[lbo-talk] Change [was: Kees van der Pijl]

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Mon Jun 30 07:00:52 PDT 2003


Grant Lee:
>
> It can be argued, I think convincingly, that the Welfare
> State and the New Deal saved capitalism in the 1930s.
> Although these obviously adversely affected some individual
> capitalists and some sections of capital.
>

Anything can be argued convincingly, and as my French colleague once observed, with the proper choice of words and assumptions you can fit Paris in a bottle.

The offending part of such arguments is its hidden teleologism - or perhaps a hindsight rationalization (which are based on the same kind of fallacy) - we observe elements A and B being associated at the time T when we observe them, we note, furthermore, that A occurred at the time T1 which is before T - and we conclude that A must have been "intended" to produce B (a strong version of teleologism) or that A "caused" B (a somewhat weaker version of teologism). The problem with teleogical arguments or ex post facto rationzalizations is that they cannot predict B from A when we know only A but we do know whether B has occurred.

Wojtek



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