It has become complicated to respond to Jay's comments because they are so
extensive that as I've been preparing on the basis of the first three, a
fourth substantial post has appeared that addresses comments made to Elisa
and also Peter has posted again. I guess this provides something
instructive about the time scales Jay repeatedly mentions. So I'm going to
parcel it out as best possible. Suffice it to say I'm very glad to see this
discussion of dialectical materialism -- although we have veered in a
direction away from the issues of "the ideal" toward which I'd hoped the
discussion might lead (and then perhaps on to the difficult question of
reflection itself). But . . .
and I'll follow Jay's lead here too, cutting a long post into several
relatively shorter ones.
1. I was happy to see Jay Lemke's extensive comments on Peter's paper for
a
whole lot of reasons, not the least of which being that he knows the Lakoff
and Thelen/Smith material that Peter used to discuss the notion of embodied
cognition. But I found myself wondering what his primary point is since in
the first (6/10) post he stated that "Peter's view of Materialism seems
either too optimistic or too narrow for me" and in his last (6/12) post he
states that "dialectical and system dynamical pictures" (identifying his own
position with the latter) are "very similar, and certainly compatible." In
fact Jay goes along with the essence of Peter's argument against Lakoff when
he states that "if there is anything we use language to do, it is to engage
socially with other humans" a position that has always been a premise of the
dialectical materialist theory of language and which primate studies
indicate to be phylogenetically valid..
A major problem of course is what is meant by TRUE. Both Peter and
Lakoff reject the objectivist paradigm of truth that is based on a
correspondence between some ideal system of representations and an objective
world existing independently of that system of representations. Jay also
appears rejects the objectivist paradigm but in various passages it seems to
be informing his analyses.
One place this problem surfaces occurs when he talks about
how social semiotics and ecosystem theory can "add to historical dialectics
as a theory of social change" insofar as the lattter "build the conceptual
bridges across scales of organization, from the evolutionary and historical,
to the macrostructural, to the developmental, to the micro-interactional."
What could this be but an objectivist statement? Who is the concrete
historical subject for whom these conceptual bridges are built and for whom
these scales of organization exist as part of a historically given
world-view? From Jay's comments I do not get the feeling that he would be
comfortable saying that they only exist for a handful of academic theorists
and system analysts who are involved in the the activity of
furthering the cyberneticization of the economy and the society. In fact
these levels and activities have to emerge from someone's activity but he
hasn't said whose. A second place that it comes up is in the discussion of
truth as ONE or as MANY -- here what is true is reduced to a consensus among
individuals.
Nevertheless, the specificity of the diverse groups for which MANY truths
hold (accepting for the moment the questionable position that truth can be
reduced to consensus) is one of the bases of his rejection of Peter's
Materialism:
the "factorization" problem we are informed is such that we cannot separate
out the influence of the specific groups "point of view" from the ensemble
us-world. (Peter has himself now responded to this in answering Elisa).
Jay compares his position to that of Nils Bohr's theory of
complementarity of which Einstein said, "The Heisenberg-Bohr soothing
philosophy --or religion? is so finely chiseled that it provides a soft
pillow for believers . . . This religion does damned little for me." Which
would seem to confirm his position since these two points of view
(Einstein's and Bohr's within the very bosom of the emerging field of
quantum physics) could each be called a TRUTH. Why then one might ask has
Einstein's position been rejected, Bohr's accepted? This would further lead
us to believe that the MANY truths of which Jay speaks are simply truths of
the relationship between language and a world which language represents
since Bohr himself synthesized the perspective of complementarity as
follows: " There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum
physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to
find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature." (in
Niels Bohr's Times by Abraham Pais, pp. 424 passim, Andy's website also
contains the 1949 piece by Bohr on the subject, see:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/index.htm ).
Nevertheless I think the comparison with Bohr doesn't go far since the
latter, unlike Jay, would not have defended the position that what can be
said about nature depends on the group that is doing the saying but is
rather a property of what can be said in general, a neo-Kantian position.
Nevertheless, dialectical materialism does hold that the specificity of
the society (read group) is fundamental in determinining not just what can
be said but also what is TRUE. So it would
seem that the issue can be explored by looking at how "group" is
conceptualized and how the group so understood determines what can be said.
This I reserve for the third part of this reponse.
This in turn raises the question of the relationship of language to the
group which Jay has put at the center of his observations. Dialectical
materialism's answer to this is well known: the dominant ideologies are the
ideologies of dominant class in society. Admittedly this is not so much a
solution as a specific way of formulating the problem one that dialectical
materialism takes as its own.
Paul H. Dillon
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