language

[Paul Henry Rosenberg]

Angela wrote:
> 
> > ideological claims are empirical claims and as empirical 
> >claims they stand or fall as the empirical evidence shows
> >the truth or falsity of the claim. I know of no other way
> >of proceeding. 
> >
> >Consider the statement "the URNG provoked the Guatemalen Army
> >into committing genocide against sectors of its own population.
> >The genocide in Guatemala was thus the fault of the URNG and
> >not the military." This political/ideological claim is an
> >empirical claim. The empirical evidence show that it is false.
> >Given that it is false, why is it being >disseminated by the
> >intelligentsia and why is it believed when all evidence points
> >to the contrary?
> 
> another example would be - and it's still my favourite one: 
> 'by the year 2050, 80% of the Australian population will be
> asian'.     now, the empiricist riposte to this has been:
> 'no, this is wrong.  all estimates show that by the year 2050,
> only 30% of the Australian population will be asian'.
>
> leaving aside for a moment the obvious problem with this
> reply - that if someone is a citizen of australia they are
> Australian; it has always struck me that to respond to the
> empiricism of the claim with another empiricism would be to
> leave the racism of the first claim intact, namely: that it
> would indeed be a problem if 'asians' were in australia.  
> the issue then becomes how many 'asians' does it take to
> change 'our way of life'.
>
> that is, this is a lie, but it is more than that, which is
> why it is repeated, in the form of different (if less
> menacing, but nonetheless repeated) calculations.

This last statement illuminates the problem here -- it's not the
empirical claim that's at issue here, but the racial sub-text. 
Positivism is particularly blind to such issues, but pragmatism is not. 
For pragmatism the question of purpose is always relevent. 

A pragmatist has no problem identifying what's going on here, and
separating the empirical claim from the political purpose.  It's then a
pragmatic question how one should respond -- and the answer to this
question can vary from situation to situation.  If one is dealing with
hard-core racists, it's best to confront the racism directly.  But if
you're dealing with prime targets of their attempted recruitment, then
straight facts about percentages can indeed be a good place TO START.  

In either case, however, empirical evidence has a role to play.  Racism
is justified by all manner of false empirical claims, and refuting those
claims is part of combating racism. 

-- 
Paul Rosenberg
Reason and Democracy
rad at gte.net

 
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"