Young Master Smeet
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I see the ghost of Stuart is still eating duck (after asking for a bit of robust debate and getting it). he seems unable to answer the question of how you achieve unity between people with different objectives: he's never answered that one any time it was raised. good uck to Tactical Unity, they'll need it.
jpodcaster wrote:Welcome to politics Bill – its a messy business. Alternatively you could always establish a central dinner committee to tell everyone where they'll be going?Or, we could organise a Dinner group based on the agreement of what a restuarant is, and how to get there, first, instead of trying to reconcile incommensurates. The idea of unity between Labour reformists who don't want socialism, Stalinist and Trotskyist totalitarians and woolly libertarians is the opposite of politics. Politics is deciding what you want to do, and how to do it, not agreeing to submerge those two key things for the sake of 'unity'.Or, to use Alistair Campbells very useful TLA: OST Objective, Strategy, Tactics. Left unity looks to unite around tactics, and knock O & S into the long grass.
stuartw2112 wrote:As for dinner, you try telling someone who's hungry that unhealthy snacks are a diversion from the glorious Michelin starred restaurant that awaits us at the end of a 40 year journey. I'll hold their coat while they smack you about the head.I see you're having duck for dinner. Anyway, eating sweets between meals can ruin your appetite. It's the snackers that are delaying dinner, that's the point.
I'm in the middle of organising our works Winterval Dinner. We are united around going for dinner (except those who don't actually want to go). Some want to go to an Indian restaurant, some want to go to Thai, but we are all part of Dinner Unity. We are united in Dinner Unity, and we can work together, despite wanting to go to different restaurants. We believe in Dinner. Just don't ask us to define it (some think it has to include meat, others don't). But we want to go to each restaurant we want to go to by different routes. But we are still Dinner Unity. Some people think that we don't need to set a time for arrival, so long as we travel together, and while dinner is nice in principle, we have to eat lots of unhealthy snacks in the meantime as a lesser evil. Some think that the restuaraunt is inimportant, and it is the journey that matters. But we are still Dinner Unity. Oh, and we all hate each other, and are sneaking behind each other's backs to try and undermine each other, and impose our choices of Restaurant, route and time on each other. But we are still Dinner Unity.Now, I have a ballot to re-run using the Condorcet count.
A fascinating book on this general topic (well, science) is: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Peoples-History-Science-Midwives-Mechanicks/dp/1560257482
Blurb wrote:We all know the history of science that we learned from grade school textbooks: How Galileo used his telescope to show that the earth was not the center of the universe; how Newton divined gravity from the falling apple; how Einstein unlocked the mysteries of time and space with a simple equation. This history is made up of long periods of ignorance and confusion, punctuated once an age by a brilliant thinker who puts it all together. These few tower over the ordinary mass of people, and in the traditional account, it is to them that we owe science in its entirety. This belief is wrong. A People's History of Science shows how ordinary people participate in creating science and have done so throughout history. It documents how the development of science has affected ordinary people, and how ordinary people perceived that development. It would be wrong to claim that the formulation of quantum theory or the structure of DNA can be credited directly to artisans or peasants, but if modern science is likened to a skyscraper, then those twentieth-century triumphs are the sophisticated filigrees at its pinnacle that are supported by the massive foundation created by the rest of us.A copy is available in the Party Library…
LBird,actually, I'm not joking, I'm in with the Singularitarians on the immnent emergence of human constructed super human intelligence (when I say "I" I obviously mean the linguistically constructed retroactive justification for the actions of the meat-bot hitting the the keyboard right now).
LBird,we can't, as yet, quantify love. But if we could build a fully functional computer simulation of a working brain, then it would become literally possible. Also, we can speculate that we could measure hormonal responses to stimulous and assess teh presense of hormones associated with the love instincts. If we could do that, that would be an advance of reason, and we would have turned a quality into a quantity, and thus understand and control it better. We could then obey our new robot overlords…
Lbird wrote:Given that Pannekoek here remarks on the change from 'quality to quantity', and not Engels' 'quantity to quality', I'm not sure that it's relevant to our discussion on dialectics.Saving that it does seem an intriguing reversal, and, to my reading, suggesting that the transformation from observing qualities and then being able to quantify them is the correct way we should think of them: that should be the dialectical approach.
LBird,I may have been over-reading Pannekoek, it's page 445 in the 1961print:
Panekoek wrote:It can be remarked that the addition of decimals fundamentally changed the charcter of 'magntitude' [of a star — YMS] From a quality, a class, an ordinal number, it has turned into a quantity, a measure, an amount that can be divide by fractions, a basis of measure. We cannot speak of a star of the 2,87th magnitude; but we can say it's magnitude is 2.78.Maybe it was just because I knew he had also written on philosophy, but it does read like the application of dialectic (ish) by a practical scientist. I have to say the idea that being able to measure numerically seems to be a commonplace of defining the advance of a science.
LBird wrote:I'm not sure I get your meaning, here. 'Quantify' is a human judgement. 'Quantitative change leading to qualitative change' is a supposed 'law of dialectics', according to Engels; that 'law' is what I'm objecting to, not humans making judgements.I suspect we're all in agreement about said law: saving (moving into the philsoophy of mathematics) whether one exists or not (are numbers real or human constructs, etc.)?
LBird,the books at home. I'll try and get a ref tonight. My reading of Pannekoek was that quantity/quality wasn't in nature, but the development of the human understanding of nature. So, the quality of overwhelming military force transforms into the military science when we can analyse and quantify military capacity (and thus understand it better).
LBird,Would you include Pannekoek in critical realism. ISTR finding his version of the quality/quantity thing (in his history of astronomy) interesting, not least because it kind of chimes with the now widespread view that the advance of a science can be compared to it's capacity to quantify it's object of study (for him it was the quality of brightness).
Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:since the reading I suggest absolves Marx of making a crass error.Take your pick: Marx was either an ignoramus or my reading is correct.I know which alternative I prefer.Choosing a reading based on saving a writer from being an ignoramous or committing a crass error is a fundamentally bankrupt and intellectually fraudulant approach. I weigh the evidence without prejudice or the exclusion of the very real possiblity that Marx was wrong (as he was about so many things). Ockham's razor often suggests error is the most likely reading.
Indeed, we can keep working with the postface as the primary source, but if we look here again at this sentence:
Marx wrote:The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner.Hegel's dialectic is referred to without article, which usually is suggestive of a definite article. So, here with have an identity between Hegel's dialectic and dialectic. I have to say you're putting a lot of weight on an endorsement of another critic. The statuis of being published is strong and sugegstive, but it is not iron clad and definitive. If Marx wrote in the secret diary of Charlie Marx age 43 3/4s "My dialectic has nothing to do with hegel, and really, I've never read him, I'm just conning people" you would want to ram that down people's throats, and ask the valid question, how does it relate to his published statements (It would make Charlie a fraud, is the basic answer).
Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:I agree, but where the unpublished source contradicts the published source, the latter must take precedence.Like the punchline of the joke, Frayed Knot. Where the two contradict, we need to look at why they conradict, and why the author chose to make their public view different, we cannot take the public as read, though.
