Reply to a Comment. . .

I feel compelled to reply to the comment made by Doconnor to my last post because this goes to the heart of what I have been trying to say. Furthermore, I believe it is motivated by a philosophical misunderstanding that not only doconnor makes but is rampant in our culture. Though I am sure that doconnor and I would agree on many things politically speaking and I appreciate his/her comments, we are operating in different paradigms. First of all and most pressingly, I think doconnor makes the mistake that many people make and which the work of philosophers of science like Feryabend attempt to correct, which is that he conflates so-called "facts" with "science" as though the two were the same thing, which of course they are not. Science is an ideological construct that attempts to organize a picture of the world which is more or less consistent and under the rubric of science there are many, often conflicting methodologies for doing this. "Facts," on the other hand, are a simple form of 'truth' claim. And of course, using Habermas' forumla in his monumental work "Theory of Communicative Action," there are other kinds of 'truth claims' such as normative and dramaturgical ones. Thus, to also follow Habermas, all three types of truth claims operate on different levels and continually operate together in order to function in the world. Obviously one can never entirely separate claims of fact, for example, from normative claims. They are interdependent. Now it is a common misconception, to which I believe doconnor is falling victim here, that assumes that pragmatic (think Rorty) or 'post-modern' operative philosophical approaches (think Derrida or Foucault) are attempting to circumvent 'factual' claims, which they are not. Rather, the real issue here is that all claims of 'fact' are (and think Nietzsche here)indelibly (and a priori) coloured by our normative judgments, many of which are assumptions of what the Germans call Lebenswelt. Seen in this light, 'science' is an entirely different matter and must be seen in an ideological light (here think Althusser). An effort to see it otherwise is bound, I believe, to fall into the worst kind of scientism.

Now, in this light, I think I can show why doconnor's statement that one can have "fact without ethics" is false and misunderstands the nature of epistemology and the interactions between different kinds of truth claims. Philosophers who are variously referred to as "rationalist" or "objectivist" or under some other rubric, have failed since Montaigne to understand the relationship between so-called rationalist standards and what one might call 'pre-rationalist' judgements. Montaigne's skepticism goes to the heart of this epistemological discourse. One cannot have "facts" without 'ethics" (and I use ethics in the broadest normative sense here) because our normative, non-rationalist, assumptions and judgments predate our perception and understanding of 'facts.' I think even the work of THomas Kuhn demonstrates this. First of all, many people, if not most, will be unable to see certain "facts" until they have colonized the lebenswelt.But second, there is a more subtle and complex issue at stake, which is for 'factual' claims to be in any way organized and meaningful to us as thinking beings, we must assume an entire structure of normative and ethical assumptions. In other words, while it is clear that one could not make normative claims without assuming certain 'facts' about the world because norms assume an external world in which to operate, it must also be said that you could not have facts without normative structures. (This is not, of course, to claim that the physical world of 'facts' doesn't exist without our judgements of it. Rather, it is only a claim that the two are co-dependent. A tree may have a physical reality whether or not we recognize it as such but it would have no "meaning" as a tree without an entire normative structure from we observe it.) Since the advent of the Enlightenment, Western rationalist philosophers have been, in Feyarabend's words, operating in a Conquest of the Abundance of the world. But regardless of what rationalists (or even scientists) believe they are doing, facts are not instructive, we cannot derive an ought from an is, and facts will only be widely accepted as such, or socially meaningful, when they properly relate to or are integrated into some kind of normative structure.

The problem with having this argument, and I have had it for twenty years with philosophers as well as scientists, is that it is paradigmatic in nature and in recent generations a paradigm has formed which is profoundly different from, and often hostile to, this position. Just as Odysseus was completely baffled by Achilles' paradigmatic rejection of the system of honour when he left the battle of Troy, people who are steeped in the contemporary rationalist paradigm will simply be baffled by such a position or falsely believe that it is a naive or an overly metaphysical kind of philosophy. It is always difficult to converse across paradigms, because people find it difficult to imagine that there are other meaningful world-views than their own. And the left has been just as guilty of this as any other group. But even more significantly, it has become very difficult to question the Western rationalist and scientific paradigm because people who adhere to it are so certain that they simply see the world "as it is" and everyone else is confused or deluded. Just as people on all sides of the political spectrum are hostile to anarchistic ideas, so most people are hostile to ideas that they think are relativistic or overly pragmatic. But all societies are dependent upon certain kinds of 'myths.' A member of the Aztec society would think you were deluded or insane if you claimed that the Sun was no more than a ball of fire. And most members of the capitalist society think you are similarly crazy if you say, for example, that competition is unhealthy. We have not reached (and I am not sure we can) the social position that Habermas thinks we have, in which people recognize conflicting ideas as meaningful positions that are all subject to discursive redemption.

So are we trapped in a kind of paradigmatic 'double-bind' or can we find a way to relate to each other? I am not sure. I am fairly confident, however, that the great philosopher Max Weber has been sadly overlooked in recent times and that the technocratic, scientism which grows out of Western rationalism is leading us to an iron cage of teleological efficiency and rational control that is widely misunderstood even by people who think that they live with a different worldview than the prevailing capitalist one. Herein lies the rub.

More to ADHR and Normative discourse. . . . .

With all due respect ADHR, I really don't think you understand what I have been saying. If I sounded arrogant, I appoligize, but this conversation brings up some serious emotions and I have been having this paradigmatic argument for so many years.

 Correlations DO in fact establish the point and sociologists since the foundations of modern social sciences from the time of Durkheim and Weber onward have established this point. And Habermas's contemporary work on both communicative action and Normative standards and the foundations of Law reiterate it over and over. Crime is almost always an over-determined act socially speaking and laws can very seldom be tied directly to the commitment of crimes. You cannot, for example "prove" that laws against murder slow the murder rate. Most legal arguments can only be meaningful against the backdrop of certain kinds of lifeworld (lebenswelt) assumptions or certain kinds of ideological constructs. As a result - in most cases correlation is not only the best kind of proof the social policy-maker has it is often the ONLY mechanism they have.

Your distinction concerning correlation and causal connection is simply wrong according to the mechanisms of most decent

social science and philosophy. It is the discourse of science and mathematics. Even though some social scientists have attempted (I believe with no success) to establish Coefficients of Correlation, these are not only too complicated but are not meaningful to normative and social discourse. This is clearly one of the things that Habermas established in the Theory of Communicative Action and one of the things that he has long fought against concerning the colonization of social discourse by technocratic discourse. Incidentally Feyerabend also did brilliant work in this area.

Connections between certain kinds of social behaviour and certain laws and social policies is in fact correlative not causal, period. Furthermore, the neo-conservative efforts to colonize all social policy making with absolute causal 'proofs'and quantifications is part of a nearly global and entirely disingenuous effort to create the appearance of necessity and technocracy, all the while being driven by fairly firm ideological efforts.

Of course, an issue like gun violence is over-determined and cannot be reduced to any single policy or social phenomenon. But if you need to get technical then this much is clear. No law, NONE, can be said to be causal since only individual actions by independent actors could appropriately be referred to as causal. Thus the great sociologists like Habermas have established normative discourse in terms of a complex web of determinates. Since one cannot "prove" that loose gun laws in the US have lead to the highest rates of gun crimes in the world, the sociologist is dependent upon another kind of discursive exercise. This is not "illogical" or faulty logical as your original comment implied. Rather it is a kind of normative discourse that depends on correlations and certain kinds of communicative actions. And since you, and no one else, can actually prove a causal relationship between any law and certain behaviors (a fact even many right-wing theorists have been at pains to establish) it is entirely disingenuous to demand such proof in normative discourse. Rather, it is a different kind of correlative and communicative mechanism that is demanded. I can no more 'prove' by technocratic standards that a gun registry will reduce gun crimes than you can 'prove' by the same standards that generous welfare causes the working class to be shiftless and lazy. And since no such mechanism of 'proof' exists you can choose to believe that there is no link between the loose gun control mechanisms in the US and the highest rate of gun violence in the world. There is in fact no causal link, properly so-called, only a correlative one.

We know, for example that in countries like the UK and Holland gradually established stronger mechanisms of gun-control, including registries, and gun-violence (particularly domestic violence involving guns) gradually declined more or less in line with the establishment of such controls. This is not causal, it is correlative. But hard logic and technocratic reason can still let you deny such links. But technocratic rationality doesn't actually belong in the realm of normative discourse and in my opinion technocratic rationality is largely and ideological illusion anyway, a position made clear by a long history of skeptics from Montaigne to Feyerbend. You failed, when you talked of the “empirical” question, to understand that I was in fact arguing that you cannot, in almost all cases, make such empirical connections within a region of normative discourse. In other words I am using an entirely different paradigm of discourse rather than the 'empirical' one. Furthermore, I am arguing that I explicitly reject the paradigm you are using because it is a technocratic colonization of normative discourse, which is not only useless but entirely disingenuous. And I am building this argument on the back of Weber's work on rationalization in Economy and Society, Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Habermas' work in Action, Theory of Communicative Action, Theory and Practice, and Between Facts and Norms.  (See also Luca Corchia's work on Explicative Models of Complexity)

The Problem of paradigms . . .

Blogging has confirmed in my mind at least one particular idea; that one of the primary problems people have in understanding each other and finding creative solutions to our problems is that they think quite firmly within a particular paradigm. The inability to think outside the paradigm in which they are operating makes it very difficult for people to see that certain social interactions or even scientific problems have numerous, sometimes countless, solutions but they are prevented from seeing them because a paradigm, or worldview, is like a hard frame that forms around our thought preventing us from seeing beyond our thought to creative solutions. The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn wrote extensively about this idea in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But his conclusions are easily transferable to other areas of society. Ironically, academics are probably some of the people who are most vulnerable to paradigmatic blindness because they are steeped in a certain culture so deeply and because they are well educated they imagine that they are very open minded. It is doubly ironic that the process of peer review continually reinforces this process. Living as I did for many years on the margins of the academic community, I saw this process first hand and was continually shocked by it. But it happens everywhere in our society; in the arts, in politics, in religion, etc. Thus we often discuss things at cross purposes because people can seldom even identify the paradigm in which they are operating and if you don’t even understand that you are operating from a particular world view that is confining the ways and patterns in which you think, breaking out of this will be nearly impossible. Thus we often discuss issues at cross purposes with very little, if any hope, of coming to an understanding because we are operating from conflicting and unidentified world views. People are usually convinced that they are objective and can see all points of view but are only operating in an inter-objective manner, that is, within the confines of their own paradigm what they are arguing makes sense but looked at from another point of view the same argument might be entirely senseless.

I have no solutions for this problem. I just mention it because many of the comments I have received on my blog have been so completely beside the point that it has amazed me. But when I realize that the person is operating in a different paradigm it makes more sense. 

Partisanship past and future . . . Clarifications

My recent post on partisanship elicited a number of strong comments, a couple reasonable and justified and a couple of offensive wing-nuts who actually think a group of Jewish trade-unionists run the world. (These comments were justifiably rejected)

As a point of clarification I want to say that the quote that I used to suggest a troubling trend in political discourse on Liberal blogs was in a blog that subsequently contained a number of reasonable points concerning the recent NDP convention. I didn’t name the blog simply because I found the unfortunate words at the beginning of the blog to largely nullify any reasonable discourse because such poison language can hardly be the foundation of a real political debate. It is hardly reasonable to say to someone “you are a no-good, dishonest, lying, stupid, weasel” and then say “but here are some of your good points.”

Though the blogger from whom I took the quote had a number of cogent points later in his post, not only was the possibility for meaningful discourse poisoned,  but it was never my intention to get into a wider debate about specific policies of the NDP some of which I agree with and some of which I do not. My blog is very seldom about policy issues. Though I have attacked specific policies of the Conservative Government, usually when I address politics I am talking in wider terms about political philosophy and the various paradigms in which we operate. One of the reasons that I seldom engage in policy debates is that the people with whom I disagree are working in a different paradigm to the one in which I operate and for policy debates to be meaningful it would require far more space and time than a blog offers.

I have been accused of actually misrepresenting myself as non-partisan because my blog appears on a NDP blog site. First of all, I was completely unaware that I appeared on any NDP related site and have never seen this for myself, but given the nature of the Web I guess it is possible. Second of all, I say to the one or two readers out there who actually read my blog that I have never been a member of the NDP, I would never shy away from criticizing the Party if such criticisms seem warranted to me, and If my blog does appear on an NDP related blog site this should not be interpreted as evidence of some kind of party affiliation.

Finally, my recent post was intended only to address what I see as a growing trend of poisoned discourse in relation to partisanship in Canadian politics. I am certain that I have also been guilty of this at times, and for this I express my regrets. I have always reserved my harshest words for the Conservatives because I think that beyond simply matters of policy the party in its present manifestation represents a serious threat to human rights and democracy in Canada.

Yours in the struggle.

Kirby