[lbo-talk] Re: war propaganda

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri Apr 4 22:00:39 PST 2003


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>
>
> At 8:15 PM -0800 4/4/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >treating the individuals and their mental states as merely causally dependent
>
> I thought that discussion in the thread titled "explananda" concerned
> only the virtue (or lack thereof) of "psycho-sexual" explanations
> (i.e., the use of "psycho-sexual factors" as explanans") in social
> theory, rather than "individuals and their mental states," which, to
> me, constitutes a different topic.

Agreed.

70% of Americans support the war. If one wanted to explain that psychologically, one would have to add up some 140 million individual case studies. Each individual history is unique.

In fact we are not at present able to explain at all fully the mental states of individuals. I would suspect that except in very rare cases (e.g., brain damage of a particular sort, such as the brain damage that made a painter unable to either see or imagine color) those mental states cannot be separated _either_ from the social relations (activity) in which the individuals find themselves enmeshed or from the activity of the brain.

Carrol


> --
> Yoshie
>
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