logic and the subconscious

[Justin Schwartz]

Russell was not, _not_, NOT, a logical positivist. He would punch you out if 
you called him that. Occam was a great philosopher whose ideas are very much 
alive; the fact that he lived long ago in different times is not a 
refutation. Occam's razor ("Do not multiply entities unnecessarily") is a 
perfectly sensible principle that scientists who have never heard of him 
intuively accept. So what's your point, Chris? --jks


>At 23/05/01 16:19 -0700, you wrote:
>>At 03:17 PM 05/23/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>>
>>>- no subconscious is needed (remember
>>>Ockkam's razor?)
>>
>>Ockkam's razor is a move in a logic game; whether it has any application
>>to reality remains a matter of interpretation.
>
>William of Occam, who lived around 1300 to 1349, lived at a time when the
>rising material wealth of developing methods of pre-capitalist production
>in Europe were bringing democratic currents into being.
>His simplistic reductionist principle is completely in harmony with the
>rational steps of organising production in which monks were in the
>forefront, particularly in the great Benedictine monasteries (although he
>was a Franciscan).
>
>His principle is a simplifying logical device, without any basis in wider
>reality. There is absolutely no reason in a complex universe, why there
>should be only one explanation for anything. Indeed to think there is is
>probably wrong.
>
>His principle has been taken by later centuries. Bertrand Russell, the
>logical positivist in "A History of Western Philosophy" says "I have found
>this a most useful principle in logical analysis". He praises Occam by
>saying that he was "so far as logic is concerned, primarily a secular
>philospher."
>
>As for imagining that we can be conscious of everything all the time, that
>is ridiculous. But it is a reflection of the bourgeois reductionist idea
>that society consists of discrete conscious individuals each with their own
>rights and liberties, rather than that we live in a matrix in a profoundly
>complex psycho-social world of which we are conscious only in part and only
>part of the time.
>
>IMHO and in haste.  Sorry to sound dogmatic in an attempt to puncture the
>dogmatic veneration of long dead man for purposes of bourgeois ideology. In
>fact no one really remembers, or could of course remember, the real William
>of Occam
>
>Chris Burford
>
>London
>
>BTW I could not work out who sent the original post. No personal offence
>intended. Just an e-mail encounter on what seemed to me a small but
>significant remark.
>
>

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