Karl Popper was invited, there was a breakdown. 

Popper took up several questionable positions, namely, falsification - the notion that verification or confirmation of statements could never prove the truth of the statement; however, a falsifying instance could negate the truth of the statrement. Underlying this key idea of Popper's was the rejection of induction, that is, that no repeatable observation or measurement could justify a generalization or uniformity. Popper proposed instead a form of eliminative induction, or deduction where principles might predict an observalbe instance, or peferably, be falsified!

Science does not accept any necessity or certainty, we must instead acknowledge error and interpretation.  The field where natural science and the social sciences intersect is at Evolution. Evolution is empirical but incomplete. The meaning of the term evolution is indeterminate.  Those who reproduce form offspring that might adapt to new environmental and social conditions.

Where Wittgenstein posited a field where values did not count was opposed by Popper who interpretted evolution as circular reasoning but who did hold a values orientation.

Evolution is not about morality or religion. It is simply a matter of who reproduces in the competition of the sexual market.

Evolutionary biology tries to modify the ‘red in tooth and claw,’ the mating practices that tend to exclude many people.

Evolutionary biology posits notions like adaptation and altruism,  memes or cultures that defend reproducers. Political science posits societal learning processes as advancing cultural and international integration and modifying intergroup conflict.

The wars, hostility and hatred continue however; aggressive practices collide against legal and democratic social organization.  Adaptation and altruism seem like moral accommodations that encourage reproduction, but people who are amoral, manipulative, selfish and authoritarian reproduce more than the moral and ethical.  The wealthier reproduce more than the impoverished which speaks to the (im)morality of population control and the normalization of sex.

The criteria of interest is ‘meaningfulness.’  Therefore, ‘change’ is an essential attribute of reality for scientists.  To understand what has happened during the history of man and science from the 19th century’s positivism, to mathematics and logical empiricism to the linguistic turn, the interpretation of meaning and the analysis of the sociology of science are the current frameworks.

During the linguistic turn, the study of language, the language of description in relation to reality, the standard became ‘meaning.’

Psychopathy and Psychiatry

Psychopathy is the standard for identifying criminality but a few caveats should be considered: any person with a mental disorder tends to have periods of time which are normal and then there is the pathological or disordered period; the disorder is probably triggered by the social environment and not simply a continuous brain state or malfunction. The problem of antagonism in social relationships, especially concerning the “power of family” and the ‘cutting-off’ effect from “authorities" (which may or may not be via official channels) deserves to be addressed - are people being responsible when they deny their role in triggering the psychopathological break in another?

In "The Divided Self" Laing construed this attribution as a function of an extremely disjunctive relationship between the person who is in the role of a depersonalized—and depersonalizing—diagnosing psychiatrist and the person who has become a depersonalized, and sometimes depersonalizing, diagnosed patient. This construction is a contribution towards a personal understanding (*Verstehen) of what is going on between psychiatrist and patient, in contrast to a scientific explanation of what is going on in the patient alone. In fact, he offered a personal understanding of the psychiatrist's scientific explanation and construed it as, unwittingly, a way of cutting off

the cutoff person from the possibility of reunion and renewal.

The psychiatric, diagnostic look is itself a depersonalized and depersonalizing cutoff look. 

Psychiatry is an application of a highly sophisticated scientific look that is culturally deeply conditioned. It is a way of seeing things, and the relation between things, by subtracting all personal experience. However, a person is not a thing, nor is a thing a person. It is a look which is cultivated with the express intention of not seeing intentions in others or even collectively as in the intention of a group. Things have no intentions. It is the exact opposite of a sensibility cultivated with the express intention of recognizing and sympathetically understanding the intentions of others, and their interconnections.

Laing is opposed to physical treatments, e.g. drugs and surgery.

The Oediple Complex

 The Oediple Complex

The Oediple Complex is simply the threefold relation between the infant, it’s mother and a third person which may be the father, or another person.  Reducing Sophocles play or Shakespeare’s Hamlet to actual biological relations and then adding onto that matrix the unconscious motivations related to the castration complex, phobias, sibling rivalry, and other disorders, especially hysteria, is what most psychoanalysts do.  

The development of the idea put Freud in different speculative positions from a seduction theory to a fantasy theory. Experimental social psychology and ethology have clarified what is in fact occurring: infants experience stranger anxiety and separation anxiety to which various attributions are associated. Also, infants seek comfort over food to which they form attachments. Most of the vissitudes of the so-called Oedipal Complex are unique and arbitrary. Infants, children and adults change their attachments or objects for a variety of reasons. The attachment to family roles is dogma even though incest between parents and offspring, and between siblings, is universally discouraged if not illegal. But, social and psychological relations between family members persist under a death drive where separation is denied leading to the excessive rates of domestic violence and interpersonal violence.

Between Kant and Hegel - Free will

One issue driving the free-will controversy is the distinction between historicism and anti-historicism. Historicism posits distinctively different circumstances for decision-making. Thus, the capabilities for free will change. 

Anti-historicism claims that the human capability for free will does not change regardless of circumstances. 

Hegel links freedom with reason in the context of historical change. For Hegel, as for Kant, blaming someone for something depends on how much he knows about the factors involved and how much he can be expected to know. State of mind or blame refers to what the actor knew about the case at a certain time. 

Kant demands compliance with principles and norms, eg categorical imperative, rules, etc. Hegel, however, does not simply link free will to responsibility, he also connects freedom to reason through expanding understanding. Conceptual truth is not a given framework as it is for Kant, concepts and the connections between concepts change and move just as history changes to higher and higher forms of freedom, so does reason.

A lacuna emerges here because Hegel is positing that freedom is a good for everyone, that everyone is seeking freedom, thus no one denies the claims of freedom. However, this is not the case and would place Hegel back on the anti-historicist side with Kant. Power and ambition dominate the present scene over against virtues, or Kant’s good will, which degenerates into the moral forms of false consciousness. 

False consciousness to Hegel are conceptual frameworks which both illuminate and misrepresent. The framework at issue is individualism. Where Kant represents the moral life in universal and necessary terms, the limitations of individualism are concealed. Hegel calls this situation the spiritual zoo where each individual finds himself assessed by others in terms of his role in their pursuit of freedom, and free will. Each person becomes the fate of another. To deny these impersonal forces and one’s own disillusionment (each of us however must be disillusioned or we would live our lives in an illusion), individuals turn back to virtue and take up arms against others and the world. In doing this, they claim they were just minding their own business and following the law as obedient citizens!

Hegel identifies this absoluteness in free will, duty, as excusing self-seeking, rivalry and ruthlessness which disguises the objective truth. The Kantian followers do not differentiate the commodities or entities involved in their deliberate acts, it is no concern of theirs whether the principles they obey affect things or other humans!

I’ll cut it off here with a notion from Thoreau. “Sometimes, we have a duty to disobey.”

Amoralism

Nietzsche chastised morality as untruth.

With the decay of religion and its palpable philosophical secularizations, restrictive prohibitions lost their inherent authority, their substantiality. It became ludicrous to pronounce prayers or commitment to a church with sincerity, especially as witnesses to 20th century horrors which were permitted by the major religions.

 In the 19th century, material production was still so undeveloped that it could be proclaimed with some reason that there was not enough to go round.  Anyone who did not criticize political economy as such, had to cling to the limiting principle which was then articulated as unrationalized appropriation at the expense of the weak.  The objective conditions have changed.  It is not only the social non-conformist or even the narrow-minded bourgeois who must see restriction as superfluous in face of the immediate abundance.  The implied meaning of the master-morality, that he who wants to live must fend for himself, has in the meantime become a still more miserable lie than it was when a nineteenth-century piece of pulpit-wisdom.  

If in Germany the common citizen proved himself a beast, this has nothing to do with national peculiarities, but with the fact that bestiality itself, necrophilia, has become in the face of manifest abundance the attitude of the backward, the deluded philistine, that same ‘hard-done-by’ mentality which the master-morality was invented to combat.  

If Cesare Borgia, late 15th, were resurrected today, he would look like David Friedrich Strauss and his name would be Adolf Hitler.  The cause of amorality has been espoused by the same Darwinists whom Nietzsche despised, since evolution meant racism, and who proclaim as their maxim the barbaric struggle for existence with such  vehemence, even though it is no longer needed.  True distinction has long ceased to consist in taking the best for oneself, and has become instead saturated with taking, the practices in reality of the virtue of giving, for Nietzsche occurs only in the mind.  

Ascetic ideals constitute today a more solid bulwark against the madness of the profit-economy then did the hedonistic life sixty years ago against liberal repression.  The amoralist may now at last permit himself to be a kind, gentle, unegoistic and open-hearted as Nietzsche already was then.  As a guarantee of his undiminished resistance, he is still as alone in this as in the days when he turned the mask of evil upon the normal world, to teach fear of its own perversity.

Marxism is not communism

 Marxism is not Communism

Marxism should be sharply distinguished from communism. The communist ideal as discussed by the early Marx is not the same as Lenin's (from Kautsky) notion of the vanguard party. Nowhere does Marx mention a vanguard party, instead he talks about a well-organized proletariat leadership which took the form of unions in the 1800's. What Chapman did was to present a version of Marxism by picking out certain phrases from the Communist Manifesto, a document from the young Marx. Chapman specifically stated that he was not going to address the mature Marx?!  

Anyway, the point is that Marx's works considered in his historical period, and events related to his works which occurred in the 20th century were hardly based on his ideas. The best example is the issue of the primacy of class struggle which most every Marxist from Lenin to Althusser acknowledges is the central issue in history, the wheel of Historical Materialism: Marx's key insight. Class struggle takes particular forms/appearances at different times in history. The class struggle in Russia circa 1905-1917 is different from the class struggle in the 1920's between the Communist Party and the two worker groups: farmers and industrial workers. The Cuban Revolution does not only involve the US puppet Batista but the international mafias as well which Castro kicked out. The Chinese Revolution pitted the Nationalists led by Chiang Kia-Shek - intermission fight against the Japs - continue the Revolution and the long change of the culture through Mao's reforms from agrarian to industrialization, and then from poverty to middle class diffusion and a capitalist-communist nation-state. The class struggle took the form of different social and economic classes, or fractions, conflicting within the leadership and within the population in each historical situation. But, the scientific socialist "law" of historical change via class struggle is different in each concrete particular moment and place. Marx could not possibly anticipate these particulars and although these "Marxist" leaders used Marx as a springboard, it is a leap (no pun) to infer that their policies were based on Marx's ideas. In sum, the communist parties of the 20th century hardly resemble Marx's ideas of dictatorship of the proletariat which implied Democracy: government by the people. Ironically, the only real instance of a proletarian dictator was Hitler.  

What is overlooked is that Marxism was cohered to refer to the USSR and Red China. However, Marxism took many different forms in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Southern Asia, and America - different forms of democracy and socialism. In these latter instances, Marxism was used against the totalitarian forms in Russia and China, and especially against the Nazi's. The only real resistance to patriarchy, capitalism and liberal political leadership has been Marxism in its emancipatory form. One of the best cases of this difference was between Trotsky and Stalin. Like Marx, Trotsky spelled out in detail the important moral issues in persuing liberation. Trotsky's was the only real voice against Stalinism in the 20's and 30's. The rest of the Marxists had their hands full with Nazism! US conservative extremists turned the word 'Marxism' to mean unions, even Democrats, and communists and socialists, after WWII because before and during WWII, they were allies! My main point is that Marxism must be understood as a complex of variants, some good and some bad, and not as a monolith, and certainly not as Marx's original theory of history, economics, or politics. Where Alvin Gouldner talks about two Marxisms, read.

Lastly, what is obscured with all of these historical happenings and theoretical asides, is the everyday changes in the lives of the peoples concerning their occupations, their families, their marriages and their social relations. When Marx talks about the topsy-turvy world of capitalism with its fetishism, commodification, social domination, mystification, expropriation, and alienation, he is not only referring to the social relations between workers under capitalism, but to the supposedly more rational and decent institutional arrangements under communism. Such a peaceful and utopian state of affairs never occurred. While the USSR mocked the US over its racism, it applied severe anti-semitic punishments and should be understood as having an equivalent genocidal effect as Nazi Germany. But, the maelstrom in social relations, e.g. sexual behavior, that occurred after these various revolutions is repulsive: Soviet families disintegrated, Cuba persecuted homosexuals with a vengeance, China underwent an abortion epidemic. All of the maladies that Marx specified as horrific under capitalism were doubly worse under these new regimes. It was only where the themes of emancipation and liberation were implemented by the left that a resistance to capitalist and communist institutional confusion restored a sense of order and fairness. The impetus for this orderliness were the unions, the social movements that threatened the political sphere, the educational system which improved literacy and above all publications in higher ed, and the civil sphere of journalism, TV and radio, that spread the news of corruption and brutality which embarrassed the political class and led to legal and financial changes.

Democracy

 Democracy

Socialism in my understanding is not necessarily a system, or not only a system. Socialism means to me that all decisions are social, mediated by the social and not from on high or through a set of norms and rules structured by the economic or political system. It is not that politics are unimportant and your schema is certainly worthy as a reform of our current democracies. From the system perspectives, we must always pursue more democracy and not believe in some sudden switch to more or pure democracy. The issue is that the system can only be held responsible if it is an obstacle to social mediation, rather the solution it was intended to be. For example, how does the system intervene and modify the tyranny around family relations: marriage, sex, family and neighbors (in the broad sense of everyone in the region). Crime and social control is a system imperative but does not include social mediations that are part of the character or personality of the people. The kind of change that socialism represents is not merely a new or better system. Socialism should develop better social relations! In this sense, democracy is supervenient to socialism unless socialism really means 'social.'