Digging through some of my notes on this --

https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4057

is a paper that argues in favor of your notion of translatability from the historical perspective while using one of the classic examples Kuhn liked -- from Aristotle to Newton.

My take-away from this was that we can translate one project into another. But I wonder, along the way, what is lost from Aristotle in the translation? What motivates Kuhn to talk of paradigms, where Rovelli wishes to demonstrate harmony between supposedly different worldviews?

And it was probably around this time that I began to have a shift in interests with respect to philosophy that took me down just entirely different paths than science and its history. Hence why I'm still just right here on the issue. :D I just thought you might enjoy the paper.

I have a vague recollection of Feyerabend talking as if language games were incommensurable. If he did, I think he was wrong. Chess 960 is still chess. — Banno

Me too. But it's been awhile. Even visiting this paper has been awhile. I remember getting the gist of it and thinking it a strong argument, but getting caught up in understanding Tarski.

Been enjoying the recap.

Aighty. I suppose I'll pick out ones I can formulate an answer to then.

The Importance of Philosophy
Why do philosophy in the first place, what does it matter?

Because it is pleasurable.

Bonus question: How do we get people to care about education and knowledge and reality to begin with?

We do not get people to care. This is not how care works. People care about what they care about -- and to know what they care about all you need to do is listen to them.

The Importance of Knowledge
Why does is matter what is real or not, true or false, in the first place?

To the extent that one's desires are frustrated knowledge is important. Knowledge is a tool or a toy and nothing more.

The Institutes of Justice
What is the proper governmental system, or who should be making those prescriptive judgements and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?

There is no such thing as a proper state or governmental system. Any one state is relatively good to the extent that they help people -- and not just citizens -- satisfy their needs. If they fail in doing that they are relatively bad. It is not easy to describe or sum up the relative worth of a society -- there are relative goods and bads within every society that we have to judge individually. Not all needs are congruent or comparable. And the ones who should make the judgments are the one's effected by said judgments.

I have no such system.

Also, I'm not so sure that I'm even trying to build one.

There are a handful of questions I enjoy exploring. I especially enjoy going through ideas and thoughts with others insofar that I feel I can progress the dialogue.

Somewhere along the way philosophy seemed unfinished and boundless.

The attraction to systems diminished with that impression -- which is not to eschew systematic thinking, per se, but to be less concerned with the coherent end-product of a system of propositions.

interesting thought, but it's not so much that I need a big story for motivational purposes, I do seem to still care about making the world a better place. but for me what's missing is the underlying structure and framework that allowed me to make sense of what making the world a better place meant. Now I simply have no clue, without absolutes and with the indeterminacy of the meaning of words, I am left with the sense that really all that directs us is self interest veiled in appeals to truths like fairness, justice, equality that are ultimately linked to a world view where those things had meaning because God gave them meaning. I can't escape the thought that those concepts make as much sense in the human world as do they with respect to a pack of wolves... — dazed

Right. So you care about making the world a better place, but you don't know how to make the world a better place because you have a new belief -- a belief about the self, the world, and everything. Hence my calling it a Big Story.

So my question to you is -- if the new belief isn't working, as you would like to make the world a better place but find it difficult to answer what that means because of the new belief, then why hold onto the belief that we are brains spewing out narratives, that all our moral talk is actually veiled and directed by self-interest, that this renders such moral talk meaningless?

What is still compelling you to believe it, given that this very belief is going against your self-interest in fulfilling a desire for a Big Picture morality, where you strive for the greater good and feel good about it?

An even deeper engagement would involve caring about causes, positive societal change, the greater good. I used to be engaged and care about trying to better things (when I was a theist). Now I have no interest in those things because I can't define what positive or good would really mean on a macro scale. I just stick to the micro where it is usually more easy to define what is good for those I actually interact with. — dazed

You do not care about causes, positive societal change, or the greater good -- but you care about what caring about those things did for you, it seems - because you felt better maybe?

So why not pursue the causes, positive social changes, and greater goods based upon what makes you feel better?

But perhaps that's not as satisfying. Perhaps it's better when we have a big story about purpose and origins to justify caring about these things, but if it's all just brains in bone-boxes responding to feelings selected by a historical and evolutionary process then the big story just isn't as inspiring anymore.

Why is that, I wonder? I mean why isn't the Big Story of the self as a string of narratives spewing forth from the brain nowhere near as satisfying as the Big Story of the immortal self set in some eternal plan within a purposive universe? What did Jesus have to do with immigrants, besides saying some pithy things about love that any brain could have (well, I'd probably go so far as to say *did*, given that I don't believe) come up with?

You say it is because your brain is set for Judeo-Christian meaning and purpose. But nothing could substitute Judeo-Christian meaning and purpose; it would be atheist meaning and purpose, or democratic meaning and purpose, or Buddhist meaning and purpose, or whatever-else-it-is. It would always be a different Big Story. But something about the brain-making-stories Big Story isn't satisfying. . .

So why stick to it?

It's the latter that I like it for. But alas, that's merely aesthetic. Blue was a nice, soothing color.

Well I, for one, just want to see the words change black. ;)

But I'm amenable to changing things to make folks happy.

Definitely wealth acquisition is an external end - its just not a moral one. It's relentlessly amoral, in fact, even avowedly so - Hayek says markets are amoral, in principle, and quietly laments that fact while maintaining its just the way it is. — csalisbury

OK! I, for whatever reason, didn't pick up on the emphasis on morality.

Reread your posts, and they're interesting, but I don't have more to say right now. The brain-box is tired at the end of my work-week :D.

But I'm not championing external ends as ... ends in themselves. I'm saying they're necessary and the political (and personal!) struggle is finding shared ends to work toward. — csalisbury

Cool.

I also want to hear more....I just want to hear realistic, pragmatic approaches and suggestions.I think we're on the same page, I'm just being a little bit of a bloviating diva about it.

I wouldn't say you're being a diva, bloviating or otherwise. I wouldn't want to hear more if I thought you that ;).

And I think we're basically on the same page. At the very least close enough that discussion would be fruitful.

I guess I'd like to dig more into this notion of realism and pragmatism -- though I don't want to take too much away from the thread either, so I'll try and stay focused on the notion of the commons. I've been taking the environment as a kind of example of the commons, though maybe that's too broad. What do you think?

Well -- I, for one, want to hear more.

Though don't we have external ends, now? I think wealth acquisition is a kind of external end, no? And, in our current environment at least, it's the insatiable desire for wealth meeting the finite resources required for that wealth that's ruining our commons. Or do you mean that the opposition, in eliminating said telos, doesn't offer anything and so just isn't compelling?

Or maybe I don't understand, and I should just stand by my first comment -- that I want to hear more.

It's a little empty -- but only because we are stuck in certain habits, I think.

I mean 3 can mean all kinds of things. It's kind of a negative space -- what counts as culture, after all? And how do you foster it? Is it possible to do so today? And if so, how?

For my part I am happy to point out that the supposedly pragmatic solutions are just not very pragmatic on the basis that they aren't working. By all means get them working -- maybe that's the best we can do. But we surely shouldn't defend what's not working on a pragmatic level if it's just not accomplishing the task of building sustainable economies.

I might go further and say that the first two solutions don't seem to be effective. What would count as the commons, now? Anything owned by public entities? In which case the majority of the commons are covered by either option 1 or option 2 now -- in the sense that we treat "Big fat dictator" to mean any state monopolizing violence over a geography, however said state may be organized (with a democratically representative layer or not).

And we have to admit that option 2 requires option 1, though there are those who may wish to limit option 1.

But this just divides the commons up. And what would count as a pass would be the preservation of the commons for us all to benefit from it flourishing -- so we do not use the natural resources afforded us to a point that we can no longer do so.

But that doesn't seem to be happening now. And yet our main solutions are solutions 1 and 2 when it comes to dealing with the commons.

So if that doesn't work, why keep doing it?

I will say that it was only a few months ago (6 maybe?) where the opposite was the case. These sorts of discussions just roll in and out in favor of atheism and in favor of theism. Maybe annoying, but hey -- it's a forum, and we're all in different places with respect to these topics. So even if they may be a bit tiring to some, some people feel the need to talk about them too.

Again, you say [if] "there is no knowledge of the internal", but how could you possibly know that - how could you talk at all about the internal, having no knowledge of it? — unenlightened

That's a good question. At least for me to ponder on. Every answer I've run through right now seems superficial. Something like poetry? But the philosopher would reply that the poet is only working and expressing what they know or have come to know. What about music? A technical capacity, which is clearly where I was coming from with respect to knowledge. And merely saying "insight" is just a rebranding of the word "knowledge" without answering this question with some sort of meaningful response, something to do with the method of talking.

I could go the other way and say there are two types of knowledge. But I want to think on this more. Just posting to say I'm not sure I'll have a response anytime soon.

What do you mean?

Knowledge may be stored in books, fossils, etc, but books nor fossils don't know shit. — unenlightened

Well I'd start from the usual meaning of JTB rather than try and persuade folks that they mean something else, unless you want to be an internal eliminatist or something. We use knowledge to build bridges but we build them out of something more substantial. — unenlightened

I hope you'll forgive some creative stretching here. These are ideas I've played with awhile without getting anywhere.


I'd like to start from a position that makes knowledge fundamental, rather than the constituent bits like JTB. Why? Because truth is redundant, so adds nothing to knowledge, belief is an intentional state towards a proposition, but knowledge is not merely propositional, and justification is a matrix of aesthetic standards which are institutionalized -- and so actually seem to take away from what we mean by knowledge in a commonsense way. Or, perhaps a better way of saying it -- it just seems to me that JTB is philosophically fraught, so it is better to simply observe knowledge and go from there in answering what it is - to use the term I used earlier, to "bracket" out the usual sort of philosophical baggage that comes with discussions of knowledge and instead just look at instances of it and come to some kind of beginning of an explanation for what it is. (Like lot of philosophical questions I have usually many lines of thought going on at once. I'm trying to hold some things still here to move forward rather than just flounder in a quagmire)

It seems to me that knowledge is invariant to belief -- I can believe true and false things, but to know is not to believe, but comes with competency. When I adjust the knob on a machine just *this* much I know that I we are likely to reduce the output of our pump by about 10 mL, which is what is needed for production today. I know within the context of doing things with others. When asked if I know something I am being asked to help guide a person through the steps of a procedure.

I am trying to frame this in a way that is not eliminative of the internal, though -- rather, preserving the internal as something beyond knowing, and something which is not knowledgable -- or, at least, if there is knowledge it is a relation to something external. Hence why I thought maybe the better word would be "insight". Not quite knowledge. But still meaningful and worthwhile.

Language allows states of mind to become abstractions that can function as elements of thought - the word "thought" there becomes an element in the thought that contains it. This is what allows for introspection. — unenlightened

I'd like to follow Levinas on this one. Language is the only tool by which we can share our interior space with another while still retaining it as ours and respecting them as theirs. Abstractions, on the other hand, allow us to subsume the other under the guise of knowledge, under categories which turn the other into a sort of tool to be used. But if there is no knowledge of the internal, then all we have left with is our knowledge of language which allows sharing, but not categorizing.

So introspection, by this, would require language -- but there'd be a kind of language-less experience that is still our own.

I'll take both at once. One cannot talk about knowledge without using introspection, because knowledge is interior. I can know shit without introspection, but I cannot know that I know shit.

And you know that I know that I know, because I just told you, and vice versa, and there's the intersubjective, which is how we decide what knowing is in the first place. — unenlightened

Under this parsing I agree that I cannot know that I know things, and perhaps that is the absurdity -- but bear with me a moment. I hope to highlight that there are valuable aspects of the mind which are not-knowledge -- that knowledge, while valuable, isn't all that is valuable. So I might substitute something like philosophical talk about knowledge as being insightful, while not strictly being knowledge.

And I think I'd like to say that knowledge is not internal -- but our insight of knowledge is, because insight only comes from belief and introspection and sharing with one-another, through the power of language. Rather, knowledge is what we build together by acting -- so belief is clearly involved, but knowledge is a social product whereby we act together.

And, on top of all this, it would mean that there is no knowledge of the mind at all. But perhaps that's just something floating in the back of my mind that's not entirely applicable.

There's no rule. But that's half the problem: the equivocation and indistinction, intended or not, between the two senses of 'identity politics'. I mean, you can almost describe the pattern in which this plays out: some idiot - say, Jonathan Haidt - rails on about identity politics, and then some well-meaning lefty chimes in with 'but all politics is identity politics!', and then the Haidt gets flustered, and by this point the audience is thoroughly confused, and everyone is worse off. — StreetlightX

I think I'd offer another alternative reading, here. I'd say that the intent behind calling all politics as identity politics is to call into question those sorts of politics which are claiming to be identity-neutral. So it's not a well-meaning sort of intent, but rather a challenge to the notion that identity can be escaped when dealing with politics -- as is often claimed. But generally this sort of politics does have some identity that it privileges: to use Deleuze's terms you've introduced, there is a majority which does not need to express its identity, and so can appear formal, but which is everywhere always expressed, and so it is not a strict formality.

So calls to go back to our constitutional democracy, for instance, are seen as white and male, as are calls to focus on the real problem, that of overthrowing the bourgeoisie.

So if we are to move beyond identity politics I think the target has to be this challenge -- can we demonstrate that in this move that we aren't just re-establishing an invisible, unspoken identity at the center of our new political language?

Well, a bit of both. The confusion itself is dangerous, insofar as it makes people politically incapacitated. But, so too is there alot of danger in identity politics itself, which is reactionary in a literal sense: identity politics becomes a primary mode of political engagement when other avenues of such engagement dry up - deprived of any meaningful ability to engage in the process of creating or participating in the creation of identity (shaping the power relations which give rise to them - Deleuze's 'minority becomings'), one falls back upon shoring-up and entrenching already established identity labels. — StreetlightX

But does it actually politically incapacitate, or is it just this facile sort of appeal to identity politics that is politically incapacitating?

I think that identity politics can be a primary mode of political engagement regardless of what other avenues are available -- because recognition is an important part of doing politics. If one is not recognized for what they are then they won't be treated as they feel they should be treated -- not that recognition necessarily implies appropriate treatment, but it's a part of the process. Hence why you had Marxists interested in raising class consciousness. Coming to be recognized, and even more fundamentally, coming to recognize yourself as a certain sort of identity is a part of the political process. Else, you'll be making bourgeois appeals for why you are worth more money when that language is saturated in standards that are more or less rigged against someone in your position as a proletarian.

This is more than a off-hand recognition that identity must always be a part of our political lives. Building a proletarian class who knew its historic mission was a part of the political program before what we tend to call identity politics today was a "thing".

So I guess I'd lay the challenge out as two-fold: One, we have to address the person who is speaking about the ubiquity of identity and demonstrate how this new approach is unlike political tendencies which claim, on its surface, to be non-identitarian while silently privileging a certain identity. And, two, we have to look at what identity politics actually has to offer such that people are mobilized by it, rather than writing it off as a mere conceptual mistake -- there is something to it that is talking to people, and its talking to people, at least on its face, because they feel their identities are objects of political persecution or privilege, depending on which side you fall upon.

How do you move beyond identity politics when its an object that speaks to people? When it's been used to mobilize even supposedly identity-neutral programs?

If the thread has so far focused more on 'what' identity politics is over the nature of it's effects, that's mostly because there's been confusion over the former, even though the latter is important and interesting too. — StreetlightX

It's all good. I agree the latter is interesting too.

There's a lot of silly talk about what knowing means (justified true belief theory as the prime example) that I find evaporates when I look at how it really works while I'm thinking. It struck me how often I talk about my experience of how mental processes work in my posts. From responses I've gotten, that appears to be alien to a lot of people on the forum and, I assume, in general. — T Clark

I don't know if it's totally alien, though of course all of our experiences are likely different to some degree too -- and its this mixture of agreement and disagreement that produces some confusions and difficulties in talking about such things as how we come to think, how we come to know, and so forth -- plus some more basic operating beliefs too, I'd wager.

I think you're onto something, though, in saying that there's a lot of silly talk that evaporates when we look at how it all really works. I like this approach a lot. But, in part why I wouldn't go so far as to call this knowledge, what we perceive doesn't necessarily have the same structure or feelings associated -- that doesn't mean it can't be insight, of course, nor that it is fruitless to share what we perceive when we just look how it works, bracketing away beliefs about the world about us.

As to where to go from here, I think I've gotten out of it what I wanted. — T Clark

Cool. :) I think that my interests were perhaps more tangential to yours, then. I think I was coming at this from the perspective of "OK, having established this, that, and the other, then. . . "

Because what happens is basically a confusion of process for product: identities (black, woman, gay, American) are results, products of an articulation arrived at in the course of complex social, historical, and cultural negotiation and development. One of the (necessary) means by which this negotiation takes place is politics, making it one (inescapable) ingredient that goes into the final, baked cake that is identity. Now, politics does alot more than just bake identity-cakes (not all politics, not most politics, aims merely to shape identities), but that it does, is inescapable. In is in this sense that one might say that 'all politics is identity politics': if you engage in politics (or if politics engages you), you end up, whether you like it or not, articulating the contours of identity (among other things). — StreetlightX

Do you believe that a person who ascribes to the belief "All politics is identity politics" thinks of identity politics in this way, or in the other way:

But this is very different from taking identity as the explicit site of political action, of taking identification itself as a kind of political process: "I am woman, therefore, vote for me"'; "We put rainbow flags on our advertisements, so buy our products". This obscures process for product: this is what it means to engage in 'identity politics', where identities themselves are taken for (stand-in for) the very process which produce them. — StreetlightX

?

This confusion of process for product is what confuses so many people about identity politics, which is in many cases just assumed to be 'any kind of politics which has any bearing at all on identity'. Which is completely stupid because it's a confusion that ends up just equating identity politics with politics tout court, and then you end up in the disastrous situation where politics itself is taken for 'the problem' (because 'everyone knows' identity politics = bad boogeyman). This is why anyone who thinks this is just merely a verbal dispute is pretty dumb, insofar as the stakes for thinking politically - for understanding what it is we are even talking about when we talk about and of politics - are pretty high. — StreetlightX

I take it that your target is not a person who ascribes to identity politics, then, but a person who -- perhaps on the periphery of political action -- calls this mistaken move of flipping process for product identity politics. Am I right?

I don't think that this is merely verbal. Just because there are, in my way of framing the issue, translation rules between different instantiations of power which allow us to reframe historical facts into different frames that does not, at least as far as I'm concerned, imply that these are merely verbal disputes. I think history is important, though I believe we can translate facts into different frames.

The act of translation, I'd say, does not occur in some realm of thought alone -- but has real consequences too.

I don't think knowledge is necessarily a social phenomenon. . .

All in all, I don't think you and I are far apart — T Clark

I don't think we are far apart with respect to what I might term hyper-rationalists -- I take that to be the target of your thread. But the devil is in the details, especially when we are close. That's where the interesting disagreement lies, I think -- at least philosophically.

Here's my basic take -- introspection does not yield knowledge, but is an observation of our own thought. We come to have beliefs about ourselves, but since knowledge is a social product -- we produce it together -- the beliefs we come to have about ourselves through introspection (observing our own thoughts) cannot become knowledge just by the fact that introspection is only a self observing their thoughts and moods.

Though this line has an interesting way of throwing a wrench in my basic take:

Two psychologists meet:
How am I?
You're fine, how am I?

Some of us are so radical as not only to rely on our own introspection, but also on that of others. — unenlightened

And is probably related to what you say here:

Also, what I know from introspection can be social. This thread is good evidence for that.

So, which of these two forks sound more interesting to explore, to you? Characterizing knowledge, or intersubjective introspection?

It may not be what you're talking about -- but doesn't that make sense of why someone might say "All politics are identity politics"?

I don't know if I'd say that assumptions about groups -- like "Gays are against Trump" or "We are a progressive bank because we have a picture of women playing rugby" -- are exactly what I'd call identity politics either. But there is a sort of short-circuiting going on when all that we have are the display of identities linked to some kind of political support. But, as I said, I'd say that this sort of mistake -- and I'm willing to call it a mistake -- isn't what identity politics is about.

So how are we moving beyond identity politics then? Or do you just mean to point out this as a kind of mistake?

Could you unpack it? — StreetlightX

Sure.

Let's take distributive power. We can divide the world up into income brackets, say, and look at what these people care about or what their life spans are or how many of them are in jail or some such. But then we can also do the same with identity -- and even, on the basis of said identity, point to distribution as a mechanism for discriminating against certain identities.

So we have two ways of looking at a groups and their power, but depending on the emphasis we could look at Race : Distribution, or Distribution : Race -- the one could serve a bolstering point for the other, just depending on the directionality of our function between the two sets. (to make this a little more formalistic)

If that be the case then depending on the historian -- or in the case you cited, an activist -- they can look at the exact same historical facts, but come away with a different story -- one in which those who have less must deal with x, or in the other case where those with this identity have to deal with x.

At least that's what I had in mind. There are cases where it is more obvious to apply a certain interpretive lens than another interpretive lens, but then we can always -- through the relation between instances of power, or as I'm putting it here through our interpretations of historical facts and the relationships that can be established between these interpretations -- describe a historical situation in one set of terms or another: identity, decision-making, distribution, etc.

In my experience, all the ways of gaining knowledge are generally working together all the time. In my experience a good therapist or a friend who knows you well helps you improve your self-awareness, make your introspection more effective. — T Clark

Cool. Then I think our main disagreement is just in our characterization of introspection. I don't really think of it as a method for gaining knowledge because knowledge is a social phenomena -- it's something we produce together. Whereas introspection is looking in at the self, so it necessarily could not be knowledge (if my characterization of knowledge is held to, at least -- obviously there's other ways of parsing knowledge).

Funny. I would say the same thing about rationality. Just look at all the people who tangle themselves up with their words here on the forum and elsewhere. I can't deny I've done it myself. — T Clark

I'd agree with this, though I don't think I'd pit introspection against rationality either. But yes we can get a little too caught up in the rational mode -- to a point that one might even claim that a person is behaving irrationally.

Right! And so we have a distinction between high-grade and low-grade exercises of power. Now, could these different grades of power have relationships between one another, do you think -- or no?

I would say "yes" -- in which case we could say that low-grades can depend upon high-grades, and high-grades can also come to depend upon low-grades (Why is it the police officer can resolve conflicts with a talk? Because they have the authority to wield violence in the name of the state).

And if that be the case then we could say that a symbiotic relationship could form between grades of power in particular, historical cases -- and a description would depend on the historical facts as well as the interpretation of the historian.


To bring this around to the beginning -- if we can form relationships between instances of power, then it becomes even easier to understand the formulation that all politics are identity politics -- the relationship gives us a sort of interpretive rule between instances of power (violence : race : identity : distribution).

But why? — StreetlightX

Well, if power is flat, then violence is just another instance of power, one of many expressions of our social world. I haven't posited that power acts upon or is outside of a social world. I've targeted violence as having a relationship to other forms of this flattened power -- a power where violence is not a necessary correlate or property.

Violence would not be impotent, from a theoretical standpoint. It would just be another form of power - unless there was some relationship to a different, potent form a power that spells out its impotence.

Good point. I don't really think I'd say introspection is a way of thinking, but maybe I should have said that it is a good way of gaining knowledge. — T Clark

Cool. I think this speaks to a lot of underlying disagreement, where I was more than happy to agree with some of your conclusions -- because now I think I'd say definitely no. :D Even self-knowledge, I think, is better understood in conjunction with other ways of gaining knowledge. Not that you could have self-knowledge without introspection, but rather that speaking to others -- be it friends or priests or therapists -- helps one to gain self-knowledge better than introspection alone.

I'm not sure to what extent I'd include introspection in other kinds of knowledge. And some of this comes down to the big buggaboo: knowledge, and its characterization.


All that being said I do agree that introspection can be valuable. I also think that we can get a bit too caught up in ourselves by introspecting, though perhaps you'd call that something other than introspection.

This strikes me as at odds with your expression that violence is impotence, that power brings about circumstances where people do as you will and violence is the band-aid upon a failure of power.

I'd say that even if we flatten power that different interations of power can develop relationships with one another. So violence can develop a relationship to, say, identity -- and has done so historically. There are conditions of violence -- one of which, if it be political violence, is organized activity. It is merely a kind of organized activity. And so violence is a symbiote to this larger body -- closely, even physically related, enmeshed in our social lives, but would not exist without our social lives, without surplus energy to fuel a new kind of organism.

So it's not so much a base/superstructure type of description, but rather a description of different instances of power and the relationships they can or do develop.

Let's try stripping out the moral language then and speak more descriptively.

Rather than "leach" let us say "parasite" -- and what is a parasite? An organism who benefits from another organism. The host has surplus energy and the parasite re purposes said surplus energy into their own reproductive line -- rather than the reproductive line of the host.

Now is "parasite" quite right to say, if we are stripping the moral language? Perhaps we could say that it is a kind of symbiosis. We have certain qualms about allowing tapeworms to continue living in ourselves, but in a descriptive sense the tapeworm is a symbiote to the human. The human, and other animals as well, are host to its lifecycle.

In this way, perhaps, we could imagine that violence is a symbiote to (What is the genera? Perhaps not social action or mutual activity. But then is the amorphous power the genera? Or what?)



Because it seems to me that there's something here. There's the rhizomatic power, and there's the notion that violence does require something from us that's more basic than the political act of violence. It needn't be an essence.

should we depend less on introspection than on ratiocination? Love that word. Means, more or less, rational thinking. If so, how do they compare in terms of their credibility? — T Clark

Seems a different sort of question than the titular question :D. I don't think they are separable, even in matters of fact, as you put it. So there's an interesting bundle of alternating answers in there, between yourself and myself, while still agreeing that they are not separable.

But is introspection a kind of knowledge at all, or if it be a kind of knowledge is it a valid one? I don't think that I'd agree that introspection is a kind of knowledge, but rather is way of thinking. We look into ourselves, and try and identify -- make into words -- different parts of our mind. This is the belief that is based on a gut feeling. This is the belief that is based on an observation. The terms "gut feeling" and "observation" are products of a way of thinking about our beliefs and classifying them -- the introspective way.

But then you say this:

I include feelings, values, impressions, and personal experience - both internal and external - in my arguments. — T Clark

And I wonder -- is this more of what you mean by introspection? Because the inclusion of feelings, values, impressions, and personal experience within an argument -- so I would say -- does not invalidate it as knowledge. Knowledge is made by people, after all, and people are motivated by feelings. So the inclusion of what moves us to make knowledge is only honest -- and in fact is often asked after when someone does make an argument or provide some chain of reasoning.



Which is a dizzying sort of way to say that I think there's a lot to untangle.

Then I'd like to posit that what I understand of @unenlightened and yourself are not so much at odds with one another, at least at first blush.

If violence is impotency, and power is getting others to do, and there's a distinction between coercive power and other sorts of power -- then that gets along quite well with the notion that coercive power leaches upon societal action; something that can be broadly understood as mutual activity, where we agree to something or work together.

No?

My dear friend always said that politics begins the moment you have people together, because whenever people come together there are power relations between them. However. . .

The tricky word here is "power". If power be the fundamental unit of identity, then as your OP suggests this would make sense of why someone might claim that all politics is identity politics -- because power makes up identity.

If power is a system of ownership, as your distributive model would have it, then insofar that we believe ownership and identity are different then we might have some leverage to say that there is at least a difference in emphasis, even if identity is always involved.

But "power" is one of those words that is easily reified and not easily defined -- kind of like freedom, or a host of other concepts that are so simple they become hard to describe or speak of.

We might even go so far as to say that "power" has different forms -- distributive power, identity power, decision-making power, bodily power. . .

And then one thing I'd like to posit is there is a difference between coercive power, and power tout court -- power is not a dirty word, because there are more forms of power than hierarchical and violent flows or foundations. Power flows from the barrel of a gun, said a man wise in the ways of doing politics, but not all power does -- hence why things like petitions, demands, marches, and strikes can work to effect change.

((that being said, I do believe that coercive power is part of doing politics, but there's still a meaningful distinction to be made))

Man I'm gonna need more to go off of. Sorta seems ineffable. Which means . . .

I think I agree with @Wayfarer's characterization --

It's not 'fuzzy' or warm feelings or anything of the kind. It's an outcome and you know how to make it happen or you don't. — Wayfarer

Which is to say that my instinct is to say there is no feeling to knowledge. My feeling says that knowing feels the same as believing falsity. But perhaps this is off topic?

I've always understood "radical" in the political sense as referring to advancing a complete reform of a political body. — thewonder

You're not wrong. After all if you believe there is a root cause to many problems, what else would you do other than act to make a complete reform of a political body? If there is some root problem, then the very political institution you are railing against grows from that root problem -- hence needing to dig it up and start anew.

Just slating Anarchism against heirarchy is fine by me. I had thought that it was more of a problematic concept than it actually is as I had assumed that heirarchy implied that there was just one person at the top.I don't really think that President of the United States of America can be held to be responsible for all of the plights within the current geopolitical situation — thewonder

Maybe hierarchy needs to be clarified more. My preferred conception is to say that hierarchies are established when there are people who have decision making power when others are effected by said decision making power. What is decision-making power? I hope, at least, that this is clear: merely the ability to make decisions. But if you want to question me on this then we can. I merely mean that there are people who can say "Yes" or "no" or have the ability to formulate creative responses to questions, and those responses -- yes, no, or otherwise -- effect other people who do not have ultimate say in the decision. As an example: Voters may contact their representatives, and tell them the reasons they believe their representative should vote such and such, but the representative is the one who can vote "yay" or "Nay".

I've posted this before, but maybe it deserves a reposting. In spite of the ironies of having an authoritative resource for anarchy I recommend the Anarchist FAQ. -- looks like it changed since I posted it last. Damn it's almost like a bunch of folks who hate rulers are fine with changing shit on the fly. ;)

But it looks mostly the same. It's just a bunch of writing on the notions of anarchy. Hopefully it proves educational.

I'd say that this is an impoverished view of anarchism. Anarchists are against both state and capital because they are against hierarchies -- it is a radical philosophy in the sense that anarchists believe that the root of many social problems comes from hierarchical social organization.

Though perhaps this isn't the focus of your thread -- I just wanted to point out that unless one is aligned with the right-wing libertarian sorts, that anarchists are opposed not just to states, but to capital because they are both instantiations of hierarchical social organizations.

I am what makes me do any particular activity in my life. I don't believe there is some deeper entity than that from which my actions stem.

I have often wondered about your notions of identity. And I think I begin to understand it here when you would rather substitute(is that the right word?) "identity" for "subjectivity" -- and "self-aggrandising" for "self-defensive".

And I think I understand the notion of self-defense being more of an advertising slogan -- but I will say, as a person in the US who lives in Republicantopia without R sentiments, that "self-defense", as a word, is a thing here that is not like Coke saying "Be happy, fun, and free!". Not that that makes it not-a-slogan, per se -- but it has more cultural weight here. I hope that makes sense.

All that said I think that self-aggrandising, at least as defined by the dictionary, is the appropriate word too. Self-aggrandising is self-defensive, at least in accord with the Chad Kautzer paper I linked.

I want to ask you -- who do you think, in the case of these acts, are the demagogues?

You say that demagogues will arise when therer develops a large gap between the social body and individual identity -- are they the news organization, the people in power, the people on 8tran posting, the imagined people in the actors head, all of the above, or something else?

According to you at least. You are an observer of these things. I'd like to know what someone not-here thinks.

I *think* I agree with you in saying we are not supposed to notice (in a subjective sense, as a normal person) is that the real power doesn't have guns -- but has others do the shooting, or grows others, through education, to do the shooting. I often feel that way about America, at least.

I may have linked this paper once before. I don't remember. But I thought you'd find it interesting @unenlightened -- it seems to get along with what you've written.

But then if the speaker of those statements does not define what she thinks science is, then we don't know exactly what it is that she thinks will answer all our questions and solve all our problems, or what she thinks it is that can answer any coherent question and why she thinks a question that cannot be answered by it is incoherent. — Janus

True. What do you think of the broader definition of science with this consideration? That basically all empirical thinking is a kind of scientific thinking? Would those statements count as scientism with science broadly construed?

I'm tempted to say it would not, but that the understanding of science is too broad.

Fair enough. I thought maybe I was missing something :D.

I don't think scientism is a testable "theory", and I don't think we have to define science before understanding it either. At the very least we can clarify what a speaker means, of course, and move on from there.