----- Original Message ----- From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Friday, January 11, 2002 9:46 PM Subject: Re: Science, Science & Marxism
>
> > >But you're then just using "true" to mean
"work"
> >
> > No I'm not. I use "true" to mean "true," as
understood, for less, by
>Tarksi.
> > For each sentence "p" in a scientific theory,
"P" is true if and
>only if p.
>
>==============
>
>Why not just bypass Tarski? That's what G Spencer
Brown, Varela and
>more recently Michael Lynch, do and they still
let us keep the virtues
>of recursiveness that Tarski alluded to.
Otherwise aren't we just
>stuck endlessly prattling about deflationism?
>
>Ian
>
I'm not stuck on Tarski. You know more about this
than I do. I was just
invoking Davidson's use of Tarskian truth theory
in natural languages. But
my point was that I don't reduce "true" to
"works." I am a pragmatist, but
not a Jamesian. If there are other and better
theories of truth than
Davidson-Tarski, let's use them. I have Alston's
recent book, A Realist
Conception of Truth, which I have onl;y skimmed.
It looks promising.
jks
=============
Well there's always Doug's take/spoof on the matter; 'truth is what makes you money'! :-)
Seriously though, those 'better' theories, while having lots of applications in 'disciplines' other than political economy, have yet to infiltrate and gnaw away at a whole host of issues important to lefties. I think its still too underappreciated that Marx started out in philosophy and law and worked his way towards PE *because* of the failure of the Enlightenment to practice what it preached and while there's been tons of great work at the level of theory NC PE [especially it's financial systems aspect] is the last great bastion to buckle under what's been going on--perhaps due to the fact that theories complexify 'in the face' of opposition and this makes it difficult for lots of types of collective action that would be enticing and transforming of the factionalist notions of Madison. He's the theorist-master politician that *still* needs to be wrestled with.
I agree with your last post regarding objective conditions, but they, in turn, are the 'sedimentations' of theories--I'm thinking of Paul Churchland's quips in SR&TPoM about the theories that 'got there first.' Keynes 'slave of some defunct economist' and all that. Analogically we're at the stage of thinking about what was the Grand Canyon like before it became the Grand Canyon--precisely in order to redirect the river before all those indicators-ecosystem health, ineqaulity, gender, political participation, property rights, work, the list goes on and on, 'hit the point of toxic irreversibility.' We wouldn't be on this list arguing and discussing this stuff if we were fatalists and I think that's what Greg's getting at and what Habermas was getting at a few years ago when he said we need to go back to Hegel. I just think we need to go forward even as we pick and choose from the best of the past...East and West, North and South. That may be eclecticism and Carrol may denigrate it as the bourgois quest for a facile form of novelty, but hell we need every bit of knowledge and wisdom the species has coughed up so far if we're to make to 2099, nay, even 2030, without being engulfed by fear, anger and hate operationalized by hi-tech.
Ian
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