power

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Dec 11 08:08:54 PST 2002


Catherine, you continue to baffle me utterly. The proposition that "an explanation comprises and/or infers a definition" is _either_ a tautology (and trivial one) _or_ it is litgeral non-sense. An explanation is expressed in words, and a definition describes the historical usage of words, hence the explanation is not intelligible unless the definition of the words it which it is expressed are clear.

If she means something else than this trivial tautology, she will have to explain it before I could possibly respond very substantively to this post. I insert a few tentative observations below only to provide clues to what my problem of understanding is.

catherine.driscoll at adelaide.edu.au wrote:
>
> >
> >There are few more disastrous errors in historical thought than in
> >confusing a description for an explanation. Descriptions and definitions
> >are essential to identify _what needs to be explained_. But historical
> >thought consists in giving such explanation.
>
> Description isn't at issue here.
> A definition either comprises and/or infers an explanation -- whether
> that's a definition of Marxist or of power. And an explanation -- say of
> either of those -- comprises and/or infers a definition. The words we use
> constrain as well as produce what we talk about.
>
> At the level of say, a book for review or an essay to be marked, an
> explanation may very well be more nuanced than a definition -- depends on
> your definition though. That doesn't mean an explanation does not infer a
> definition of what is being explained.

It seems to me absurd to compare a definition and an explanation: It's like saying a horse is more flavorful but the color green is louder. Incoherent. I don't even know, in this context, what you think an explanation is. The proposition that the words we use "produce what we talk about" is also either false or a (trivial) tautology. Obviously Catherine and I wouldn't be talking about power if one of us hadn't used the word "power," and I wouldn't be talking about it if I did not think the _word_ "power" in much discourse referred, and could be used to refer, to an attribute of social relations (in the sense in which those words are used in _Capital_, _Grundrisse_, and in many (not all) commentaries on those works. Notice we are, so far, _only_ talking about the _word_ "power," and it is only the word, not the thing (if it is thing) that we can define. (Plato thought we coudl define the thing; I take it that Aristotle points away from this word superstition -- the belief that by defining a word one has defined a thing.)

"An explanation . . . infer[s] a definition of what is being explained": Trivial or false. In fact, its triviality is such that I don't know how to paraphrase it or argue for or against it.
>
> Now if you wanted to tell me that you avoid all definitions because they
> are always too simplistic, not as aware of the historical/cultural

Jesus! Of course I don't avoid definitions. When I use a word in a technical sense I either define it (the word, not the thing) or I trust that my readers share the technical sense I am using. On this list I would not use "value" without defining it; in some contexts I would simply use it as referring to a fundamental social relation of capitalism, _not_ to whatever sense it carries when we say (e.g.) "We should value human lives."


> specificity of a concept and inclined to present it as static, I would
> probably agree. But only with the proviso that your or my explanations will
> always be inferring some kind of de facto definition whether we hope to
> avoid that or not.

Who in the hell wants to avoid definitions? I don't understand at all why you are setting up "explanation" and "definition" in this odd way.


>
> Of course this could be something to do with Lukes, and therefore beyond my
> ken. Or some sort of Aristotelian thing, in which case I just have to say
> again that I have nothing whatsoever against the man or his work, we just
> don't belong to the same world.

Everyone is either an Aristotelian or a Platonist. And I call Platonism superstion or word magic.

I still don't really know _at all_ what you are talking about. I assume you are saying something about the world, but it seems to me that you are speaking in a private language.

Carrol
>
> Catherine



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