Nate,
Your last post seems totally opaque to me. For one
thing it seems you are confusing the logical and psychological uses of the
word "identity" . For another, the quote talks about how something unfolds
but you
didn't include the preceding sentence where that "something" is described as
"the twisting which occurs when a formal classification system is mismatched
with an individual's biographical trajectory, memberships, or locations".
The full sense of the quote is completely compatible with and contravenes
nothing I said in previous posts: sciences are totally imbricated within the
networks of social relations and this determines (though not without limits)
their functions in any given society. (yes, you can use a hammer to screw
with but not very efficiently). The phrase, "conflation of aristotelian and
prototypical categories", would seem to indicate that the authors are
pointing to a confusion of common sense stereotypes (wiry hair, nose
breadth, skin color, etc) with aristotelian categories; ie, categories based
on
the possession of a common characteristic present in all individuals of the
category. Perhaps in earlier chapters they explain why they single out old
aristotle, whose categories (substance, relation, quantity, and quality)
were also picked up by most western philosophers through Kant only to be
dissolved in the Hegelian dialectic and thoroughly discarded after Boole and
the emergence of algebraic logic. In any event, keep in mind that Ilyenkov
interprets all formal logical categories (ie, categories defined by
possession of a common trait or group of traits) as "abstract" not
"concrete" universals. Such categories do not provide understanding of
necessity except in deductive, aristotelian sciences (eg, objects fall
because that is their essence or things burn because it is their essence).
A concept such as race is fundamentally a non-dialectical concept until it
is seen that one race defines another dialectically, just as the gender
categories male and female are defined in relation and indisoluble unity
with each other. Perhaps this is why the authors single out aristotelian as
opposed to dialectical categories??
But theories of classification are marginal to the point I've been making
which you have yet to address directly. This concerns the process of
development of scientific knowledge of necessity; concrete knowledge of a
world that is independent of our conceptions of it, definitely not an
artifact of our construction, and yet whose necessary structures we can
know, knowledge that builds on and grows out of preceding knowledge. In
mathematics this process is somewhat easy to follow but you might dispute
that the subject matter of mathematics is independent of us. This is itself
a debate within mathematics although I interpret Godel's findings (following
von Neumann) to indicate that the subject matter of mathematics is as
independent of us as the composition of a star (we in turn are dependent on
the composition of stars). Chemistry provides excellent examples since the
medieval alchemists developed quite concrete knowledge of the properties of
matter leading to the development of such techniques as amalgamation among
others. Priestly isolated oxygen on the basis of Stahl's alchemical theory
of phlogistons, an essentialist, aristotelian concept coming from the greek
word meaning "to set on fire". In other words alchemy was a form a
scientific endeavor based on the ancient categories: earth, air, fire, and
water whose specific knowledge of necessity was superseded/subsumed in the
molecular model of chemistry. Nevertheless, that knowledge was, at its
historical period, scientific knowledge, and it could still probably be used
in a pinch to achieve some goals--after all celestial navigation still works
on the assumption that the stars, not the earth moves. This works because of
the limits within which the calculations are projected. There are other
examples: the subsumption of Newtonian mechanics as a special case within
relativity theory is well known. It would seem that the entire development
of science during the past 5000 years could be studied from the perspective
of zones of proximal development where the "adult", the "teacher", are the
various challenges provided in the unfolding application of the knowledge to
human practice, which is precisely where the structures of necessity impose
themselves, not in the formal construction of the theories themselves.
How scientific categories and scientific knowledge are manipulated and
torqued (and how far such torquing is possible before that knowledge needs
to be repressed) in social power processes is certainly an important
question but such manipulation and torquing doesn't in and of itself bring
into question the specific pan-cultural fact of scientific knowledge of
necessary laws. I've yet to see how you demonstrate the contrary.
Paul H. Dillon
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 01 2000 - 01:01:51 PST