• Moliere
    4.5k
    As long as they have 2 legs, I'd call them human. Featherless biped and all.
  • Banno
    24.2k
    ...

    There he is again.
  • Moliere
    4.5k
    The result of contradiction in classical logic is not just vague - it's quite literally anything.

    (p ^ ~p)⊃q. From a contradiction, anything goes. That is, if we allow contradiction then everything is both true and false, and we cannot explain anything. There are various systems of paraconsistent logic that accomodate or mitigate explosive results, so I won't rule out some form of dialectic, but I won't rule it in, either. (see what I did there...?)
    Banno

    :D

    Yeah.

    I got Marx so I gotta rule it in, in some sense at least, and figure that out. If possible.
  • Moliere
    4.5k
    There is a retrojective argument. For things to be crisply divided then they would have had to have been previously just an undifferentiated potential. A vagueness being the useful term.

    Our imaginations do find it hard to picture a vagueness. It is so abstract. It is beyond a nothingness and even beyond the pluripotential that we would call an everythingness. It is more ungraspable as a concept than infinity.

    Even Pierce only started to sketch out his logic of vagueness. That is why it excited me as an unfinished project I guess. One very relevant to anyone with an evolutionary and holist perspective on existence and being as open metaphysical questions.
    apokrisis

    I'm excited for your thoughts on the unfinished product. These are open metaphysical questions; I have no doubt on that. If you could do more than sketch out a logic of vagueness that'd be impressive, and I can see the connections to the perspective -- I think I'm less holist these days, but still on board with evolutionary perspectives.

    So the "leap" is : things are individuated, and they can only be so if they were an undifferentiated potential.

    Things are Individuated

    Therefore, things were an undifferentiated potential.

    How do you get to the PNC from there?
  • Banno
    24.2k
    We could do that again, but it's sunny... :wink:

    Those three puzzles are more of a problem for solipsism than idealism. But I think you think that idealism readily collapses into solipsism. Is that right?bert1

    Long ago, in a previous forum, there was a long debate concerning the chairs at the end of the universe...

    Another debate. What fun! How pleasing to have a forum that allows such things. Thanks, Busy, for setting this up; your time is appreciated. Thanks also to Landru, for agreeing to meet here.

    This topic comes from a thread that I started just last week, and which in that short time has boomed to over seven hundred posts. A hundred a day.

    As things stand I simply cannot give the time needed for such a thread. My reading was encumbered by the sheer speed of posting. My slow old head could not make the signal out from the noise.

    So I am pleased that one of the more erudite defenders of anti-realism has agreed to spend some time pondering my puzzlement, perhaps to help me understand what is going on here.

    To start, I will repeat the opening post from the thread mentioned above. It’s about a problem I have in understanding how ontological idealism avoids being solipsistic.

    So, apparently the idea is that a kettle is not a kettle, but is experiences-of-kettle. We might talk of kettles as if they are things, but the more sophisticated of us ought understand that what we call a kettle is no more than one’s experiences. Although we pretend that the thing is a kettle, one cannot separate the kettle from the self that is doing the experiencing. What there is, is the experience of kettle.

    What happens here is that the individual kettle dissipates, becoming instead a relation between experience and the self. The boiling kettle becomes my experience of the kettle, my experience of hot water; So the self becomes central to every such account. All I can know is the experience, never the really, really kettle. For all that I might infer or induce about the kettle, all there is, is my experiences.

    What bothers me is that having placed the experiences had by the self at the centre of the universe, how does one avoid there only being one’s self?

    What about you? There is my experience-of-you. If I am to be consistent in applying this ideal approach, what more is there of you than my experiences of you? That’s what you are. You become my experience of you.

    All I can know is the experience of the kettle. There is no kettle apart from these experiences. For all that I might infer or induce about the kettle, all there is, is my experiences.

    But if this is so, then surely all I can know is the experience of you. There is no you apart from these experiences. For all that I might infer or induce about you, all there is, is my experiences.

    Hence, if one is consistent, one must accept some form of solipsism.

    It will not do to claim that other people are also selves. One cannot experience the self of another, just as one cannot experience the “transcendent reality’ of a kettle. If one is entitled to induce that other people have a reality beyond one’s experience, one is also surly entitle to induce that kettles have a reality beyond experience. If one denies reality beyond experience, then one denies it for both people and kettles.

    So demanding a reality beyond experience for other people, but not for the objects of the world in which we find both them and ourselves embedded, would appear to be no more than special pleading.

    I hope, Landru, that you can help me with this. How does idealism avoid solipsism?
    — Banno

    But few here would remember @Landru Guide Us...
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    So the "leap" is : things are individuated, and they can only be so if they were an undifferentiated potential.Moliere

    It is not merely that they are individuated. Any particular thing would require some generalised dichotomy that allows it to be measurably this thing and not that thing.

    So where is this particular thing on the scale spanning the gamut from chance to necessity, discrete to continuous, part to whole, matter to form, local to global, integrated to differentiated, construction to constraint, and so forth. All the grounding dichotomies that made metaphysics the generalised reality-modelling logic that it is.

    In my discussions with fellow semioticians, a dichotomy of dichotomies emerged from this murk. The local~global and the vague~crisp.

    The local~global encapsulates the idea of hierarchical structure in a pretty strong mathematical way. But it is the synchronic view. The view of everything as it is organised right now. You then need the developmental trajectory point from the vague to the crisp to capture the diachronic view. How things started and where they end as their reciprocal limit.

    You can imagine the opposite also happening – the crisp dissolving back into the vague. That was Anaximander's model. But the Big Bang does argue for a one way symmetry-breaking arrow. Which makes sense if the vague~crisp is indeed the most fundamental level as existence is really a self-organising process of coming into being by becoming more locally~globally divided.

    It is what cosmology tells us. The Universe exists because it does just this. It begins in the radical vagueness of the Planckscale – what could loosely be called a quantum foam. And then it expands and cools, becoming more definitely divided against itself which each tick of the cosmic clock. It doubles and halves, doubles and halves as its global expanse keeps growing while its local contents keep thinning.

    So sure, the PNC can be applied to the particular individuated thing in the way classical logic likes to imagine. We can have one cow and then another cow, and indeed a modal infinity of cows. They seem to come ready-made as individuated. And each can be further individuated as substantial beings with any number of differentiated properties.

    This cow could be black and this other cow white. But a cow couldn't be black and white all over. Or this cow could be in my paddock or in your paddock. Just not – barring quantum superposition – in both at once.

    However I am talking at the level of universals. And what is a cow universalised? There we start moving into utterances that seem to have some vagueness about them. Or are generalised enough that we can see our working concept is suitably encompassing.

    Is a cow still a cow if it has no legs? Is a cow still a cow if it is a hot air balloon flown over a rock concert.

    What would it mean to have pinned down this vague~crisp axis of developmental or evolutionary ontology – metaphysics' diachronic vantage point – so as to make it a robust logical relation. The reciprocal or inverse relation that dialectics would suggest. A symmetry breaking taken to its opposing limits so that it indeed comes to be a fundamental asymmetry.

    Can one see the cow in the larval sponge? Well we can think we find the first hazy vestiges of a creature having a segmented backbone. A vague potential now sufficiently differentiated to begin producing a whole host of further differentiations – variations of the same new gene program – to produce complex vertebrate bodies like a cow.

    And can we see the crisp end outcome that factory farming puts on that continued differentiation – the further individuating of cow-substance into non-contradicting types? The kind of cow which one might start to order up in engineered fashion.

    "I want an A2 milker and not an A1 as those give people leaky guts. And you risk getting sued if you can't deliver exactly the type that was asked."

    Specificity becomes an open-ended possibility once a dialectical spectrum of choices has been set out in a suitably logical fashion. One that is indeed already able to support counterfactuality.

    Vagueness is then that which swallows all counterfactuality like a black hole. Creating the famous black hole information paradox.
  • Banno
    24.2k
    Your use of the Cake metaphor sounds like you think it's a bad (magical?) idea to try to have it both waysGnomon
    This was perhaps partially answered by the stuff about dialectic. My worry is that @Wayfarer argues for what he calls epistemic idealism when talking to me, yet a form of ontic idealism when talking to other folk. To his credit he's addressing the tension here between beliefs and world. There is perhaps little difference between what he says and what I say, apart from where we place the emphasis - he on the beliefs, but I on the reality.
  • bert1
    1.9k
    Thanks, I'm not sure if I read that debate with @Landru Guide Us or not, but your post makes your position clear. I think your position that idealism entails solipsism is very reasonable. I don't agree with it but I won't argue with it here. For myself, I am still undecided about idealism, I think it might be impoverished and insufficient to account for the world, but am not sure. What I would say is that every time you criticise idealism with arguments targeting solipsism, people like me @Michael and other idealist-sympathisers are going to keep popping up saying that you've mischaracterised idealism.

    Some folk here (perhaps @Wayfarer is an example) have an interest in and sympathy for religious/spiritual metaphysics. I wonder if that sometimes engenders an uncomfortable loyalty to ontological idealist metaphysics of a Berkeleyan stripe. If so, it needn't in my view. Just as realism does not entail physicalism, even though they too are natural partners.
  • bert1
    1.9k
    @apokrisis @Banno

    Apo's approach to bridging the is/ought gap and his approach to the hard problem of consciousness seem very similar if not the same. But I may have misunderstood. His response to me regarding the hard problem is to say that he has met his burden of showing what consciousness is in terms of making predictive models, and that the burden is now with me to show how that is wrong. And I think he has said similar to @Banno in this thread regarding the is/ought gap. However I don't see the theoretical bridge in either case.

    An interesting topic might be "Is the is/ought gap and the hard problem of consciousness essentially the same problem?"
  • Michael
    15.1k


    There are different kinds of idealisms. Subjective, objective, epistemological, and so on. You'll need to clarify exactly what kind of idealism you're talking about before you can argue its merits.
  • bert1
    1.9k
    Sure, but when @Banno criticises idealism, he is criticising one kind of idealism, namely solipsism. And he often doesn't say this. I'm not defending idealism in this thread - it's way off topic. It just came up in responses to @Wayfarer.
  • 180 Proof
    15k
    But few here would remember Landru Guide UsBanno
    An old sparring partner ... :smirk:
  • Tom Storm
    8.9k
    Some folk here (perhaps Wayfarer is an example) have an interest in and sympathy for religious/spiritual metaphysics. I wonder if that sometimes engenders an uncomfortable loyalty to ontological idealist metaphysics of a Berkeleyan stripe. If so, it needn't in my view. Just as realism does not entail physicalism, even though they too are natural partners.bert1

    From what I've read @Wayfarer takes care to separate his account of idealism from that of Berkeley.
  • bert1
    1.9k
    Probably. Sorry, I'm a bit careless
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    However I don't see the theoretical bridge in either case.bert1

    In general I argue for a metaphysical holism in opposition to a metaphysical atomism. But complexly, it is a holism that must recover an atomism within it as its own contrary or dialectical limit. It is thus a holism as understood in modern hierarchy theory, systems science and Peirce’s triadic semiotic logic. A holism bounded in terms of its modal dimensions of the vague-crisp and the local-global. A holism where substantial actuality emerges from the hylomorphic pincer movement of structural necessity acting on material possibility.

    So that is always the connecting thread. One finds every argument being polarised into two rival camps, two rival claims to truth. That is just how debates go. One must find a side and join it. Collectively the two sides use each other to drive themselves ever further apart. Those involved seem powerless to resist the logic of this dynamic. To arrive at agreement seems impossible because one must always pass first through some absolutising division. You joined one team and not its “other”. Intellectual peace becomes impossible. Indeed no one wants the game to end even though the disputes are long past being productive.

    But a larger view can see that this is a pattern that has its resolution. The dialectic is not resolved by its dissipation in some third thing of a synthesis exactly. It is instead resolved by becoming a division - a dynamic - that now can be seen to be basic and foundational over all scales of being. The division is how the system develops in general rather than being something which simply exists in a problem creating way. At any point in a world, you should be able to see that it is based on the fact that it is balanced between two complementary tendencies. What is actual is emergent from the mutuality of a reciprocal opposition, or the logic of a dichotomy.

    So an example would be our best model of a society or an ecology as a holistic state of order. At every point, at every level, we should find that the system is in that state of tension - of criticality - that is a balance between the actions of competition and cooperation. The society or ecology must always apparently be torn between these two opposing tendencies, these two teams they want to follow. But in being a polarity framed within a hierarchy, there is now a global equilibrium balance that can be struck. The system can have its optimising goal of balancing that fundamental tension, that fundamental dynamic, over all its scales.

    This is why the natural theory of well balanced societies is to see them as hierarchies of interest groups. They can collectively optimise as they can become as differentiated as they are integrated. If you want an association of pickleball players, then go for it. If that impinges on the paddleball fraternity, then constraints will be exerted. Competition forces cooperation and cooperation permits competition.

    So long as this is a fluid and emergent causal story, a system can seek its holistic equilibrium while also being composed of its atomistic interest groups that range from the most obscure to the most globally applicable.

    The problem thus is one finds stale debates that have folk trapped. They are locked into a dilemma and feel they must simply now assert one pole or its other as the only acceptable monistic choice. I can point the way out of this bind. But their own atomistic reasoning is what won’t let them free themselves.
  • Wayfarer
    21.8k
    I wonder if that sometimes engenders an uncomfortable loyalty to ontological idealist metaphysics of a Berkeleyan stripe.bert1

    Berkeley is an ingenious defender of idealism, but nominalism is his weak point. However nearly all the objections I read to him are no different in essence to Johnson’s 'kicking the stone' which in my view fail to come to terms with his arguments.

    I note that C S Pierce admired Berkeley particularly his arguments against materialism and his emphasis on the importance of perception and the mind. However, Peirce was critical of Berkeley’s nominalism. He saw value in Berkeley’s challenge to the materialist conception of reality, which aligns with his own semiotic and pragmatic views where meaning and understanding arise from signs and their interpretation.

    Peirce criticized Berkeley’s nominalism, the idea that universals are merely names without any real existence. Peirce, a classical realist, believed that general concepts and laws have a real existence independent of individual instances. He thought that Berkeley’s nominalism undermined the reality of general concepts, which Peirce saw as essential for a coherent theory of knowledge and science.

    Whenever I read Berkeley (the editions on Early Modern Texts are excellent) I’m impressed by his rhetorical ingenuity and subtlety. However too much of his argument is underpinned by reliance on God as a universal agent and his vague notion of ‘spirits’. He blurs the line between philosophy and faith. And due to his nominalism, he is unable to draw upon the repertoire of Platonist philosophy (as did Schopenhauer and Kant) in support of his views.

  • Banno
    24.2k
    Cheers. Might leave the idealism line where it is, unless it becomes salient. Except that I will point out that the argument above applies to ontic idealism generally, showing how it leads to solipsism.

    Both the is/ought and the hard problem are to do with intentionality, but though related they are not the very same issue. In both cases there is the aspect of our bringing about various states of affairs, including the way we see the world.
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    Peirce criticized Berkeley’s nominalism, the idea that universals are merely names without any real existence. Peirce, a classical realist, believed that general concepts and laws have a real existence independent of individual instances. He thought that Berkeley’s nominalism undermined the reality of general concepts, which Peirce saw as essential for a coherent theory of knowledge and science.Wayfarer

    I can't tell the difference between Wayfarer and ChatGTP anymore. :chin:

    But this is another way of talking about that holism vs atomism division which a logic of vagueness hoped to resolve. The generality of form must be matched by the vagueness of matter. In this sense, matter can be seen as effete mind. Or rather less tendentiously put, the least structured form of Being.
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    Both the is/ought and the hard problem are to do with intentionality,Banno

    I.e.: Finality. And the degree it can be both an epistemic assumption and an ontic commitment in our metaphysical schemes.
  • Banno
    24.2k
    A bit more on dialectic. A contradiction leads to explosion, as explained. Dialectic bases itself on contradiction, where "opposite sides" lead to a "speculative mode of cognition".

    I would like to place some emphasis on the second criticism I offered above, that " even if we supose that dialectic does not breach non-contradiction, the result is not clear."

    In Hegel the first moment, of "understanding", gives way to the instability of the second moment, the "negatively rational", and thence to the third moment, the "speculative" or "positively rational".

    But somewhat notoriously, what that third moment consist in remains quite undetermined. Just as from a contradiction, anything follows.

    This is close to Popper's criticism, that dialectic is unfalsifiable.

    In effect dialectic provides the opportunity to invent a just-so story in support of your preferred third moment, by choosing your first and second. But such a method can explain anything, and so ends in explaining nothing.

    Now this is a quite general criticism, and so needs to be explicated in some detail in particular cases, but more often than not it is possible to see in a writer's use of dialectic how they first reach their conclusion and then work backwards to the explanation using the dialectic. So in Hegel, The Prussian Court is the inevitable outcome of history, while for Marx, Communism is not so much deduced using dialectic, as justified.

    Similar things occur elsewhere.
  • Banno
    24.2k
    Like you I am not enamoured with a simple division into ontic and epistemic versions of idealism.
  • Wayfarer
    21.8k
    I can't tell the difference between Wayfarer and ChatGTP anymoreapokrisis

    I use it as a reference source.

    But this is another way of talking about that holism vs atomism division which a logic of vagueness hoped to resolve.apokrisis

    You have your way of carving up the territory, but it's not the only way, and it's more concerned with modelling and engineering.

    I am not enamoured with a simple division into ontic and epistemic versions of idealism.Banno

    And I can see why. It's a fluctuation between 'world' (ontic) and 'mind' (epistemic) - which is fundamental? My approach is like that of phenomenology - the world and mind are co-arising. My claim is that whatever we consider to be real has a subjective as well as objective grounding, but that the subjective tends to being ignored or neglected in the pursuit of objectivity.
  • Banno
    24.2k
    the world and mind are co-arisingWayfarer

    Ok, whereas I - and perhaps @apokrisis - take mind to arise within the world.
    ...whatever we consider to be real has a subjective as well as objective groundingWayfarer
    Do you see how this crosses from the epistemic to the ontic, in the way I tried to encapsulate using cake?
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    My approach is like that of phenomenology - the world and mind are co-arising.Wayfarer

    And the better way to carve up this territory is semiotic. The enactive or embodied self that is sometimes the cognitive science approach you cite. Hence why you persist in a way that causes confusion.

    In the semiotic story, the co-arising thing is the Umwelt. The view that has a self at the centre of its understood world.

    The mind of a babe starts out vague. Self and world are not yet strongly formed as suitably dichotomised poles of its being. But learning quickly follows. A strong or crisp self/world duality becomes the regularising habit. That is the way mindfulness as a generality arises. In a nervous system set up to learn from experience that there can be both a world and its intentional master.

    The conscious self is a construction that arises in the dialectical process that is a world-making.

    But this is the remaking of the world as the thing in itself into our felt psychological reality.

    And we know there is then also that world as a material reality as it stands in hard causal opposition to our intentions rather too often. Like when we kick a stone in fact.

    To deal with this recalcitrant aspect of the world, we then seek to tame it via further semiosis. We eventually get to a scientific point of view where we become the technological gods whose every intention becomes exceptionless law.

    We become not just selves but superbeings. Or just some kind of rebirth as supercharged and ill formed toddlers. Can’t decide which. :razz:
  • Janus
    16k
    But does he do so coherently? Not that I have seen.

    Ok, whereas I - and perhaps apokrisis - take mind to arise within the world.Banno

    Yes, there is no coherent way to render mind ontologically fundamental, since the notion has its roots only in our naively intuitive apprehension of our own experience. @Wayfarer claims he doesn't agree with Kastrup's "mind at large", which I would say is itself an incoherent idea, but he apparently cannot offer any coherent alternative. So, all he can do is vaguely gesture towards something he doesn't seem to want to give up, rather than being able to state a cogent position constituting an ontology.

    I really can't blame him for this because I don't think a cogent (consistent and compete) ontologically is possible.
  • Wayfarer
    21.8k
    ...whatever we consider to be real has a subjective as well as objective grounding
    — Wayfarer

    Do you see how this crosses from the epistemic to the ontic, in the way I tried to encapsulate using cake?
    Banno

    I do. But I also see that you have a pre-reflective world-model of 'self in world' - yourself as subject, in the domain of objects, other persons, and so on. For us, the world naturally divides itself along those lines. It is part of the mindset of modernity and of liberal individualism. (This is discusssed in detail in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, where the 'buffered self' refers to the modern understanding of the self as the autonomous individual, sole arbiter of value, separate and apart from the world. He contrasts that the kind of 'participatory knowing' which characterizes pre-modern identity in which the self-world division is not nearly so impermeable, where the subject participates in the (re)creation of the world through ritual.)

    The reason for my references to Buddhism, is that I look to it for a normative framework, one that is separate from the cultural mainstream (hence, counter-cultural) . As you introduced the subject of dialectic, Central Philosophy of Buddhism describes the 'madhyamika dialectic' of Mahāyāna Buddhism (and compares it with Western idealism for which it is criticized by later Buddhist scholars for euro-centricity.) But the over-arching perspective of that philosophy is non-dualism and a way of enacting it, a way of being in the world.

    Now I really don't want come across as one of the holier-than-thou 'western Buddhists', most of my existence has been suburban family man mode (now also a grand-parent). I'm entangled in the hindrances and have attained nothing by way of higher states. But that's the philosophy or 'way' that I am attempting to understand in some degree. At least it provides, as it were, a vantage point, and also, however remote, a sense of there being a destination.

    The conscious self is a construction that arises in the dialectical process that is a world-making.apokrisis

    :100:

    We become not just selves but superbeings.apokrisis

    Wasn't that Nietszche's answer? I never warmed to him.

    (I'm off to gym to spend an hour on the machines listening to a Chris Fuchs lecture on QBism.
  • Janus
    16k
    I'm entangled in the hindrancesand have attained nothing by way of higher states. But that's the philosophy or 'way' that I am attempting to understand in some degree. At least it provides, as it were, a vantage point, and also, however remote, a sense of there being a destination.Wayfarer

    Without actual renunciation such social entanglements are inevitable. And even with renunciation, complete disentanglement is not possible, because complete renunciation is impossible. If you attempt to understand Buddhism or any mystical way analytically you will fail they cannot be rendered as coherent and consistent philosophy, they can only be "lived' via faith. Philosophy itself ultimately consists in faith, not in knowledge or understanding in a scientific, mathematical or logical kind of sense.
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    In Hegel the first moment, of "understanding", gives way to the instability of the second moment, the "negatively rational", and thence to the third moment, the "speculative" or "positively rational".Banno

    A good job Peirce fixed Hegel’s stab at a systems story of logical development then. The dialectic became the semiotic. The tale of how dichotomies start from a position of mutualising advantage. It is then reasonable that they would continue to develop in being properly balanced.

    Other Enlightenment historians and political philosophers of course saw the necessity of exactly this self-organising logic. Social democracy emerged as a balancing of the “thesis and antithesis” which is the win-win story of a system able to equilbrate its contrasting tendencies towards competition and cooperation.

    Good politics is systems thinking in action. It just doesn’t get called that as such reasonableness seems simply commonsense.
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    The reason for my references to Buddhism, is that I look to it for a normative framework, one that is separate from the cultural mainstream (hence, counter-cultural) .Wayfarer

    I should remind you of Joanna Macy who drew the parallels between systems theory and dependent co-arising.

    https://www.amazon.com.au/Mutual-Causality-Buddhism-General-Systems/dp/0791406377
  • Moliere
    4.5k
    A bit more on dialectic. A contradiction leads to explosion, as explained. Dialectic bases itself on contradiction, where "opposite sides" lead to a "speculative mode of cognition".

    I would like to place some emphasis on the second criticism I offered above, that " even if we supose that dialectic does not breach non-contradiction, the result is not clear."

    In Hegel the first moment, of "understanding", gives way to the instability of the second moment, the "negatively rational", and thence to the third moment, the "speculative" or "positively rational".

    But somewhat notoriously, what that third moment consist in remains quite undetermined. Just as from a contradiction, anything follows.

    This is close to Popper's criticism, that dialectic is unfalsifiable.

    In effect dialectic provides the opportunity to invent a just-so story in support of your preferred third moment, by choosing your first and second. But such a method can explain anything, and so ends in explaining nothing.
    Banno

    This is nice to think against, and I had a thought this morning about just accepting the principle of explosion as an outcome, but one which is somehow bounded by informal rules of practice.

    At least, this is how I'd lay out Marx's dialectic, which I think I have a better handle on than Hegel's. The practice is the point so the dialectic continues on, but unlike with Hegel continuing on within the halls of philosopher's concepts forming the Prussian state and on upward towards human Freedom through this dialectic, Marx's dialectical pursuit of freedom occurs in collective practice which "bound" the contradiction from an arbitrary conclusion that the Principle of Explosion would allow. (at least, so the thought goes -- there may be disagreement later on, and the problem then is that there won't be any easy way to deliberate: the practices diverge and inform our ideas, and we diverge in practices so the ideas can be different, or you're not thinking dialectically enough :D )

    It may be that the dialectic is not so much an explanation, but as recognition of the collective. I think Hegel is similar there in his emphasis on the community coming to define the self. But with Hegel I believe his motivation is more along the lines of defending an Ideal of Humanity as an agent of Freedom, and through the dialectic of concepts progressing towards this humanistic vision of the future (which surely starts in the Prussian state ;) )

    Whereas with Marx Freedom is still the goal -- for all of humanity no less -- but the dialectic is historical.

    So one way I think of seperating Hegel from Marx is to say that their domains of evidence are different. For Hegel the domain of evidence are the classic philosophical corpus, Christianity, and the political movements of his time. For Marx the domain of evidence is the records, the balance sheets, the newspapers, the reports from the workers front, and so forth (which is why it can dovetail pretty nicely into modern historiographical methods), with the philosophical influence, of course, to provide the intellectual frame for understanding said evidence.

    Where I disagree with Popper is that something needs to be falsifiable in order to be valuable on pain that history is not falsifiable, and that this is the only way we understand how science works -- rather than a science of science we understand science contextually, by the records and practices of scientists and this knowledge is transmitted from one generation of scientists to the next even though it's not falsifiable.

    I'd hazard that what's being chased after in Hegel and Marx is simply different from what Popper wants.
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