Reply to Comment . . . The Logic of Normative Discourse . . .

I accidentally deleted a comment by ADHR and therefore post it here in its entirety. 




No. There's a hole in her logic, and in yours. You both assumed that the gun registry actually is a tool for reducing gun violence, particularly against women. That has not been proven. All we have to go on are (1) a correlation between reduced violence and the existence of the registry (and, as any good skeptic knows, correlation is not causation), and (2) the say-so of the RCMP (that's this RCMP). Neither proves the point.

I'll refrain from comment on your "culture of violence" riff. 


Now for my comment on his comment.


I grow weary of people who try to argue formal "logic"  when they don't appear to understand either formal or philosophical logic in any meaningful sense of the word. Our commentator here seems to be conflating hard emphatically centered logic, which has more of a relationship to mathematics, and the more common use of logic as it pertains to social science and the rational discourse of normative questions. 


First of all, guns, like all inanimate objects, cannot be said to "Cause" violence. A machine like a gun could  only be said to 'cause' violence in the presence of a malfunction and even then to argue 'causation' in such a case is a stretch. To put it in biblical terms we can take from the book of Job which reminds us that "Affliction cometh not forth from the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground."  Guns do not cause violence, they precipitate it, in the sense that they promote its possibility to a significant degree both in quality and quantity. 


Thus ADHR doesn't seem to understand that, while correlation is indeed not causation, in most such cases 'correlation' is all the social scientist has to establish links. Thus, ADHR seems to be functioning in a milue of dogmatic empiricism which lost its power generations ago. There is nothing 'illogical' about correlation, rather it is perfectly logical - it is just not empirical in the sense that a philosopher like, say, Hume might demand. 


There is a direct correlation in most cases between the number of guns in a society and the degree of gun violence. One does not need to argue a causation here, in fact causation simply doesn't enter the picture. It is like this - there is a direct correlation between the number of working telephones in a society and the number of telephone calls made each day. The telephones are not "causing" the calls. However, if you took half the phones away, for example, there would be a reduction in the number of calls made each day. This is correlation not causation. 


Similarly with the case of guns; reduce guns and you reduce gun violence - the correlation is clear. Now we come to the question of the gun registry. We actually don't need to prove causation here either, since there is a direct correlation between the degree of gun control in society and the number of guns and the amount of gun violence. Gun registries actually reduce the number of guns in  circulation because there are always a certain number of people who will not purchase a gun if they are compelled to register it. This is one of the reasons that there many more wackos in the US who possess guns - because the easier it is to get guns the more likely someone who doesn't "need" the gun because they live on a farm etc, will purchase it. 


The value of any gun registry cannot be made in a causal or empirical sense, the same way that certain individual laws against violence could not be seen in isolation in order to be meaningful. This is because of something in logic called 'over-determination.' One cannot make a causal link in cases of over-determination. Rather one can only make correlative links. Obviously any gun registry program will not put an end to violence, but since there is a correlative relationship between greater degrees of gun registration and control and the number of gun crimes, it is in fact perfectly "logical" to assume that a generalized program of gun registration and control will ultimately reduce the number of gun crimes. And since one of the primary areas of gun violence is violence against women, we can also assume that gun registry and controls will reduce, in the long run, violence against women. Thus it is important to remember, as Mallick reminds us, that The registration forms are designed to guard against people buying guns after they separate, or divorce, or are under psychiatric care. And it tells police officers what’s waiting for them when they approach a home where there’s a domestic dispute.


Logic utilized by philosophers and social scientists is not simply empirical and causal and if ADHR had read the work of Louis Althusser or Jurgen Habermas he would understand this. Laws and social policies have to seen against the backdrop of  general correlations otherwise reason in normative questions would not be meaningful. Even Hume understood that you cannot derive an ought from an is. But there is not a hole in the logic here as ADHR claims. Rather Ms Mallick simply understands the rational discourse of normative questions and the direct and meaningful correlation between controls on guns and the quantity and quality of domestic and generalized violence. 


PS. Given his apparent failure to understand normative discourse, I am glad that ADHR refrained from commenting on my "riff" on our culture of violence. Because if he thinks we have not created a culture of violence he is so far gone from both logic and reality that it wouldn't be worth our time.