I think it’s a superstition that only man in the form of a state employee can enforce contracts and tender and pave roads. — NOS4A2

I can go halfsies here. I agree, in a universal sense. There have been many social organizations that are not in the form of the state. I wouldn't flirt with anarchy if I didn't see that. I don't think the state is a final form.

But to call a sole proprietor a counter-example is a bit of an idealization, is all I mean. The tender, the law, the courts, the education system -- it's all there to make people behave in a certain way. Of course people behave when they have learned the rules. But what taught them the rules? And isn't the sole proprietorship designation a rule specifically designed for people who just like being on their own? Isn't it a rule to accommodate the desire to be an individual?

School, work, the state, the people around them -- it all forms a system of rewards and punishments which influence how people behave. Because there are claims on property through the state, and everything is basically owned, we need each other not just in the gregarious sense but in an industrial sense too. That's the economy which allows us to continue on right now, and has even shaped us such that we can't really live outside of an industrial economy. A sole proprietor needs the farmers to keep growing things after all. They aren't self-sufficient in that sense, though they are self-sufficient in the social rules sense, the simulation of individuality that is individual rights and property.

As for your state, I would not say it is somehow oligarchy free. People love oligarchy, apparently. — NOS4A2

Maybe.

I think people like hierarchy more than they ought.

But it's not inevitable.

Not if you’re a sole-proprietor and self-employed. — NOS4A2

Even the rare self-employed sole-proprietor requires a state to enforce contracts and tender.

Would you say that such a state, where everyone is a sole-proprietor and self-employed but there is a state, is somehow oligarchy free?

It didn’t last long. The Gov burned down their makeshift homes and sent them packing. I wouldn’t even say they were anarchists, to be honest, though a few were. — NOS4A2

It's the way of things.

Now, if they were organized and communicating they might have been able to push back. :D

I can’t remember the last time I’ve spoken to someone in authority or any leaders but I interact with people every day for work and pleasure. Imagine that: people just getting along with some pushy organization telling them what to do. If I was in an organization, though, that would be quite different in virtue of its structure. — NOS4A2

The way I look at organization -- work is already an organization, even of the more traditional sort. It's a legal entity with property claims and contracts. It requires a state to function. It's a space which is already organized with its own hierarchies and rules around property and propriety. People obey the rules, and are subject to discipline for disobeying the rules, and there are people who aren't even allowed in.

I’ve actually spent a few months in a supposed anarchist community, believe it or not. No leaders, elders, or anything of the sort. The only meetings we had were surfing and fishing and the odd celebration.

I believe you. Heh, no point in disputing what real anarchy is.

Not all of them work like that, as you might imagine.

Not that a reformer couldn't do something, but that wouldn't be radical politics -- but the first one that popped to my mind was the AFL-CIO.

In general it's when it's time for an organization to die because it no longer fulfills its function.

:D Yup.

Oligarchy is the rule of the few. So I see a few people holding positions of power over the vast majority of human beings. I would argue that very little in everyday social life is oligarchic in character, that neither rule nor coercive power need apply to any of it, really. In most instances and in most interactions throughout history, self-rule is the norm. — NOS4A2

Care to spell out the argument more? I don't see how you reconcile your notion of everyday social life with seeing oligarchy everywhere, unless for some reason political organizations are outside of everyday social life -- which is just not true. People often prefer not to think of the political organizations which constitute their lives, but that environment is still there influencing the everyday lives of people.

Oh yeah.

How else would you organize if you didn't communicate?

The general anarchist thrust is that it is a radical politics, in the sense that there is thought to be a root cause of problems, and the root cause of problems for anarchists is hierarchy. So anarchist practice is all about how to organize without hierarchy or to minimize hierarchy -- which usually ends up meaning lots of communication and intentionally implementing practices which spread power, be it over a household or workplace or whatever bit of property or decision is under discussion.

The cartoon picture is more or less the opposite of the reality. One of the advantages to anarchic organizing, like the conversational model I proposed, is that organizations don't outlive their use.

But that advantage is also it's downside: organizations with staying power will outlast them. Organizations like warlords and gangsters, for instance, who don't tend to care too much about how they treat other people to get their way (unlike anarchists).

If need be. Or there's the bad kind of anarchy -- but usually that's just warlords and gangsters rather than anarchists. (Not to say it's not a threat as well)

It's just funny to me comparing the reality of anarchy with anarchists (endless communication and meetings and collective decision making) to the picture (propaganda of the deed, revolution, CHAOS).

still serves NOS's purposes, which is to promote anarchy. — frank

Maybe in the abstract.

In practice, though -- most people hate anarchy not because it is exciting, but because actual democratic practices take work. Living anarchically is a form of organization unto itself, and is usually more about who is going to wash the toilets and take care of the chickens and buy the groceries and distributing out the tasks in a collective manner.

Basically it's more collective than what I gather @NOS4A2's preferences to be.

I'm not sure oligarchy fails because I see it everywhere, I'm afraid. People keep instituting it, justifying it, and seeking to benefit from its fruits. Given the very structure of their organizations, it appears to me that everyone concerned with building democracy are really concerned with building a better oligarchy, especially one amenable to their tastes.

Better to remove the organization from power and politics. Organize for other reasons like cleaning up the neighborhood or helping a community member get on his feet. — NOS4A2

If the Quakers even count as an oligarchy then I'm not surprised you see it everywhere :D.

I'd draw a distinction, of course. But I think it would be better for you to say a bit more on oligarchy at this point. When you say you see oligarchy, what is it you see? And, what isn't oligarchic that is also social, if there be any such entity in the set?

he started out a socialist and when he wrote about the Iron law of of oligarchy he apparently was some kind of syndicalist revolutionary. He was not that extreme yet when he wrote that book. But yeah I do get your point, there's a lot not to like about the guy for sure.

The interesting thing to me is that he did come out of socialist milieus and the unions, people who are supposedly aware of and actively fighting against oligarchies, and yet turned oligarchy themselves. That is where he got the experiences that influenced his ideas about oligarchy. — ChatteringMonkey

Right. And I'm not unaware of these things, either.

There's a truth in there -- it's the generalization that's being questioned, as well as the formulation. There's certainly the ideological differences that are being questioned, too.

"Ossification" is the word I like to use in thinking about organizations which form a core -- they function more like a bone structure does in a body. To keep things neutral I'd just say look at a workplace that's familiar to people, such as a kitchen. There's usually a core of people within a kitchen who function like the bones do -- they hold the structure together.

And you might gather that someone who plays the roles of the bone structure within an organization might have more influence than someone who plays the role of some other specialized function that's not holding the structure together.

I think that's undeniable.

But then what is oligarchy, in the thesis? @Banno already addressed this, and I've mostly been utilizing this ambiguity in attempting to come up with counter-examples: Not only is oligarchy fairly mushy, so is "organization" -- such that conversations might count (though they were unpersuasive here), but then even if we mean more traditional forms of organization then there are many which are not oligarchic right now, such as the political parties that aren't presently in charge. But the law is formulated in a way that we have to see these non-oligarchies as potential oligarchies, so it strikes me at least -- it really isn't a falsifiable idea.

But I haven't been pushing that as much because I don't pick up the falsifiability criterion for social theories, but I agree It's worth noting that the theory is not falsifiable, or is at least written in a manner that makes it easy to formulate a falsification as well as a verification, as the desire may be.

I'm not all that familiar with Aristotle... but even though he was in many ways more empirically minded, he was still a student of Plato and his academia. Isn't aristocracy akin to the Ideal form, how it is ideally conceived and intended originally, and oligarchy how it eventually ends up after special interests corrupt it over time. If that is the case, then this wouldn't exactly be a counterexample to the iron law, but rather a more general and broader theory about the eventual corruption of political organisations. — ChatteringMonkey

Yeah, you're right that this isn't exactly a counter-example. And we could certainly do more justice to the Politics than using his distinctions -- but that's enough for me, and can be found at the SEP. Scroll down a little from there to see the table of correct and deviant constitutions.

It's definitely a different theory! And it's richer. With respect to social theories that's often a good reason to adopt something.

But really I think it's important to look at questions from multiple perspectives, especially when it comes to social theories. You gave me just enough of an opportunity to lay out an alternative theory of oligarchy that recognizes these tendencies but explains them differently, and in a manner which is not some foregone conclusion. The theory acknowledges the things which the iron law does, while pointing out that these tendencies are not necessary -- it's not inevitable that an organization becomes an oligarchy. (and, interestingly and somewhat along the lines of what the iron law is getting at, it even terms democracy as a degenerate form)

With Aristotle's theory what you have is the beginnings of a solution, though -- you have to look at the constitutions which city-states are organized around. Some constitutions are better than others on the basis of whether they are in the correct or deviant form.

That's the sort of thing I think a good social theory does -- it doesn't just tell you "Don't bother", it attempts to get at what can be done about the problems.

I'm not sure how to address this because I don't think the CI works in practice. I don't mean this in a base or mean spirited way, but we do sometimes use people as a means, out of practical and psychological necessity... I would be hard if not impossible to live in total accordance with the CI. — ChatteringMonkey

There's a bit of a difference here worth noting, I think -- it's not that we cannot use others as means to an end. We're human, we have to! We are very much dependent upon one another. It's that the CI prohibits using others merely as a means to an end.

Also I want to say -- if democracy were an easy goal to achieve, given its popularity, it'd have been done by now. But we're still figuring it out. It's a project that takes participants rather than an ideal in the sky.

The second formulation points out how even an individualist can organize collectively without it being coercive. That's mostly what I think I'm trying to get at -- even if we be perfectly willing subjects there's a way in which we can build our social environment.

I think I do agree that collective organisation around values is where it is at, I'm just not sure how we can do it in practice while at the same time avoiding all the known pitfalls. What you describe for instance functionally looks a lot like how religions or myths would organize communities around shared value systems, but then a lot can and historically has gone wrong with that. — ChatteringMonkey

Yes. And a lot can and has gone well with it too. The future being open means we can also fuck it up, and there's no guarantee. Even if we do all the things right -- it's not a controlled experiment. And we're still pretty ignorant of how social forms "work" (if there be any way that they work at all), so even with the best of intentions we can mess things up along the way.

It's for these reasons I tend to favor democratic practices. I don't believe I have the answer, but I think we can probably come up with a better one together than we have so far.

There are two thoughts I've yet to express that I'm uncertain even how to --

But I keep coming back to Aristotle's Politics, and the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative.

(1) In the Politics even Aristotle* makes a distinction between Oligarchy and Aristocracy -- and he happens to like Aristocracy over Oligarchy. Naturalized politics is kind of his whole thing and gets along with the idea that we can falsify such stuff, I think.

(2) The second formulation of the CI pretty explicitly points out how one would organize with someone: by treating them as not merely a means, but as an end unto themselves.

1: Given that we're looking at all societies due to the law-formluation, I'd take Aristotle's Politics as evidence that many constitutions exist, and someone smart back then knew about these tendencies but didn't generalize oligarchy to all organizations. If we're looking for textual counter-examples then he counts.

2: This points to how we can collectively organize on ethical grounds even from a libertarian individualist stance. It's not inevitable, from that perspective, because we all make choices based upon some commitment, and here is a commitment which harmonizes collective action rather than pits all individuals against one another. Even on rational grounds.

the point, I think, is rather that we never arrive at some perfect static system, at some utopia, but that these things are in perpetual motion. — ChatteringMonkey

I'm gathering that there are more points people pick up than this from Michel :D -- yes?

I agree that there's no static system or utopia, and that social lives are in perpetual motion. That's not the point I saw in Michel, but hey, we agree there.

*That is, the guy who, in writing, wrote about how slavery is good. That guy. Slaves? OK. Oligarchy? Fuck that shit. That guy.

If Michels’ ideas are wrong there should be cases where he is. — NOS4A2

How about the Quakers? They run their organization on the basis of consensus. Not just consensus building, but 100% consensus.

There's a lot of groups out there which don't follow this purported law.

But so far it’s nothing, at least as far as organizations are concerned. So why should someone like me or anyone else sit around and wait for political parties and organizers to bring us democracy, when it is more than likely they’ll bring us oligarchy? — NOS4A2

This is confusing to me.

If you're organized you aren't sitting around waiting for some group to do something for you. You're actively participating in the process of politics, regardless of the form of government. And if you want a democratic group then you form the group around democratic practices.

And there's where you'll find, outside of the books and ideas, your counter-examples -- democracy doesn't just happen, it's built, and many groups utilize democratic practices.

If, indeed, democracy is worth building. If the Iron Law holds, then it wouldn't be possible to build, so why not let the oligarchs run the show?

The only thing is -- tomorrow isn't like yesterday, when you keep looking back. And the part you've yet to address is that oligarchs fall. So what's so iron about the law if the form continues to fail due to a lack of trust that such a social form tends to breed?

I think, in a practical manner, you're right. This tells me what I need to know in choosing a particular group -- what are they doing, rather than just what are they saying? Most of my criticism of the institutions that be run along those lines.

But here we're just talking about ideas, and concretely that's all we can do -- here. That's the purpose of this space. And we all have ideas that came from a Background, as I'd call it, sometimes which is formed by brainwashing. Hell, in our propaganda-rich environment, our Background beliefs are almost certainly at least partially the result of undergoing techniques meant to create beliefs. It's little wonder that we don't trust institutions when we look at what they do.

The downside is that we don't have much of a choice in the matter when it comes to politics. It's either us, the random, brainwashed, and at times irritating shmucks we happened to be born around, or no one.

From what I can see of the iron law the downstream decision is to cut out, to be on your own, to be an individual -- or, if you're into politics, to become an oligarch. If it's an Iron Law then there's no in between: There are oligarchs and there are the people at the bottom of the pedestal, and the people who want to change the pedestal are just would-be oligarchs. Which is why I thought calling it defeatist made sense -- it paints a picture that is cynical.

And, on top of that, it's well constructed in that it latches onto a truth to be persuasive. Oligarchs certainly exist, and we certainly have the problem of dealing with oligarchs.

But to keep beating the dead horse until it's heard, the only way to push against oligarchs is organizing. So, to me, it seems Michel's beliefs are not just wrong, but the downstream decisions lead to the perpetuation of oligarchy through cynical apathy or cynical manipulation.

The biggest organization which pushes individualism is the United States government and the laws it enforces. Every individual is held accountable for themself as a legal entity, so individualism is deeply enforced by the legal system.

But even debates we have are about individual choices. One of the regular points people would bring up against universal health care would be that some people take better care of themselves than others, and that general thrust is why Obamacare is this bizzarro private-public partnership law that costs way too much. To make sure that the bad individuals didn't get what the good individuals deserved.

With respect to ossification, though -- I think it makes sense to treat what is organized like an organism, and apoptosis, like extinction, is a natural process. Hence why I pointed out the toppling of pedestals.

When a cell is ready for death, then death comes. So goes it with social organizations, though we don't know how it works -- but inequality sometimes features in topplings.

EDIT: Other times, in a conversation for instance, the random blatherings of someone does the trick ;)

One of the things I also tend to push against is the notion that political parties get to define what's political. So I'd naturally push against the idea that political parties define organization. Being organized is a good thing -- political parties in the United States? not so much.

I also push against individualism because I know it's an ideology spread by the already organized. I wouldn't use artificial/natural as a distinction, because I know that human beings like hierarchies. I don't think ossification, even, is unnatural, which is roughly what I'd equate to "The Iron Law of Oligarchy" -- and I think that the Iron Law formulation of ossification overlooks too much in search of an idea. Even in the context of political parties, how have the various third parties in the United States faired in terms of the law? Do they have a core of oligarchs controlling the pedestal below them, or are they just a bunch of sad sacks and hopefuls doing their best in a first past the post democracy*? Or is the point that they aren't oligarchs, but will become oligarchs once they.... are oligarchs?

You see?


*has-been democracy, if you ask me

But I guess its an interesting question if any aggregate of human beings can be considered an organization. if you want to get into it, it's clear that the relationship of mother and child, or the bourgeois family, are not democracies by any stretch of the imagination. — NOS4A2

Yup, I agree.

I begin with these personal relationships because I can relate to your expressed suspicion of abstractions. I'd only push further and note that a physical object, a boundary -- these are abstractions too.

With respect to this conversation the only non-abstract is our relationship, the relationship between NOS4A2 and Moliere on The Philosophy Forum.

The state? The Marxist? The Liberal? The Republican? The National Socialist? Collectivism? Individualism? These are all abstractions we are discussing in the context of a philosophy forum. The only non-abstract referent here would be what's happening within the conversation, and who we are to one another. The position you occupy in space, in this conversation, is on a forum rather than wherever you're at while reading this. At least, that's the space I tend to respond to since that's the space I have access to and am sensitive to. In abstract you'd represent something, but in concrete you're just you and I'm just me talking about ideas.

It's true that human beings and other primates are gregarious. But you are a single object. The last dyad you or I have ever experienced ended when the umbilical cord was severed. Any and all attachments are strictly metaphorical. To me it's patently false to treat aggregates of any number of human beings as single objects, so I'm a strict nominalist in that regard. I can't get around it and I can't help but fashion my politics around what I see as brute facts.

For these reasons I believe any effort to give a group priority over the individuals in it—collectivism—is to prioritize ideas over actuality, and worse, one's own ideas and nothing more. It is never about the collective qua collective, nor could it be. — NOS4A2

Good thing I recognized both, then. The group is composed of individuals, which themselves are not isolated monads, but multiplicities connected to others. Does our relationship to our mother become a metaphor when the doctor cuts the umbilical cord? Why?

If I am an object, which object am I? If I lose my leg, do I lose my objectivity? If I lose my boyhood, do I become a new object -- a man?

If I am a ship of theseus then I am certainly not a monad disconnected from the physical world, but rather am a machine for processing the world from sugar to shit.

But surely none of that even matters when it comes to politics. So why focus on such brute facts? Why call yourself an object?

I don't treat aggregates as objects. I treat objects as objects. And we are a dyad, in this conversation, rather than an object. There is both give and take, a listening and a speaking.

So when you say:

I don't see social interactions, conversations, and natural groupings as organizations because they are not arranged systematically and artificially. They are not organized.

It sounds to me that you have poised the well in proving the Iron Law of Oligarchy, then -- you'll only accept human organizations which are prone to verifying the Iron Law, and calling organizations which do not something renamed which is natural rather than artificial.

Or, at least, it seems less Law like if there are human organizations which don't tend towards Oligarchy, like natural organizations.

Perhaps it's this artificiality that's more at issue, than collectivism?

I certainly understand that a group can sacrifice an individual for collective reasons -- what else is war other than the old sacrificing the young to keep the state in order? I think those things are bad. I think individuals are important. Important enough that we, collectively, need to preserve individuals by actively fighting oligarchy.

But that takes collective action, you see?

I don’t get why people push back against it because everyone we organize with is an individual. If you only see them as a means to some collective end, then it is their subordination rather than their cooperation you require. — NOS4A2

Isn't that what the Iron Law of Oligarchy would require?

But it, too, is an abstraction. Along with "individual".

From the perspective of organizing, then everyone is both an individual and in relationship with others. I am not a monad perfectly willing myself, but a human being who is attached to his family, to friends, to coworkers and neighbors, to mild nuisances and to outright enemies -- I am not just myself, but my relationship with others.

In this conversation, though, that too is an abstraction. We are you and I in a conversation. This form of organization is not an oligarchy. And it's certainly not inevitable that it will become one. And depending on how we count organizations -- well, the conversational dyads outnumber the hierarchical organizations, just by sheer numbers. Insofar that you accept our conversational dyad as a counter-example to the iron law of oligarchy regarding organizations, then surely you could count some of the other dyads out there too -- but the conversational ones in particular seem to resist oligarchic tendencies, because as soon as either participant is done they can just walk away. And so when the organization ceases to fulfill either participants desires it ceases to be, rather than lives on like the abstractions.

At base we can say you are yourself and I am myself and we're on a forum thinking about ideas and their limitations, and that conversation is not oligarchic nor does it need to become oligarchic.

Heh. Cool.

I suppose, in spite of my Epicurean aspirations, I am a sensitive whatever. I appreciate the clarification :)

Owie-powie -- I feel I missed the joke at my expense.

Not that I mind it. I put this in the lounge for a reason.

Oligarchy is not inevitable. — Banno

Yup.

And it's not a conceptual distinction between individualist/collectivist that makes the difference. To be political you must have others. "Collectivist" is a boogeyman word to dissuade people from -- well, coming together. It's something you say to persuade people outside of a collective to stay individual.

I know it'd be nice to all live our individual lives @NOS4A2 -- and I also know that collective organizing requires recognizing individual differences. I've done enough organizing to know that my own individual will didn't mean squat when it came to democratic organization.

I suppose that's why I push against these narratives. We need one another. That's a good thing to recognize. It's also good to recognize that some people use that need for their own ends -- but the solution isn't individualization, because that gives people who are able, who have more power even more power. Masters like being able to spell out the rules to subordinates, and it's much easier to do so when they subordinates are alone.

I guess I meant, "overused".. used to refer to too many vaguely related but not quite necessarily related things. — schopenhauer1

Also, fair. It's easy enough to say everything that is is equiprimordial. Things get confusing after that.

Not sure what to make of this. What do you mean "reifications of experience"? — schopenhauer1

I don't think experience is a thing, so to treat it as if it is a thing -- like a drop, in analogy to water -- is a reification of what is not a thing.

Hypostatization is pretty much what I have in mind. If experience be material, as a materialist must accept if they are not eliminative, it's still not a thing. Experience is of things, and reification is when you treat what is conceptual or experiential as if it were the same as the things it's about.

Sounds right to me. And I'm fine with waiting until after we see a particular person do something or any other criteria we might imagine. So a plumber knows more about pipes than me. I want to resist the homeless junkie bit, but I agree that homeless persons know more about surviving without a job or home than those who have a job and home.

You see how strange it is that knowledge is innumerable and that there are people who know more?

In comparison to the set of real numbers is it a bigger or smaller infinite?

EDIT: A bit of a nonsense question in follow up to a nonsense question -- but it'd at least give a basis of comparison.

It could be that knowledge is innumerable, which I suspect, but then how do we get to comparing people who have more or less?

That's interesting though because it shows how there should also be some qualitative dimension if we're going to say something like "A knows more than B", but the quality is a relationship to other bits of knowledge. So we have trivial knowledge, like "I live on planet Earth" and non-trivial knowledge, which seems to take some kind of either work, or evaluation.

I agree! These things sit together. And why it's almost a real question -- because we often do make this comparison between persons. We trust a mechanic to be able, to know, how to fix a car, and a dentist how to diagnose health problems of teeth -- but also we will often dismiss persons who demonstrate ignorance.

So there is a comparative notion which seems to indicate that one can have more or less knowledge. But what is the unit, then? That's the part that seems nonsensical, but if something is more usually we'd say it is a larger quantity, rather than a larger quality.

True! Let's say for any given time-frame, given that knowledge is in flux.

Moliere, I like your ideas, but you jumped ahead a bit. I want to read this page by page to get all the analysis from it. — schopenhauer1

Heh. Sorry!

Prehension is used here. However, it seems to be an overmined term. — schopenhauer1

How so? By overmining I understand there to be no objects. But prehension just puts objects on the same ontological level as humans by smushing perception and effect together. So it seems to recognize the reality of objects, though they are all interconnected -- which I think might speak against your thought here:

It can refer to "registers the presence of, responds to, affected by, another entity". He then adds in "drops of experience". Is this not conflating a certain type of phenomena (experience) with a more general idea of interactions in general? How are these two tied?

If objects are all connected, and perception, response, affect, and register are the relations between entities, then a drop of experience would just be another entity. It's the kind of entity we are -- and I am a little suspicious in general of reifications of experience so I don't think I'd put it like this, but that doesn't seem to be a conflation as much as a different way of looking.

OK, got it. Coercive political power is identified with organization then. And cooperation is opposed to organization as well.

In my previous replies that wasn't clear to me. I tend to think of cooperation as the same as organization.

Heh. See, that's exactly what someone who is organized would want people who are disorganized to do :D That's what I mean. It reads like fatalism, which is the sort of position advocated by those who like hierarchies. If there is an iron law of oligarchy, after all, then the scientific opponents of democracy -- though I wish to note here that I don't think this is a group -- must establish their own oligarchy if they want to be politically active, while the majority of people who are not will not be a part of that oligarchy. At least that's what seems to make sense from what's been said in the thread (obviously I haven't read the book, I'm just commenting along).

The problem with disorganizing is that organizations are more powerful than the disorganized. All it takes is for a group to decide that the benefits of organization outweigh the downsides, in their particular organization, and they'll naturally be more powerful -- and thereby will have political import regardless of ideology.

So it is and so it has been, as far as I can tell. What is our opinion on the matter? — NOS4A2

If Michels is right about the situation he's certainly wrong about the conclusion: "Thus the majority of human beings, in a condition of eternal tutelage, are predestined by tragic necessity to submit to the dominion of a small minority, and must be content to constitute the pedestal of an oligarchy."

Eternal tutelage and predistination and necessity -- these are the words of the masters. It's repeated so that the people who are at the bottom of the pedestal don't try to get to the top of the pedestal, or bring the pedestal down.

But the majority doesn't need to be content with this position, and have certainly toppled a few pedestals before.

That The Real Volcano essay in the book you linked was pretty great to read. I've been told I should read Whitehead before on the basis of things I've said, and this essay pretty much confirmed that advice.

I'm also happy to see the aesthetic nature of making a choice in metaphysics being expressed --

Harman’s difference from Whitehead,
and his creative contribution to Speculative Philosophy, consists in the ‘translation’ of
the deep problems of essence and change from one realm (that of relations) to another
(that of substances). These two realms, oddly enough, seem to be reversible into one
another—at least in an overall anti-correlationist framework. Given that ‘there is no
such thing as transport without transformation’, the only remaining question is what
sort of difference Harman’s transformation of ontology makes. I would suggest that the
contrast between Harman and Whitehead is basically a difference of style, or of aesthetics.
This means that my enjoyment of one of these thinkers’ approaches over the
other is finally a matter of taste, and is not subject to conceptual adjudication. And this
is appropriate, given that both thinkers privilege aesthetics over both ethics and epistemology.
Whitehead notoriously argues that ‘Beauty is a wider, and more fundamental,
notion than Truth’, and even that ‘the teleology of the Universe is directed to the
production of Beauty’.76 Harman, for his part, enigmatically suggests that, in a world of
substances withdrawn from all relations, ‘aesthetics becomes first philosophy’.77

Interesting stuff!

1) Can objects be understood without reference to human subjectivity? — schopenhauer1

No.

Next!

:D

I think the way you're phrasing the question makes it hard to answer though. "Understand" clearly invokes an understand-er. And usually we mean at least living things which have the capacity to understand. So the requirement of understanding the object necessitates some kind of subjectivity in the sense of an individual making choices about what to believe.

But do the objects exist without reference to human subjectivity? Yes!

Which objects, though? Oh no. Don't ask me. I can't tell. In the essay I found myself agreeing with Shaviro's exposition of Whitehead more -- I tend to think that there is an over-abundance of being, that being overflows our words, and even our conceptual distinctions like objects with their wholes and parts (a material dualism).

I've mentioned it before on the forums, but where my thinking is is in connecting the absurd to the real -- that the absurd shows how our concepts do not circumscribe all of reality, and so Kant was mistaken that all of reality coheres at all. In a backwards way, coming from the Kantian perspective, if the absurd is real then the entire project falls apart -- we can experience something which is not bounded by the categories, and therefore realism is true because there is more to reality than our conceptual apparatus.

2) Is it even wise to try to overlook the human aspect to all knowledge? Is this not only a fool's errand but somehow anti-human or is this just trying to take out a pernicious anthropomorphism that might lead to a more open field of exploration?

I'm not sure that they can, but I don't think that undermines knowledge of objects either.

Why the fear of "anthropomorphism"?

Wise or not wise, though -- I think it's interesting stuff.

The problem for philosophy, who use language as their primary tool, is that language is something self-referential, a Wittgensteinian language game or a Quinean web of belief. If Quine is correct and the distinction between the analytic and synthetic disappears, philosophy cannot differentiate itself from the natural sciences, where both discuss pragmatic synthetic generalities rather than logical analytic truths. — RussellA

*nodding along, petting his cat, evil-like* Yes, yeess, yeeessss!!! :D

Although I'd put it like this -- philosophy cannot differentiate itself from the natural sciences with the analytic/synthetic distinction. We can make other distinctions, though. Philosophy is very good at making distinctions -- so good at it that we can get lost in them and forget what it was they were originally posited for. I think analytic/synthetic behaves like that: for Kant the whole distinction was to point out the curious category of a priori synthetic knowledge, but somehow we get to analyticity as truth from meaning alone in the circuitous route from there to now.

I think philosophical axiology is what really differentiates philosophy from the other branches of The Liberal Arts and Sciences in this big-picture view of knowledge -- and in this big-picture view of knowledge, the university only defines a small portion of what is known. Philosophy doesn't need to be bound by problems. It creates its own problems. It's not even necessarily bound by the university. It created the university. And questioning the analytic/synthetic distinction is part of that creative spirit that questions not just the distinctions of others, but also its own distinctions.

I find it difficult to think of the brain as operating like a grammatic machine, and expressed as much in saying "Why neurons firing rather than concentrations of proteins of a certain kind or ratios of concentrations of the various chemicals interacting or blood flows ?" -- that what we choose as an I-language, even if we delimit our domain to the brain, will be over-determined by the E-language we already know. We'll only know to focus in on this or that bit of the brain if it happens to have a relationship to the meaning of the language we are investigating, and we'll only focus on the bits of the brain that we happen to be able to discriminate.

But that doesn't mean that I'm saying we aren't using our brains. It's just this the category of I-languages that's being disputed -- one may just want to say that things like logic and grammar are a part of the language we're all familiar with and have been using all along rather than some un-definite imagined possible brain architecture or pattern. In addition, I don't think I'd forgo grammar. Grammar and language are as real as beans and brains, in my view. (it's the theories about grammar and language that end up in the land of abstractions)




Math is always weird. Depends on how we set up analyticity probably?

The first thing to mention is that mathematics will be useful to us regardless of how we interpret it with respect to analyticity. So, on my view of analyticity, mathematics could count but I suppose the question is -- is there a non-trivial way to set up analyticity with respect to math?

It'd depend on how we want to dub a particular mathematical sentence to serve as an analytic example in comparison to our synthetic sentences. So we might want to say "For any constant A: "A = A" is analytic, and any instantiation of said sentence is synthetic, i.e. "1 = 1"" as a means to differentiating between individual mathematical sentences and sentences that are tautologously true within a mathematical system -- setting up a notion of "constant" to fulfill the same role as "Bachelor" and "unmarried man" in the bachelor example of analyticity.

:D

Are you so certain of your foundations that you'd put them in analogy to architecture?

Why not riverbed bottoms and hinges at the top?

This, for me at least, is probably why I'd favor the E-language over I-language expression of analyticity. I've been using the E-language for quite some time. The I-language, at least my understanding of it, is built upon my understanding of the E-language and my ability to use it. And, since we're dealing here with one another and not some individual phenomenological situation of problems and equipment and horizon, I'd certainly have to use the E-language in talking about analyticity even if there's some I-language foundationally at work in my use of E-language.

I'm starting to think that the E/I-language is to the side of analyticity, though I started out the other way at the beginning of this thread.

Maybe another way to put it --

Another meta-lingual category is rhyming. Time and rhyme rhyme, but that they do so is a convention of what rhyming is.

Rhyming focuses on sound synonymy. Analyticity focuses on meaning synonymy.

That some bits of language come out the same on the left and right hand side in terms of meaning is an accident in the same way rhyming is an accident -- it happens, but it's not philosophically interesting.

As the meaning of every word in language derives from convention, in what other way can a statement be analytic if not by convention. — RussellA

So far I've thought convention, as in stipulation, is the only way -- so it's trivial.

Though I'm not sure meaning is entirely conventional, either. At least not in the same way that analytic statements are. Here they are conventional because there's no criteria for deciding if a sentence is analytic other than to say "Here is the set of analytic statements"

When driving through a busy city, I don't have time to put all my thoughts into words taken from my E-language. Yet, I couldn't successfully navigate the streets and other traffic without being aware of complex concepts existing within my I-language,

Chomsky in New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind seemed to argue that not only are there complex concepts in the I-language but that they are also innate. I can understand primitive concepts being innate and complex concepts learnt but would agree that both are within our I-language.

If analyticity requires complex concepts, and complex concepts exist within the I-language, then analyticity can also exist within the I-language. — RussellA

How about like this -- if the only way we can express our I-language is through E-language, as we are doing in this thread, then what does "I-language" add?

It seems we're still stuck with E-language in determining analyticity, right?

I think the most sensical approach so far is simple concepts?

But I'd still prefer to just use English rather than simple concepts -- it seems like English is expressive enough to make sense of simple concepts and complex concepts. Maybe there's some I-language in there somewhere, but does it have anything to do with analyticity? Is "Red is a color" an analytic statement? Why is "color" considered simple, or "line" considered simple, when these are more like rarified bits of experience which require reflection and interpretation? Are necessity and contingency simples? How do we make non-arbitrary choices on basic concepts?


This is neat:

@RussellA would both eat the cake that all sentences are true by convention while keeping the cake that some sentences are true by the meaning of their terms. — Banno

If we accept that analytic statements are analytic on the basis of convention then we accept that they are, at the same time, not going to have anything philosophically interesting about them. That "A is A" isn't a truth for logicians, but a feature of a particular way of arranging language logic-wise.

As regards the statement "bachelors are unmarried men", it is not possible to know whether it is analytic or synthetic until first knowing the meanings of the words used, in the same way that it is not possible to know whether the statement "moja ndio si ndoa mwanadamu" is analytic or synthetic until knowing the meanings of the words used.

Therefore, the first task is to know what the words mean. — RussellA

We must know the meaning, of course. But do we build a meaning from the individual words? What are the tokens of meaning? Why not sentences? Why not gestures?

To know if P is analytic we must know not just P, not just the meanings of the words (think of bi-lingual dictionaries and how little they tell you) -- but we must know the language those words are in. Language allows us to interpret symbols, which is how we come to know meaning. And no sentence stands outside of context, even the ones we're using here. (It is a philosophical context, but still)

Let's just grant the I-language of simple concepts and what-have-you. Somehow this allows us to use an E-language. The examples of analytic statements aren't in terms of simple concepts, though -- they're in E-language. And it seems you agree there's an element of convention in the E-language.

Isn't analyticity on the side of E-language, rather than I-language?

I like you drawing out the conclusions -- and I agree with these conclusions. My feeble attempt with nonsense was to show how an E-language can give sense to nonsense, and make an analytic statement in spite of the nonsense.

Hopefully suggesting that sense-making, at least, isn't I-langauge dependent. If we can make sense of nonsense words with "not-adjective noun is un-adjectived noun" then the I-language must do something else other than "make sense of things" -- this is a total nonsense phrase but we can understand the temptation to call it analytic from the grammar of English.

EDIT: Which basically goes to agree withyour point here.

I cannot eat my cake and keep it, and that's not an analytic feature of language.

Yes -- analytic statements lose all their advantages in my interpretation of them. At least for anyone who wants them to be anything more than a convention. I think my interpretation acknowledges why I can understand others who claim P is an analytic statement, and deflates the reason why it is. (I was tempted to go into 7 + 5 = 12 -- but it just seemed too off topic)