-----Original Message----- From: Paul Henry Rosenberg <rad at gte.net>
>Show me where you stop, then. It's not that hard to respond to a
>reductio if it's false. Since neither of us are rationalists, you
don't
>have an insurmountable fundamentalism on my part to overcome.
paul, i don't expect you to read everything i post, but if you want to insist that i do not 'pull back in time' from the brink of renouncing rationalism, by which i assume you mean, an embrace of irrationalism, then i think you might want to return to the comments of mine on feminist and lesbian politics, where i clearly said that the response to the rationalism of political lesbianism was a kind of irrationalism, the refusal of critique (and poltics) in some circles. but then, you read these comments so cursorily in the first place... if i don't repeat every single presumption in every single post, and if you're simply unsure, then all you need do is ask.
>Hey, I got nothing against a well-placed sneer. I'm not dissing
>rhetoric per se, not at tal.
nor would i. but i did object to the your rhetoric here, which is hardly a 'well-placed sneer' and more a consistent infantilisation, or, rather, ever sneer was an attempt at infantilisation.
My point was simply that you HADN'T made
>an argument here, as you claimed you had.
okay, then say that.
>You may call me hypersensitive in detecting a sneer in there, but
even
>if I grant you that, it's just obiter dicta alongside the point I was
>making, to wit: you haven't MADE an argument.
no, paul. you thought you detected a sneer and responded to that. you also thought i was making arguemnts i was not, in the case of both posts you referred to. this is what got you steamed up enough to be offensive. if it were simply that you thought i had not established the claim, then things would have been put a little differently.
>Well, this is a mighty big subject, too big to adequately broach in
the
>context of this response. But I'll be happy to oblige with a
separate
>post -- probably not till tomorrow, as I it will take some serious
>thinking about how to put it.
as i said, i'm all ears. be waiting with bells on.
>That's not what I was claiming. Rather, I read your implication that
>his fuddy-duddy commitment to Enlightenment rationalism was of a
piece
>with purported Enlightenment (sanction of, at the very least) racism.
>This still seems to be what you were saying (perhaps unconsciously)
>despite the following:
>
>> the only subtext at work here for me was why is it that
>> anti-racist arguments so often fail, or even fail most of
>> the time.
well, paul, since you've offered yourself as therapist....
i don't think the former is of a piece with the latter. again, if you want me to send you some writings, etc, even remind of you of some old posts, you'll notice that this theme (why rationalist strategies against racism fail) is something of a preoccupation with me. partly becuase this is the strategy of choice in australia at the moment, one which has fed, rather than fended off, the emergence of a vehememently racist politics, for all sorts of reasons. now, you can either take this seriously, or you can searcha round for an unconscious motivation on my part to malign radical liberalism. if this were actually my position, then you must explain to me why my specific problems with rorty were not his liberalism, but his strive to dispense with the utopian side of liberalism.
>
>since it seems self-evident that the major reason for this is the
>fragile power of argument, having nothing whatever to do with any
>particular FORM of argument on may choose.
no, i disagree. the failure of rationalist anti-racism does not simply rest on the fragility of its argument, but more importantly on the ways in which rationalism comprehends knowledge and error. i was not talking about the premises. moreover, i was referring to two specific instances (history and intelligence testing) in which the form cannot be distinguished from the content, as in the method of historiography is inseperable from the arguments made, as in the very categories and modes of testing of the iq stuff is inseperable from the arguments made 'subsequently'. you cannot quantitatively measure intelligence without this being at the same time an argument about the hierarchies of intelligence; and you certainly cannot do such research via the categories of black and white without presupposing that the results will confirm certain 'facts' about black and white people, and a quantitatively discerned relation at that. it's called empiricism, and i think you too would have problems with that. empiricism confirms hisorical results as facts. i should also add that in the case of iq testing, the result is regarded as an attribute of those people being tested, and not something which is already framed by the questions asked.
>At the risk of sacrificing any remaining dignity in the eyes of some,
I
>must invoke the name of Aristotle here, along with whoever of his
>compatriots one wishes to cite.
>
>They well knew that validity of an argument was ENTIRELY distinct
from
>truth. A valid argument from false premises was non-the-less valid.
>Whether the premise was a factual or moral claim made no difference.
>
>It doesn't make one a Kantian or neo-Kantian to recall this ancient
>insight.
no, and i didn't make any claims about validity being the same as truth. i said that i had a problem with chomsky beleiving you could distinghuish validity from values, the method from the politics.
angela