<DIV>Hope you are having fun with your hurricane. ;-> </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>The point about the need for shared beliefs as a precondition of communication is right of course -- a philosopher of my background gets the same thought from Davidson and Rorty (and I wrote an M.Phil thesis on what it does and doesn't mean). But that's not much help in distinguishing between groups. After all, leaving aside language abilities (or with the aid of translators) both Judge Posner and I can communicate with, dispute with, discuss with, people of very different backgrounds. Christian or Islamic fundamentalists, for example. Hard core Communists. Ayn Randroids. Argentineans. Teenagers. Admirers of rap music. The extremely wealthy. Urban gangbangers. South Dakota farmers. Columbian peasants. Wtc. So both of us share a lot of beliefs in common with all those people too. In fact, if we didn't, it's not altogether clear now we would recognize them as people at all. So surely the thing that makesa  group a group in the relevant sense can't be that you can't communicate across groups because they share no beliefs in common. Don't you think? snit snat <snitilicious@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:</DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE class=replbq style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid">At 01:36 PM 8/14/2004, andie nachgeborenen wrote: > > There's another issue you haven't address! ed. 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? >Miles: 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.) > >Well, Miles, Judge Posner and I are both white Chicagoan American Jewish >atheist middle class lawyers, and we have different beliefs and actions . >. . . So I am not sure how much help your answer is. > >jks I think what Miles is getting at is what the sociologist would call the "non-obvious foundations of society" or what Durkheim called the "precontractual basis of solidarity") In order for you and Posner to have an argument at all, you have to share various beliefs. Those beliefs, you don't bother to dispute. They are just there but that they are there at all, makes it possible for you to disagree about some things. So, the example doesn't really address the issue. If you and Posner disagreed about _everything_, you wouldn't even bother to be around each other let alone argue over anything. (Of course, some people have tried to wed Freudian and Durkheimian thought, perhaps as a way to understand why some people persist in being around people with whom they, ostensibly, disagree with completely.) Rational, contractual society, as both you and Miles seem to suggest, is always underpinned by non-rational, non-obvious ties of solidarity. The sociologist examines how those ties are formed and ritually enacted and re-enacted in order to form certain kinds of beliefs which we don't often articulate unless those tacit beliefs are called into question. K (taking a break from cleaning up after the flooding--and it's raining again!) "We're in a fucking stagmire." --Little Carmine, 'The Sopranos' ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk </BLOCKQUOTE> <hr size=1>Do you Yahoo!? <a href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/mail_us/taglines/50x/*http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail/static/efficiency.html">Yahoo! Mail</a> - 50x more storage than other providers!