[lbo-talk] Re: Democracy and Constitutional Rights

Miles Jackson cqmv at pdx.edu
Sat Aug 14 10:18:47 PDT 2004


On Fri, 13 Aug 2004, andie nachgeborenen wrote:


> The point is that disgreement -- by our standards -- only means that
> both positions can't be right. Which really the opposite of the view you
> have, that disagreement means that both positions can be right.

You're not getting my fundamental point: a position can't be right or wrong on its own (that implies there are some universal standards that can be applied to make the assessment). I'm not saying any positions are equally valid; I'm saying there are social conditions in which each position will be considered right and the other wrong. (Think like a sociologist rather than a philosopher here!) Whether a position is valid in some universal sense doesn't really interest me (I don't know how to even approach the question).


> You think that this situation means we should worry that maybe the
> fundamenalists are right. But why is that unless we can think of a
> reason that is a reason by our standards to think so?

No, you're not getting my point. According to our standards, its perfectly appropriate to reject the fundamentalist view; it defies our shared standards of logic and evidence. I'm not worried that they're right; I'm just trying to point out that in certain social conditions, fundamentalism "works" as a good argument, just as your post here "works" as a good argument in these social conditions.


> There's another issue you haven't addressed. We have been talking of
> the standards of different groups rather loosely. When do we have a
> different group, though? How do we know that?

Yes, good point. Anthropologists and sociologists are notoriously fuzzy about the distinctions between cultures/societies. I think of it as a continuum (or I guess a x-dimensional manifold) of beliefs and practices, and different people are located at different points in the manifold. Sure, the manifold would not show distinct clusters of people with absolutely no overlap in beliefs and practices, but there would be some clustering (people who share certain beliefs and practices that other do not).

So to answer your question: we know people belong to different groups if they display different beliefs and actions (I hope that answer doesn't exasperate you; I think it's reasonable.)

Miles



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