----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Winslow" <egwinslow at rogers.com>
> As I said, it was the concept of "internal relations" that Moore
claimed was
> self-contradictory. He also claimed that "this very
self-contradictory
> doctrine is the chief mark which shews the influence of Hegel upon
modern
> philosophy." What other claims of contradiction do you have in
mind?
==============
Oh boy, conversational drift. :-)
I wasn't attempting in my original posts to get at whether Moore's claim of the self-contradiction of H's explication of the doctrine of internal relations was true or not. I was asserting, picking out one of H's positions at random, that there were sufficient flaws in Hegel's use of logic, as well as the way he attempted to lay out his ontological scheme, that don't hold muster given the advances of science, logic etc. and that as a result "Logic" was a misnomer. That's a seperate issue as to whether *a* doctrine of IR is useful for philosophical analysis--you and I are in agreement that it is. H's take on the issue is not and cannot be exhaustive, same with Whitehead's explication in P&R. I fear we're heading into a Quine-Duhem problem with regards as to whether H's "Logic" is a degenerate research program, or if it still has useful stuff that would help biologists, computer researchers, logicians, physicists etc. with their current respective problems. I see no point in attempting to subject "Logic" to a full throttle consistency test to find the one-several fatal flaws which brings his program 'crashing down.' That would take a library of writing. One need only look at the 'cult of Thomas Aquinas' as Brad put it, to see that it could easily go on till all cows are black! :-)
> In the rest, you again seem to claim that deductive reasoning from
premises
> that treat relations as external can be "dialectical" i.e. used to
represent
> the idea that they are internal. How for instance can the idea of
> "recursion" be used to represent internal relations?
===========
No, I wasn't attempting that. I'm saying that non-dialectical models of internal relations need a richer logic than bivalence, which was all Hegel had to explicate his hyptheses on the topic of IR. Whitehead asserts that's not possible even as he accepts that some model for IR is necessary for an ontology-metaphysics. For him the issue of change was paramount in dealing with the issue--P&R 58-59. I think, although I can't prove, that multivalued logics making use of recursion get us a lot further than H. could possibly dreamed of on that and many other issues of ontology. That biologists and physicists and logicians etc make extensive use of that concept to do modeling of systems is evidence enough of it's usefulness to me. How many of them have copies of H's "Logic" in their labs, offices?
>
> "the sense which has been most prominent in recent uses of the term
'organic
> whole' is one whereby it asserts the parts of a whole to have a
property
> which the parts of no whole can possibly have. It is supposed that
just as
> the whole would not be what it is but for the existence of the
parts, so the
> parts would not be what they are but for the existence of the whole;
and
> this is understood to mean not merely that any particular part could
not
> exist unless the others existed too ..., but actually that the part
is no
> distinct object of thought - that the whole, of which it is a part,
is in
> its turn a part of it. That this supposition is self-contradictory
a very
> little reflection should be sufficient to show. We may admit,
indeed, that
> when a particular thing is a part of a whole, it does possess a
predicate
> which it would not otherwise possess - namely that it is a part of
that
> whole. But what cannot be admitted is that this predicate alters
the nature
> or enters into the definition of the thing which has it. When we
think of
> the part itself, we mean just that which we assert, in this case, to
have
> the predicate that it is part of the whole; and the mere assertion
that it
> is a part of the whole involves that it should be distinct from that
which
> we assert of it. Otherwise we contradict ourselves since we assert
that,
> not it, but something else - namely it together with that which we
assert of
> it - has the predicate which we assert of it. In short, it is
obvious that
> no part contains analytically the whole to which it belongs, or any
other
> parts of that whole. The relation of part to whole is not the same
as that
> of whole to part; and the very definition of the latter is that it
does
> contain analytically that which is said to be a part. And yet this
very
> self-contradictory doctrine is the chief mark which shews the
influence of
> Hegel upon modern philosophy - an influence which pervades the whole
of
> orthodox philosophy. This is what is generally implied by the cry
against
> falsification by abstraction: that a whole is always a part of its
part! 'If
> you want to know the truth about a part,' we are told, 'you must
consider
> not that part, but something else - namely the whole: nothing is
true of the
> part, but only of the whole.' Yet plainly it must be true of the
part at
> least that it is part of the whole; and it is obvious that when we
say it
> is, we do not mean merely that the whole is a part of itself. This
> doctrine, therefore, that a part can have 'no meaning or
significance apart
> from its whole' must be utterly rejected. It implies itself that
the
> statement 'This is a part of that whole' has a meaning; and in order
that
> this may have one, both subject and predicate must have a distinct
meaning."
> (Principia Ethica, pp. 84-5)
>
> Ted
>
=========== Well his use of the concept of contradiction in a context where terms like asymmetry and/or complementarity would have done a much better job at facilitating dialogue and development of the issue. Sometimes I think it's part of the combative ethos of some philosophers. That's why I used the term non-compossibility rather than contradiction, I think Leibniz was hinting at something more than a logic of opposition and negation. But, he too, didn't have multivalued logics to work with. In that sense Whitehead's stress on the limitations of the subject-predicate form still hold enormously important lessons, especially as we attempt to 'get a handle' on representing IR's. Parts and wholes need a logic of complementarity rather than a logic of opposition/antagonism even as those terms have a place in *some contexts*. I don't think we can get that from bivalence alone. GSB and Varela are saying we can't get it from a Fregean-Russellian theory of reference. I haven't read enough commentaries on H's theory of reference and predication to know whether it's markedly superior to F&R's; that it doesn't help us in formulating-using multivalued logic seems to me to be a weakness in developing robust representations of IR's.
The map is not the territory, the limitation of all theories of IR. Constructing new territory is another issue entirely. :-)
Happy to be wrong,
Ian