[lbo-talk] This is Your Pilot Slurring

Eubulides paraconsistent at comcast.net
Sun Feb 8 11:40:50 PST 2009


Ted Winslow wrote:


> Most economists (along with many others) can't see why a paranoid
> schizophrenic, i.e. someone given to psychotic delusions about motives,
> is incapable of what's really required for truly "scientific" social
> theory, namely, the capacity for insight into motives found in the best
> literature, e.g. in Shakespeare and Balzac.

===================

Do you have a survey that backs up the claim? We've come to expect such rhetorical excess from Radio talk shows and the NY Times, but here?

I'm still waiting on the Kleinian argument that Warren Buffett is a sociopath because he's really good at the numbers/wealth game. After reading snippets of his recent biography, I suspect I'll be waiting a long time:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/business/04buffett.html


>
> Keynes provides both (1) an explanation (based on the ontological,
> anthropological and psychological ideas he claims provide the
> appropriate framework for social theory - the most important of them,
> from this perspective, being the ontological idea of "internal
> relations") of the limited applicability of axiomatic deductive
> reasoning in general and mathematical reasoning in particular in
> economics and (2) an explanation, in terms of the psychoanalysis of
> obsessional neurosis, of the immunity of those who uncritically identify
> "science" - including "social science" - with such reasoning to rational
> critique.
>
> I've several times pointed on this list to A.N. Whitehead's explanation
> of why "internal relations" limit the applicability of axiomatic
> deductive reasoning. e.g.
> <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2007/2007-January/001418.html>.
>
> Ted

=================

Just what explanatory work does "internal relations" do to demonstrate the limits of deductive inference -an epistemic issue- when "internal relations" was deployed by Whitehead largely to accomplish work on an ontology of space-time in the wake of relativity theory and the problems of set theory? [Work that has morphed into mereotopology]

Inquiring minds want to know :-)

Ian



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list