godfry n. glad

Hmmm....

Jake did post up this:

First, since Jake does not seem to subscribe to these "deconstructionist tenets", I'd appreciate someone who considers themselves to be "deconstructionist" (say...kenaz?)either confirming, denying or amending these (and...in plain English, if you please).

But, short of that, I have a question. It states that "reality is a social construct"...how is this determined? Why is it a "social" construct? Why not an individual construct?

It certainly seems that those supporting the position underpinned with these tenets would either be a stone's throw from solipcism or has arrived there and is just cloaking that "reality" with a "social" nature to make it palatable to their conversant constructs....

Can someone clarify this for me?

godfry

Ted Hoffman

Logical positivism, like many systems of thought (Marxism, Existentialism etc), served its purpose in helping humanity reach greater levels of thought and understanding and as humanity moved on, it took a different form and political thought then was hostile to it. When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Nazism rooted out the now neopositivism and many logical positivists migrated away from Austria and Germany to the US and other countries - Godel was one of the early logical positivists.

LPs held that there are two sources of knowledge: empirical evidence (sources physics, biology etc) and logical reasoning (logical knowledge including maths which can be reduced to formal logic).
Empirical evidence being synthetic posteriori and logical reasoning being analytic a priori thus there is no synthetic a priori.

Its impact on philosophy (metaphysics) can be summed in one statement: "A statement is meaningful if and only if it can be proved true or false, at least in principle, by means of the experience -- this assertion is called the verifiability principle".

LP rendered metaphysical statements meaningless. Thus Vorks mental masturbation statement.

Modern LPs? Naah. But I believe naturalists are by and large logical positivists. Scientists largely adhere to what is today called the mechanistic consesus as they do their work. Which in essence, is physicalism or even naturalism. Except for a few - maybe RBH can tell us more since Dembski (the loudest one) is not a scientist. Behe is though.
This ISCID thread - Thoughts on Thinking Matter has more on the mechanistic consensus.

LP greatly influenced what we today regard as analytical reasoning (as opposed to synthetic), probability and deductive reasoning (among others). It was in turn influenced by Einsteins SR with the concept of verifiability, it was also influenced by formal logic, mathematical logic and as it took the form of neopositivism it counterinfluenced philosophy and science. And it is with us everyday. The polemics that we have today are not the same as those that we had in its formative years hence as a "movement" it is useless. But it helped catapult us to where we are today interms of scientific thought and methodology.

To recap my rambling:

The fundamental tenet of logical positivism is its denial of synthetic a priori knowledge.

I know people like Christopher Michael Langan (He of the CTMU) have attacked science on the grounds of the "problem of inference" because science/ reality is self-referencing in its verifiability/falsifiability criterion and because of its circular manner, science (what they call scientism)/methodological naturalism is considered "inadequate".

Source
So of course positivism (today realism) is not without its detractors. All the better - more fun!

See the evolution LP has undergone over the years? Thats why I was saying Vork spoke as a true logical positivist.

To begin with(and pay special attention to the emboldened words):
So, (social) reality is indeterminate - but we (as a society) fashion it - I remember arguing at length at MF & P that the argument that having sex with children is wrong, is baseless. I had only two allies in that debate (who was that Amen Moses and AF? can't remember). But I digress.

Deconstructionism had been seen by historians as a war against history and truth and by scientists as a war against reason and logic. By its very construction, its controversial and iconoclastic, even nihilistic because it claws away at exactly what is accepted as true, as right and as real.

It attacks the very fabric that holds the society together. It challenges norms, questions authority and takes away what is, to some, the only reality.

Vernon K. Robbins, in his thesis of the "we" passages, is a very good example of a deconstructionist. But not in the "destructive" sense above.
He says his philosophical approach is "relational". That itself, together with his socio-rhetorical approach of examining the "we" passages in acts and ancient documents, speaks volumes about his philosophical system.

Structuralism, which uses two-valued logic (true/false etc) as an explanatory tool, has been opposed by "post-structuralism" (Jacques Derrida at the helm) and dismissed as inadequate and unreliable.

Source

Deconstructionist thought has been used in literary criticism. But wehn we come to NT/Biblical studies, we talk of specific forms of criticism like textual criticism, form criticism, higher criticism, tradition criticism etc.
In OW:

Source


Concerning V.K. Robbins and the "pattern" he has established concerning the we, passages:
Personally, I love deconstructionism for its jargon, outlandish way of looking at things and the richness it brings to the human thought and the understanding of the human nature and history.
Deconstructionist approach represents the only means we have today of questioning our systems of thought and the only midwife that can help deliver an alternative viewpoint in all areas of knowledge.

Thus post modern.

Phew.

CJD

Hello, godfry. I agreed with Jacob's post on a few points, but I think (if he adheres to logical positivism, then . . .) he takes too much for granted (*which I see having cross-posted with him that he does not. My apologies, Jacob).

For example, this: "I hold that scientific realism is the view that science provides us with objective truth about reality (and not history)" Should be emended to suggest not absolute certainty but extreme probability/plausibility. In other words (as I've mentioned before), semi-non-foundationalist fool that I am, I seriously doubt that science is as resistant to subjective abuse as some would like.

What's more, this, "A proposition, or a statement, is factually meaningful only if it is verifiable", is itself unverifiable and therefore meaningless based on its own criteria. Further, this statement: "A proposition is verifiable only if it is either an experiential proposition or one from which some experiential proposition can be deduced in conjunction with other premises, makes me ask "Whose experience? and Based on which premises?" It seems to me that this, far more than noting the social construction of reality, leads to solipsism, which in turn leads us to godfry's question:

First, I do think, as Mr. Aliet remarked, that "Deconstructionism" is too loaded a term to be used when discussing biblical criticism. Besides, the notion that reality is socially constructed is not exclusive to "deconstructionism." If by "reality" we mean "reality as we perceive it," then when we say that it is "socially constructed" we are merely pointing out that there is a dialectical (or tria-lectical) process in the formation of societal structures. Simply put, society is a human product that yet continuously acts back upon its producer. The individual projects him/herself into society and yet the individual becomes a person only within a societal context. The main reason this is not solipsism is because this process never takes place in a vacuum. There is no society of one without the many.

Finally, the individual increases in age and makes a "world" for him/herself (often called "externalization"); this "world", however, is never a fixed state and the individual must therefore constantly re-socialize him/herself with it; once this collective process takes shape (by the many), cultures are produced, which in turn, through generational progression ("this is how things are done around here", etc.), gains an objectivity that remains real insofar as it is collectively recognized (both objectively and subjectively). I think this avoids solipsism, godfry, mainly because exposing/showing/portraying a culture that has been produced by the many is indeed empirically observable, and thus would by nature resist the more extreme forms of subjectivism (keeping in mind, of course, that our observations are not forms of absolute certainty).

So, instead of "reading biblical history, placing it in the right context and using logic to extract what one can," (because while the principles of logic are not mere social constructs, its application often is), one ought to read the biblical history, place it in its right social context, and apply a responsible hermeneutic to extract what one can. In the case of biblical criticism, I think it is of the socio-grammatical strain. An Enlightenment conception of "history" is almost beside the point (as I think maybe Mr. Aliet was alluding to).

Hopefully I did not add to the confusion,

CJD

Clutch

Jacob,

You seriously err in associating positivism with realism. Most contemporary forms of analytical antirealism take their cue from verificationist theories of meaning; the congeniality of radical empiricism to constructive, instrumentalist, "internal realist", or antirealist metaphysics is one of the major themes of 20th C Anglo-American (that is, Austrian ) philosophy.

Russell thought that physical objects were just theoretical constructs. Carnap based his entire metaphysics (circa Aufbau) on the subjective relation 'X appears to S to be similar to Y at t'. Not for nothing is Dennett, a sort-of instrumentalist/antirealist towards beliefs and desires, often accused of being a verificationist.

What makes you think of these people and others like them as realists, no doubt, is that they were/are hard-headed about making sense. But their opposition to "metaphysics" and wanking of the "nothing noths" sort was not based on a conviction that such talk denoted nothing real while (eg) mechanistic talk does; rather, it was based on their perception that such assertions could not be given any content. But that is no realist stance. Quite the opposite.

Dominus Paradoxum

I would like to take this oppurtunity to reccomend Reason and Analysis as an exhaustive critique of logical positivism and linguistic analysis.

Clutch

I think you meant "exhausting", didn't you?

Dominus Paradoxum

Why? Did you read it and feel it was a bit long ?

Ted Hoffman

CJD
Thanks for your post.
So are you arguing that there are NO objective facts (truths) in/about reality?
If not, then the question is, can science provide us with them?

But the statement does not claim itself to be factually meaningful. Does it? This is like an axiomatic system. Its like a theorem that is to be used in handling certain problems. It is not (regarded as a) a problem itself. It is a guideline to help in handling "problems".
You cant dig one hole to stop another.
Maybe a few questions will bring you back to the fold:

How do you know it is unverifiable?
Why should it be verifiable?
On what basis is a statement meaningless because its not verifiable?

Examine this statement: "Lets consult before we make a decision"
Is it verifiable?

Other premises. Its an all-inclusive statement.
Whose experience - the experience of the one examining the proposition or of verifiable human experience.

I have already mentioned the problem of induction up there. I hope you are not going there.

I think you handled godfrys question well and I agree with what you explained about externalization.
No.

Clutch
By and large, today, the two terms are treated synonymously. At least in scientific ranks (as opposed to arts where realism is contrasted with romanticism and in philosophy where realism is contrasted with idealism) Whether that is correct or otherwise is another issue.

No. That is not the case. But I agree with your point about the Philosophical palavers lacking content rather than being nonsensical.

What, according to you, would make a statement capable of being given content?
More specifically - can one who is not mechanistic in his/her worldview or one who is non-physicalist, state that a statement cannot be given content?

Clutch

By and large where? Not by anyone familiar with the history of contemporary analytic philosophy. It is true that some (though by no means all) deconstructionists or literary theorists use both 'positivist' and 'realist' as synonyms for "repressive, provincial and false". But this shows only their very shoddy scholarship and their reliance on Argument from Labelling (of which a subclass is Argument from Labelling With Shudder Quotes). Well, yes. That was the issue I raised: whether it is correct to associate positivism with realism. It isn't, as I argued with prominent examples. (There are many more examples, if you'd like them; the association between verificationism, positivism and antirealism really is a major theme in recent analytic work.)
I defer to you, of course, on the question of why you mistook positivists for realists. It was just a conjecture on my part.
Tough question, and one I can't answer in brief. But my point in any case concerned what the positivists thought about the question. For all the fancy formalization of the V-Ppl, it seems to me that the basic motivations are homely pragmatic ones: something like, if Q is really truth-apt, it ought to be possible to grasp how Q's truth would make a difference.
Yes, of course. Mechanism has been [Billy Crystal]mostly dead[/Billy Crystal] since Descartes' plenism lost out to Newton, and was all the way dead after Einstein. The positivists were well aware of these developments (Reichenbach contributing one of the formulations of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, Schlick having been a student of Planck!) and would never advocate mechanism. As for physicalism, the positivists were split -- Russell, no; Feigl, not really; early Carnap, yes; later Carnap, maybe. And so forth.

The doctrines are really orthogonal to each other. Only in potted narratives popular in a very few quarters are they all run together.

kenaz

Please understand that it's not that I don't want to reply your request directly, ie. give specific nice examples. But subjugated knowledges only become meaningful when situated within specific genealogical discourses. So what I can offer for a better understanding (if you are interested) is to read the books listed below by Michel Foucault- each a specific genealogical dissection of unitary history, each packed with subjugated knowledges desubjugated because they become tactical forces within Foucault's discourse:

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
A critical examination of the archaeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800- from the Middle Ages when insanity was considered part of everyday life and fools and crazies roamed the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and a wall erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Reevaluation of reigning assumptions about all the ensuing reforms in the penal institutions of the West. Through the examination of innovations that range from the abolition of torture to the institution of forced labor and the appearance of the modern penitentiary, we see how punishment has shifted its locus from the prisoner's body to his soul- and that our very concern with rehabilitation encourages and refines criminal activity.

History of Sexuality: An Introduction- Volume 1
A challenge thrown to standard interpretations of modern sexual history. Exploration of humans' compulsion to continually analyze and discuss sex, and the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the question of what we are to what our sexuality is.