[lbo-talk] Terrain of Struggle was O'Reilly vs Churchill

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Tue Feb 22 09:28:41 PST 2005


Miles Jackson :
> >>Call me a well indoctrinated child of the Enlightenment, but the
> >>motives of someone who is providing information or a specific
> >>argument are completely irrelevant to a critical and rational
> >>assessment of the person's assertions.

What does this very simplistic and ultimately false cognitive model have to do with the Enlightenment? I thought that Enlightenment was about reason and science as opposed to rigid adherence to a doctrine.

The model your posting is a page torn out of the positivistic doctrine attempting to impose a very rigid straitjacket on human thought process, separating it into supposedly objective facts and supposedly objective affections and emotions. In reality, however, no such separation exists, and all "facts" are constructed, in part, by selective assembly of information - and that selectiveness in turn is guided by the affective states and dispositions of the person.


>From that point of view, the position you are proposing is tantamount to
somebody looking at a photograph and being interested only in what it "objectively" depicts without paying any attention to the type of film, type of lenses, filters, camera settings, etc.

In most cases, what really matters is the affective disposition of the speaker and what he wants to achieve with his communicative acts (i.e. motives) while the contents of that communicative act (i.e facts and type of logic used) are merely means to that end. Of course, there is considerable variation. In most academic report, the factual contents usually takes precedence over affective disposition and motives (e.g desire to become famous), but in most everyday life situations the opposite is true. That is to say, in most everyday life situations people tend to use facts and arguments the way drunks use lamp posts - for support rather than for enlightenment.

With that in mind, affective dispositions, motives, and interests of the speaker is far more important to decode his message than focusing merely on the facts and logic of the argument.

Wojtek



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