I have learned, and continue to learn, from Ted's posts on this list, and rather wish he posted also on the marxism list: it would add a distinctively different flavor to that list perhaps. I have never, however, been quite able to identify at all clearly where I disagree with him. I do agree with Ian on the specific point of the psychology of the capitalist, however. And that disagreement with Ted may point, vaguely to a deeper disagreement. I do not think dialectics (internal relations) are appropriate to the whole of human history, nor do I think that it is possible either to affirm or deny that the cosmos is a whole (as Whitehead thought) or a collection (as Russell felt). We possess no Archimedian (sp?) point (this is Hannah Arendt's image for the limits of human knowledge) from which we can make statements about the whole of history, the whole or Reason, or the whole of the cosmos. I do not, for example, believe that we can see capitalism as a necessary or even probable 'development' from pre-capitalist formations.
Carrol
P.S. It is indeed funny that Chris Doss doesn't realize that that asteroid is Cox's favorite image for the overwhelming importance of contingency in history. Mistakes like that tempt one (but I resist) to indulge in supernumerary speculation on motive.
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Ian wrote:
Ted Winslow wrote:
Carrol Cox wrote: But there is not one iota of excuse for the gross stupidity that one can judge the validity of a propositon by a characterization of the person who prnounces it. It is either gross ignorance to do so or a serious psychological problem if one is unable to consider a proposition in abstractin fromt personality.
Ted: You can, though, do what you're doing here, i.e. explain, having shown on rational grounds that an ad hominem argument is mistaken, persistence in ad hominem as an expression of a "psychological problem".
This you will be required to do if you want to explain the most recent financial crisis.
You will need to explain, for instance, the particular individual David Li's misidentification of a rational method for measuring the risk of correlated default with a mathematical formula based on the premise that existing market prices already embodied such a method. Then you will have to explain why the "quant" mentality dominant in financial derivative markets unreasonably embraced the formula as a measure of the actual risk.
This had the result that the risk of correlated default on mortgage backed securities on which correlated default was practically certain was judged to be close to non-existent which led, in turn, to the explosive growth both of these securities and of "insurance" against their default.
So a "serious psychological problem" of "particular people" played a key role in generating the conditions from which the crisis emerged when the practically certain correlated default actually occurred. Ted
Ian: Large scale epistemological errors and their adverse consequences are not necessarily indicative of psychological problems by the agents who make them. Would you say the history of medical diagnostics over the last 200 years -- an error riddled epistemology if ever there was one -- is indicative of "serious psychological problems of "particular people"?
I've yet to see any evidence that Warren Buffett and many other wealthy people are psychopaths/sociopaths in the sense you've indicated capitalists to suffer from over your various posts over the years.
Ian