Raymond Geuss - Philosophy and Real Politics
Raymond Geuss - Politics and the Imagination
Raymond Geuss - Outside Ethics

While well-intentioned, it misses the point to look only at 'secular Islamic states'. A more telling metric would be to look at Muslims populations generally, and note what Roy simply calls de facto secularization. Because I'm lazy, I'm going to recycle some notes for a presentation I made a while back about this:

"In fact, the reality of the social positions of many of the 1.2 Billion Muslims around the world is that they have been and are very much already working, eating, sleeping, living among secular nation states, and that secularity is compatible, simply by the virtue of that fact that it is what is happening all around the world. This is a sociological argument, one that looks at Islam as it is practiced, not a normative one that simply looks at the forms and shapes the arguments ‘for’ or ‘against’ secularization are.

... The role of Islam, the way it interacts with the West, with secularism, and with other cultures is not defined actually by its religiosity, but by politics and existing structures of culture and state. Secularism is established by political means, or, to put it another way, the principal agent in the establishment of secularism is the political order, not changes internal to the Islamic religion. We can look as well at the parallel experience of the Catholic Church – when it finally accepted the idea of a secular republic after the Second Vatican Council in 1965, it wasn’t because a commission of theologians spent hours pouring over and rereading biblical texts, but because the Vatican Council really had no choice in the matter – the council was a consequence of the changes already brought about by secularization and it had to respond in a positive manner, or dissolve as an irrelevant institution."

Or, here's an actual scholar of this stuff: "Until the contemporary period, secularization in Muslim countries had taken place routinely, with no tension between secular and religious authorities (except in Iran in the twentieth century, but precisely because Iran has a form of church that does not exist in the Sunni world). In western Europe, conversely, the very nature of power was shaped by that tension. In this sense, Islam never had a theocratic ideal, neither in terms of institutions (the clergy before Khomeini never demanded power) nor even in terms of law: the possible institution of sharia as state law does not in itself define an Islamic state, as all advocates of political Islam have said, from Saïd Qutb to Khomeini.

De facto secularization has also affected Muslim populations, but there has been a refusal to apply to Islam the basic principles of the sociology of religion, which is concerned with the concrete conduct of the believer. This sociology arose from the study of the Christian populations of Europe, and it showed how the changes in the conduct of believers (among other things, the phenomena of de-Christianization) had nothing to do with changes in dogma: the reasons religious observance declined in Beauce but remained constant in Rouergue had nothing to do with theological debate. The same thing is true of Islam: there is an entire realm and process of secularization that has nothing to do with changes in dogma." (Roy, Secularism Confronts Islam).

Every attempt to analyse Islam on the basis of theology and not in terms of sociology and politics is vacuous.

Bollocks. There needs to be an accomodation between Islam and the modern secular state. The fact that Islam finds it almost impossible to come to that accomodation is what is at issue. — Wayfarer

Haha, wow, yeah sure 'almost impossible'. Don't let the actually exisiting fact of hundreds of millions of Muslims living in relatively secular states get in the way of a good bit of fantasy hey? It's against this sort of unnuanced bullshit that i'm 'defending' against. I ought not to have bothered. With your shitty two line replies, its clear that you're entirely uninterested in any substantial debate. At this point, given your inability to offer up anything but assertion and the occasional rhetorical question, I think it is fair to call you out for the prejudiced shmuck that it turns out you are.

Except it isn't. Let me put it otherwise: there is no inherent articulation between Islam and the State, either positively or negatively. There neither is nor is not an inherent stance on state power in Islam, because the very discourse of the state is an entirely modern notion that is radically alien to classical Islamic tenents. You're comitting a category error.

This is not about a 'secular' vs. a 'religious' viewpoint, this is about doing religious sociology in a way that isn't half-baked and pays no attention to history or politics. If there's any irony here it's in your utterly-backward claim that the Ahok case demonstrates the rule rather than the exception, when in fact, the biggest reason the case has gotten so much worldwide attention is due precisely to it's exceptional character - the fact that these kinds of religious issues have not, up to now, loomed so large in the public sphere of Indonesian politics.

The one thing you are right about is that Islam does not really have a principle regarding the religious separation of power, but this is because the very idea of the state has simply been radically alien to Islamic discourse. Like I said, it wasn't even until the early 1900s that Islam even had to confront the apparatuses of state power, let alone have within it a set of principles to deal with it in either a positive or negative way. Literally, one could not talk about the very idea of an Islamic state up till about a hundred years ago, let alone consider it as some integral part of Islamic practice.

Further, if you've any historical sense at all, you'd know that the Islamic 'turn to the state' was brought about, ironically enough, by a raft of failures in Muslim majority secular states in the 70s, most prominently Iran, Egypt and Pakistan, egged on as well by the aftermath of the Six Day war in '67, which had the unfortunate effect of channelling what was Arab post-colonial nationalism into full blown religious revanchism. To spell this put as clear as I can for you: Islam was politicized due to multiple secular state failures that left Muslim societies economically and culturally disempowered, before which the very idea of 'political Islam' would have been a complete anachronism (check out Karen Armstrong's magisterial The Battle For God for a fantastic history of all this).

Long story short, you can quote scripture all you like, continue to ignore the complex political and historical factors which factor into the ever changing relation of Islam with the State and it's power (which, again, is an entirely modern issue), or you can continue to insist that the reality of Islam is somehow entirely divorced from it's, uh, reality, because somehow, the real world is not a good enough metric by which to understand the very phenomenon which you're talking about. As if the failure of Islam to measure up - or rather down - to the abysmally low bar you've set for it means that it's not the 'real thing'. Roy has some choice words for this kind of asininity as well:

"To show the modernity, and thus the deep historicity, of Islamist movements is interesting in terms of political sociology, but goes against the Islamists' own arguments. For them, there is only one Islam, that of the age of the Prophet, which has since lost its way, for modernity is loss. But this vision of Islam as possessing a single essence is not unique to the Islamists, since we find it both among traditionalist ulamas and among many Western Orientalists, who are in turn adopting Max Weber's reading of Islam: a culture, a civilization, a closed system. Islamist and Orientalist thinkers are in disagreement, of course, as to what constitutes the essence of Islam, but all speak in terms of a global, timeless system-a mirror effect that no doubt explains both the violence and the sterility of the polemics.".

Okay, but at stake here is this conceptually muddled idea of what is and is not 'intrinsic' to any religion - Islam or otherwise. My point, which is not empirical, is that it makes no sense to talk about the 'nature' of religion outside of it's social, historical and economic dimensions. That is literally all religion is, after all. The idea that there is some kind of eternal, Platonic 'essence' of any religion - in this case some kind of 'theocratic nature' - is simply analytically dubious in the extreme. Religion is made, enforced and lived by humans who do with it what they will, even if at the expense, and to the chagrin, of other humans.

Sure, it's 'unequivocal' is that a bunch of highly regarded Muslims found what Ahok said to be blasphemy. At some point I assume you want to make an argument - nowhere yet found - to do with Islam's 'intrinsic inability' to separate Church and State.

The first thing to note about this passage is that, at the level of the lived reality of millions of Muslims around the world, it is simply wrong. That is, Muslims live, daily and all over the world, in spaces in which the relation between faith and the state looks nothing like what the passage describes. This alone ought to radically put into question just how 'generally accepted' a 'fact' it is that 'there is no concept of "separation of 'Church' and State" in the Islamic faith'. At the level of 'actually existing Islam', the opposite is everywhere in evidence.

The second thing to note is just how anachronistic the terms of the passage are. The very idea of a specifically 'Islamic state' (not 'the' Islamic State, but a state-form organized according to Islamic principles) doesn't even date until some time in the early 1900s, and the political impetus to organize such state-forms don't even begin until the 1940s or so, in the context of de-colonialization: "The notion of an Islamic state is in fact a postcolonial innovation based on a European model of the state and a totalitarian view of law and public policy as instruments of social engineering by the ruling elites. Although the states that historically ruled over Muslims did seek Islamic legitimacy in a variety of ways, they were not claimed to be “Islamic states.” The proponents of a so-called Islamic state in the modern context seek to use the institutions and powers of the state, as constituted by European colonialism and continued after independence, to regulate individual behavior and social relations in ways selected by the ruling elites." (An-Na'im, Islam and the Secular State).

Moreover, serious organizational efforts to think of Islam in a state-centered context began in response to very concrete and very particular socio-historical pressures: "The Islamist movement has developed over half a century, beginning more or less in 1940... Indeed, as much from a sociological as from an intellectual point of view, these movements are products of the modern world. The militants are rarely mullahs; they are young products of the modern educational system, and those who are university educated tend to be more scientific than literary; they come from recently urbanized families or from the impoverished middle classes. Islamists consider Islam to be as much a religion as an "ideology," a neologism which they introduced and which remains anathema to the ulamas (the clerical scholars). They received their political education not in religious schools but on college and university campuses, where they rubbed shoulders with militant Marxists, whose concepts they often borrowed (in particular the idea of revolution) and injected with Quranic terminology (da'wa, designating preaching/propaganda).

... For them, taking control of the state will allow for the spread of Islam in a society corrupted by Western values and for a simultaneous appropriation of science and technology. They do not advocate a return to what existed before, as do fundamentalists in the strict sense of the word, but a reappropriation of society and modern technology based on politics." (Roy, The Failure of Political Islam).

In any case, there is simply no way to take seriously any source which would claim that "separation of religion and state is not an option for Muslims" - not only because it really, actually, in real life *is* an option, one exercised all the time - but also because there the practice of Islam is constantly being renegotiated in a way that no strict closure can ever be so pronounced.

Yeah fair enough.

But this topic is a about a pretty damn specific legal case in Indonesia. If one wants to move from that to a discussion of Islamic culture more generally, then some work will have to be done, certaintly more than what is provided in the OP.

I never said there is no Muslim culture, which I think is the phrase Andrew used. I said it'd be 'more correct' - by which I mean more analytically useful - to think about Muslim cultures in the plural. In this case, Islam in Indonesia has very particular political and social modulations, and that the Ahok case cannot be understood or exemplified outside of understanding what they are.

A poll of 600 US Muslims does not a representative sample of five hundred million make. And because Sharia is practised in plenty of non-theocratic places. Ever come across Muslims that prays 5 times a day? That's Sharia.

That wasn't your claim. Moreover, Sharia is simply Muslim jurisprudence: the exact articulation between that jurisprudence and the state is complex and contested. And this is to say nothing about the clear partisan hack site that is the 'Centre for Security Policy'.

Yes and?

Cite your claim.

Yeah, because your two rhetorical questions were in any way an adequate response to my post. Trust me, I replied in kind.

No because Islam is what is fucking practiced out there in the world you dolt.

It is a fact that Islam doesn't recognise the separation of Church and State — Wayfarer

Yeah, a 'fact" that, y'know, facts speak out against. As in, you are literally 100% wrong about this. Put it this way dude, there are literally more than half a billion Muslims in the world who live, eat, sleep, and breathe in largely secular nation-states. You are half a billion reasons wrong. 'Islam', like any other religion, is a human phenomenon - it does not exist in some pie-in-the-sky realm or live by the fantasies of some book: it is a diverse sociological entity subject to the forces of history, economy and culture, like anything else. But don't take my word for it, here is Roy, arguing against the utter naivety of anything who think 'Islam' can be in any way properly analysed outside of these factors:

"It strikes me as intellectually impudent and historically misguided to discuss the relationships between Islam and politics as if 'there were one Islam, timeless and eternal ... Not that I wish to deny fourteen centuries of remarkable permanence in dogma, religious practice, and world vision. But concrete political practices during that time have been numerous and complex, and Muslim societies have been sociologically diverse. We often forget as well that there is a broad range of opinion among Muslim intellectuals as to the correct political and social implications of the Quranic message. Western Orientalists, however, tend either to cut through the debate by deciding for the Muslims what the Quran means or to accept the point of view of a particular Islamic school while ignoring all others.

...To reduce all the problems of the contemporary Muslim world-from the legitimacy of existing states to the integration of immigrant workers-to the residual effects of Islamic culture seems to me tautological, in that by imposing the grid of a culturalist reading upon the modern Middle East, we end up seeing as reality whatever was predetermined by the grid, notably with regard to what I call the "Islamic political imagination," to be found in generic statements such as "In Islam, there is no separation between politics and religion." But it is never directly explanatory and in fact conceals all that is rupture and history: the importation of new types of states, the birth of new social classes, and the advent of contemporary ideologies." (Roy, The Failure of Political Islam).

Finally, even if you are granted the analytically broken idea that 'Islam' is an entity that functions in a complete vacuum of history and society, your 'generic statement', as Roy puts it, that there is no separation between politics and religion in Islam is entirely contestable not merely at the level of historical and sociological fact (where, y'know, Islam and the state have everywhere been separate, in all sorts of countries, in all sorts of times), but at the level of the 'religion' alone. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im for instance, has made exactly this argument in his Islam and the Secular State:

"Islam is the religion of human beings who believe in it, while the state signifies the continuity of institutions like the judiciary and administrative agencies. This view is fundamentally Islamic, because it insists on the religious neutrality of the state as a necessary condition for Muslims to comply with their religious obligations. Religious compliance must be completely voluntary according to personal pious intention (niyah), which is necessarily invalidated by coercive enforcement of those obligations. In fact, coercive enforcement promotes hypocrisy (nifaq), which is categorically and repeatedly condemned by the Quran .... Sharia principles by their nature and function defy any possibility of enforcement by the state, claiming to enforce Sharia principles as state law is a logical contradiction that cannot be rectified through repeated efforts under any conditions."

An-Na'im's takes the whole book to make the argument, and it is but one of course, and there are those who disagree with him. But he is not alone: "From a theoretical point of view, Ali Abd al-Raziq, for instance, conclusively demonstrated the validity of this premise from a traditional Islamic perspective more than eighty years ago... In the 1930s, Rashid Ridda strongly affirmed in al-Manar that Sharia cannot be codified as state law." This, coupled with "the fact that the state is a political and not a religious institution is the historical experience and current reality of Islamic societies" speaks overwhelmingly against any straightforward claim that "there is no separation of Church and State in Islam". At the very least, it is anything but something that can be claimed as some kind of incontestable 'fact'. Note too that I didn't say anything about you being wrong "on the grounds of prejudice and racism", but it's awfully curious that you find yourself forced yourself to use those words nonetheless, no?

The big French survey from a few years ago showed that millions of French people (mostly of North African descent) identify as Muslims but also as secular and non-observant. However, I think this backs up my basic point. — jamalrob

Interestingly, this tend continued in the recent French election. Olivier Roy - the single best commentator on these issues for more than two decades now - wrote a cool little piece recently showing that in fact, Muslims in France largely voted not along religious lines - unlike Catholics, who, by contrast, mostly voted Catholic. Importantly, the reasons have to do not with anything 'intrinsic to Islam' but are due to - as half-decent analysis would recognize - sociological reasons, owing to economic and cultural status. Here's the article: http://www.boundary2.org/2017/05/olivier-roy-french-elections-catholics-vote-catholic-muslims-vote-secular/

Incidentally, Roy's books are the best resources in trying to understand what the deal is when it comes to Islam and politics. Time and time again he has shown that political Islam is overwhelmingly a response to modern and local socio-political conditions, and that the specific shapes it has taken on - different in the many countries where it has appeared - have always been in response to the particular 'on the ground' conditions, as it were. Over and over again he has shown that trying to isolate a political stance or even a stance with respect to the state that is 'intrinsic to Islam' is not simply naive but dangerously so. He put it very nicely in the closing to his Secularism Confronts Islam: "The problem is not Islam but religion or, rather, the contemporary forms of the revival of religion."

So with respect to the question of 'Islamic culture', it'd be more correct to say that there are Islamic cultures, each of which is shaped locally and historically, and in response to the social and political forces at play in any one frame of analysis. The naivety of those who think they can talk about 'Islam' in the abstract - as if divorced form the historical and social conditions in which it is practised - is just insane to me. Yet it dominates the media discourse and if infects, like a virus, discussions like these.

Ugh, please. This is as much to do with Indonesian politics as it has to do with religion, and any analysis that calls this a 'textbook case' of how Islam 'intrinsically' doesn't respect the separation of Church and State is talking out of their butt. If anything, Indonesia has been a 'textbook case' of how Islam has not made itself overwhelmingly felt in the public sphere, and a testament to it's compatibility with democracy. This is almost everywhere widely recognized. This has recently begun to change however, because certain politicians - piggybacking off a worldwide tend toward the politicization of Islam - have been trying to stoke religious fervour in order to garner votes. The reason the Ahok case has been such a big deal - apart from the fact that Ahok himself was actually very popular and even tipped to become president himself one way - was that this has been a litmus test for just how successful that swing toward the religious hard-line has become.

It is telling that the decision is hardly uncontroversial, and that many Indonesians - alot of them Muslim - have been out in protest of the sentence. The issue is outrightly political too, insofar as Ahok has been a close ally of the current president, Jokowi, and the sentence is a political blow for him, and a victory for his opponents. Any analysis of the Ahok case that doesn't take into account Indonesian politics and sees it as a matter of what is 'intrinsic to Islam' is full of shit. Indonesia still remains the one the world's biggest secular democracies, and it's hard-line Islam is one among a myriad of political forces at work in the country. Trying to use this case to demonstrate that Islam - as if some abstract entity - has some 'intrinsic' inability to separate church and state is not only blind to the facts - that Indonesia has been, for quite some time, a model of exactly that - but also operates with a shitty religious sociology that thinks it can talk about it in the abstract without taking into account politics and social conditions. Textbook my ass.

'Unicorn' returns more hits than both combined.

Ergo, Unicorns are even more real than cultures.

I feel a rejoinder to Quine's 'On What Is' in the works.

Gattaca — Srap Tasmaner

I love this one so much. Her was also really, really lovely, to name a recentish one.

But it doesn't it seem, streetlight, that the term 'social construct' is tinged with a certain sense of arbitrariness? Even more than arbitrariness, actually, but downright maliciousness, especially when paired with typical hierarchical relations of power and domination that characterize almost every social and political configuration?

For sure, which is why you'll rarely find the term 'social construct' actually employed by anyone outside a kind of pejorative or highly qualified usage. Perhaps I can put the problem with the phrase this way: the idea that 'the social' constructs anything at all doesn't 'answer' the question of what something is/how something comes about - all it does is shift the answer one step back: what in turn, 'constructs the social' (this is what Darth, I think, was getting at)? In no postmodern-associated text I know (which is not to say all of them!) is 'the social' treated as an explanatory principle - in all cases would 'the social' itself - or at least it's workings - be something to be explained.

This is not to say the phrase can't be used productively, by the way. In fact, it's strongest associations are with the sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, who are anything but 'postmodernists', and their whole idea was to provide precisely a social theory by which to explain 'how society works'.

As for Said's Orientalism, it's been a while since I've read the work, but I don't recall him framing the issue as one of 'truth', so much as a question of discourse (his object of analysis was literature after all), and a quick skim through seems to confirm this. In fact, here's a nice passage from the introduction: "In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality. ...There were - and are - cultures and nations whose location is in the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the West. About that fact this study of Orientalism has very little to contribute, except to acknowledge it tacitly. But the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orient."

Would you agree with the idea that "post-modern" philosophy, in particular, has a bit of a beef with science and has more proponents of scientific skepticism or relativism than those who think science discovers the real?

Not really - not because I disagree, mind you, but simply because the actual engagement with the sciences, with a few exceptions, has been relatively sparse. That is, science just isn't spoken about all that much (philosophy, literature, art, and institutions are by far the majority of the objects of analysis). The overwhelming attitude, as far as I can tell, is simply indifference. And where it has been engaged, I think there's been both positive and negative characterizations, in ways that belie any generalization. This is definitely changing btw, and some of the most exciting philosophy in the last twenty years has taken place, for my money, at the exact intersection between science and much of the philosophy influenced by 'postmodernism'.

At any rate, phrases like "x is just a social construct" seem to be commonly found in post-modern thinkers and I wonder why that is or what exactly it means to be a social construct. Can a social construct itself be a social construct?

This is one of those phrases, which, while widely attributed to postmodernist philosophers, appears almost nowhere in any of the relevant texts. The problems with the phrase are numerous, but the most obvious one would be: why 'just'? Why would something being a social construct make it somehow 'less real' than anything else? Is society somehow irreal? Second and more importantly, the idea that 'society' could itself be some sort of totalizing force that could univocally 'construct' anything at all would be among the most suspect ideas that one could possibly conceive of, in a post-modernist context.

There is some truth to the constructivist emphasis which the phrase tries to capture I think, but on its own it's a completely blunt and philosophically unsophisticated notion that, as far as I know, is pretty much never uttered by anyone relevant to the discussion.

As usual, the first thing to point out is that 'postmodernism' does not designate any school of thought or philosophy, and refers rather to a particular historical and cultural period and aesthetic. The philosophers often called 'postmodernists' are those whose philosophies are seen to respond to, or theorize in the wake of, that milieu. Importantly, those responses are not in any way univocal (they differ from philosopher to philosopher), and moreover, neither are they entirely determined by that milieu (i.e. there are often concerns other than postmodernity alone that motivate their discussions).

As someone like Fred Jameson points out, a representative list of 'postmodernists' might include poets like John Ashbury, authors like Thomas Pynchon and artists like Andy Warhol, no less than the many philosophers who are often taken to fall under this banner. For my part, I think the concerns with both truth and 'obscure language' are rather overstated, and miss the forest for the trees. The former because there is no such thing as 'the postmodernist position on truth', the latter because it's mostly a triviality that doesn't merit extended discussion.

I propose we make this the new site banner



Gulag for anyone who disagrees.

I'm still somewhat curious as to what you have to say about my question about the set of all fundamental particles being able to account for all causal changes. Not that I would advocate for such a view, but past it being pragmatically and perhaps inconceivably difficult to measure, what are the rebuttals? — Marty

A few things, I guess: first, at the level of sheer instinctual/aesthetic response, I think it's an incredibly naive, even childish thesis (I mean this literally - as if the universe were one giant colorful ball pit). Second, what are the exact arguments in favor of it? It's the arguments which need to be evaluated and assessed, more so than the actual thesis itself. Third and most substantially, despite the apparent simplicity of the thesis, it's not even entirely clear what it would even mean to account for all causal changes in terms of 'the set of all fundamental particles'. In modeling a dynamic system, for instance, the fundamental parameters to take into account tend to be: (1) the set of attractors (roughly, the set of values toward or around which a system tends) and (2) the rates of change which define the dynamics of the system; (3) the 'tipping points' or critical thresholds which indicate when/where the system will undergo a phase transition (to become another 'kind' of system - the difference between a flourishing or dying ecosystem, for example). One can also add to this list rate-independent informational constraints for some systems, but that's another kettle of fish...

So the question becomes: what is the relation between these parameters and the 'set of all fundamental particles'? What here is doing the explanatory heavy-lifting, as it were? The parameters? The particles? Interactions between both? Including the environment in which these interactions take place? All of the above, depending on conditions? These are the kinds of questions that need to be asked and answered in order to assess whether it even makes sense to have "the set of all fundamental particles account for all causal changes." Personally, I'm not even convinced the thesis is coherent. Looking to something like processes of evolution (raised by the OP), for instance, I don't even know what it would mean to say that 'the set of all fundamental particles' explains evolutionary change - it wouldn't even be a 'wrong' thesis so much as a misuse of grammar.* So again, the important thing is not necessarily to 'rebut' the thesis, but to understand, at a minimum, weather it even in fact makes sense to begin with.

And I would totally recommend The Ontogeny of Information. It's one of those books I find myself going back to time and time again, and at a minimum, anyone interested in evolution ought to read.

Bonnie Honig - Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics
Colby Dickinson - Words Fail: Theology, Poetry, and the Challenge of Representation

Wendy Brown - States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity

But truth is only relevant in langauge games where truth is at stake: in Witty's example, "slab!", is neither true nor untrue: it is - in the game he has in mind anyway - a demand or an appeal (for a slab). "Slab!" is not 'about' the slab, it is a call to a certain kind of action. Of course, one can speak 'about' the slab, in a language-game in which truth is at stake, but - and this is the crucial point - this does not make it any less a language-game. Truth is a practice - it is what we say that is true or false.

Couldn't care less what people think. There's the consistency of the concept, that's it.

No, do the work yourself. Look up the the difference between interpretation and understanding employed by Wittgenstein, look up where he speaks of the distinction between agreements in definitions and agreements in judgements, look up the what it means to agree upon a 'form-of-life'. There's no understanding language games apart from this. Everyone here is speaking of 'context'; yet the important issue is the kind of context at work.

My butt is very learned. This thread is not.

Because some of what you say here is unrecognisable as having anything to do with Wittgenstein.

You should read the Investigations.

Have you read the Investigations?

Linda Zerilli - Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom

I think it's a waste of time to try and "do causality" with FOPL. — Pneumenon

Heh, you wouldn't catch me dead doing almost anything with FOPL, so I'm on board with you on this one.

In addition to grammar, one big problem is that everyday paradigmatic instances of causation that are readily visible to us fit the "billiard ball" image quite well: rock hits window, window breaks. How about evolutionary biology or something like that? A notion of causality derived from the former will break down when applied to the latter, as we've both observed in this thread. — Pneumenon

To follow through on this - along with your intuition that efficient causation is a 'heuristic' - I would put it that these 'readily visible' instances of causation are such precisely because they take place against a stable 'background' of no-less-causal factors that are bracketed out for the sake of our analysis. Aristotle's fourfold catalog of causality - formal, efficient, final and material - was meant to get precisely at this point: yes, the billiard ball hit the other billiard ball and 'causes' it to move, but causally significant too is say, the material integrity of the ball such that it doesn't shatter when hit, the tactile qualities of the table surface which enables the balls to move smoothly across it, the temperature of the room - not situated on the sun - so that the whole set-up doesn't simply melt.

Seen from this angle, there isn't anything that isn't causally significant in this scenario, and the point of analysis is to make a decision as to what factors we want to hold stable - what we want to background in order to bring out a foreground - such that we may make a conclusion about something or another. Hence the qualification of scientific experiments that results are always derived ceteris paribus - 'all other things held equal'. This 'holding stable of a background' is what Apo consistently calls an 'epistemic cut', and it marks our own imbrication in our objects of analysis. Susan Oyama, writing specifically in the context of evolutionary biology in fact (her question not being that of efficient causality per se, but on causality tout court), makes this point very nicely:

"To gain information we need to specify a context and a set of possibilities. It is in this sense that organisms generate information and it is in much the same sense that scientists do. Events do not carry already existing information about their effects from one place to the next, the way we used to think copies of objects had to travel to our minds for us to perceive them. They are given meaning by what they distinguish. Thus we find that a gene has different effects in different tissues and at different times, a stimulus calls out different responses, including no response, at different times or in different creatures, and an observation that is meaningless or anomalous at one stage of an investigation or to one person becomes definitive under other circumstances. A difference that makes a difference at one level of analysis, furthermore, may or may not make a difference at another." (The Ontogeny of Information, p. 185)

Importantly, this need to specify context does not mean that efficient causation is a mere (human?) heuristic; as Oyama notes, this selectivity is something that nature already does: "For coherent integration to be accomplished, an investigator must do by will and wit what the developing organism does by emerging nature: sort out levels and functions and keep sources, interactive effects, and processes straight." The affective capacities of 'natural' things already carry out a selection, as it were, of what are and are not causally significant, in a way that human analysis merely extends upon or harnesses for our own (scientific/investigative) reasons. We just happen to have a greater creative scope with respect to how we go about making those selections: devising apparatuses of experiment and observation, etc, in a way that natural organisms are not always able to do.

Oyama once more: "This is not to say that selection of variables must be random or that analysis is impossible. It is to suggest that guidance is more likely to come from the system under investigation than from some more abstract assumption about genetic or environmental influences. Fine investigators have always been guided by good intuitions about what their phenomenon is "paying attention" to ... Scientific talent is partially a knack for reading one's particular system productively."

There is never not a context, I grant you. There's also never not individual entities — Pneumenon

Agreed, but the point is rather that the specific phenomenon of efficient causality is what takes place precisely at the intersection or the meeting point between the two: efficient causality just is cause + system. It's not chicken or egg: it's chicken and egg, to mess up the metaphor. The temporarily involved is not linear but contemporaneous. Or, to paraphrase Kant, causes without conditions are impotent, conditions without causes are ineffectual. Perhaps part of the problem is grammatical, insofar as it's too easy to speak of 'cause' as an independent entity, whereas the formula ought to be, in set theoretic terms: efficient causality={cause, condition}.

he best swipe I have at it right now is to say that causation is a tension between those properties of a thing that (more or less) depend on its present context, and those properties of a thing that are (more or less) independent of its present context. — Pneumenon

I think I'd modify this a bit to recognize that there is never not a context to begin with, so that it's no longer a question of 'independence', but of what variety of context is in play. The term I prefer a bit better would be that of conditioning (insofar as one cannot separate a thing from it's conditions). Causality - or at least efficient causality - is always conditioned by the environment (or 'system') in which any causal event takes place: change the conditions, and the 'cause' might act entirely differently (to the point where it may not act to cause anything at all).

Perhaps another nice way to think about efficient causality is not as something inexorable (Cause A will always necessarily give rise to Effect B), but as a trigger that is effective only in the right conditions (so efficient causality can look inexorable when conditions are stable). Mario Bunge gives the example of an arrow released from a bow, which requires the interplay between both cause and process for any effect to take hold: "The act of releasing the bow is usually regarded as the cause of the arrow’s motion, or, better, of its acceleration; but the arrow will not start moving unless a certain amount of (potential elastic) energy has been previously stored in the bow by bending it; the cause (releasing the bow) triggers the process but does not determine it entirely. In general, efficient causes are effective solely to the extent to which they trigger, enhance, or dampen inner processes; in short, extrinsic (efficient) causes act, so to say, by riding on inner processes." (Causality and Modern Science, p. 195).

I think once you start thinking of causes as embedded in larger contexts, systems, or processes which in turn condition efficient causality, you can start to rethink alot of the ways in which classical problems of causality are generally posed. For example, questions around infinite 'causal chains' (and the 'free will' vs. 'determinism' baggage that it carries in it's wake) can come to be seen as particularly naive, insofar as it no longer becomes an issue of unbreakable 'chains' of causality but the complex interplay of processes and causes which can overlap, interfere, condition and change one other (causality becomes 3D instead of 2D, or even multi-dimensional across different scales). The point would not be to 'dismiss' efficient causality - as if one could ever do so - but to instead situate its instances and recognize the contingencies and necessities which always condition it's operation.