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