tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8708273719674528189.post7831199282036745080..comments2024-03-22T00:20:38.510-07:00Comments on Adam Riggio writes: Necessary Structure and Contingent Success, A History Boy, 06/08/2013Adam Riggiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14606510835439580828noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8708273719674528189.post-69574191770373228832013-08-06T17:21:45.258-07:002013-08-06T17:21:45.258-07:00I don't know that an Occam's Razor princip...I don't know that an Occam's Razor principle would quite apply to a Hegelian way of viewing history. Over the past few years, I've come to be very suspicious of any epistemic approach that would validate simplicity. Comprehensiveness, cleanliness, order — maybe. But not simplicity.<br /><br />It's a bit of a platitude among my people today, but it's worth saying: the universe is vast and complicated, and sometimes impossible things happen. They're only impossible insofar as we consider them impossible, unanticipated in the stock of concepts and interpretive frameworks we've come to accept. When we are surprised, we must change, and that change is usually in the direction of greater complexity of our knowledge. The problem with Occam's Razor is that its most common users don't realize that the universe is naturally very hirsute.Adam Riggiohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14606510835439580828noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8708273719674528189.post-89940399953210762612013-08-06T16:38:48.958-07:002013-08-06T16:38:48.958-07:00Ah, understood. So the historical dialectical proc...Ah, understood. So the historical dialectical process he traces is for him metonymically the very structure of logic. I can see how this irks you!<br /><br />I would be interested then to see where he places more traditional logical axioms in his configuring of things that humans have achieved. The law of noncontradiction to continue with my earlier example is in tension with dialectical negating if you think of both as axiomatic and structural conditions of understanding. I guess there are reconcilable on some level. And Occam's Razor would be reconcilable with the synthetic outcome? Or not? Hm. Quite a febrile mind.Tom Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04942888225118081569noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8708273719674528189.post-73008564281201785322013-08-06T16:06:32.489-07:002013-08-06T16:06:32.489-07:00See, Hegel's logic is much more specific in it...See, Hegel's logic is much more specific in its structure than orthodox logic per se. The logic of Hegel is plotted step by step in his book Logic: a series of steps beginning with a simple concept of existence (the concept of 'is') and proceeding through a long series of negations (the first step being the concept of 'is not') until the process reaches its highest possible form in a perfectly reconciled concept that unifies subjective and objective, universal and particular. Adam Riggiohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14606510835439580828noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8708273719674528189.post-37443371917449749722013-08-06T13:47:53.719-07:002013-08-06T13:47:53.719-07:00I suppose a Hegelian would say, show me the other ...I suppose a Hegelian would say, show me the other form of reasoning, the one that does not share the few rules Hegel posits as necessary for the ideal manifestation of reasoning, and show me a community that has used it to some efficacy. I'm reluctant to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The baby being logical reasoning as a most-perfected form of communicative exchange, and the bathwater being imperfect human manifestations of same. As you know I'm highly sympathetic to your criticisms of disciplinary philosophy but I'm not convinced that the baseline of what Hegel posited as the best and truest form of reasoning is so easily countered by creative thought. It seems to me that creativity is a powerful tool for revealing category mistakes, pernicious assumptions and the like, which you do to great effect in this blog, but I would have to be convinced that this cuts more deeply than being (as I see it) a corrective back to the ideal. <br /><br />I realize of course this puts me in a conservative camp and in an unfashionable way, but I do wonder what really fundamental logical propositions can really be rejected without bringing down the edifice of shared scientific knowledge. The law of noncontradiction for example can be twisted and played with to great effect, as pretty much every sage, wise man and prophet of human history has done, but can this really undermine noncontradiction as a necessary law in logical reasoning? Maybe the ideal is so far from being manifested that this doesn't matter and is not historically ascertainable anyway, but surely there has been a lot of productive acts of communication among, say, engineers building a bridge that simply cannot be achieved without those rules tacitly in place.<br /><br />Obviously, there are other forms of human understanding and communication which are due respect, but I don't see such alternative forms as really challenging Hegel's historical idealism on its own terms as a means of generated empirically verifiable truths with a minimal of auxiliary assumptions/ cultural structures in place. Tom Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04942888225118081569noreply@blogger.com