Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Kaufman: liberals, not Marxists, are the drivers of woke. NCF lecture." video.

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  2.  @Pinkdam  I don't think I know that book many thanks I'll check it out. I've written several attempted responses to your "two of them makes three opinions". I'm trying to use the early 20th century debate between F.H. Bradley and Bertrand Russell on the reality of relations. They took this as the key question separating realism from idealism, or here liberalism verses Social Justice. Non of my responses coming from this debate so far are adequate and so I wont post yet. I started using this kind of approach on a Novara Media discussion on the debate on the Kings speech. But it needs much work. (Tenuously then i can just note; One example that came up from me was like you can't build houses where there are no utilities but you won't have utilities going to places with no houses. The philosophy of relations (internal and external ) shows up something interesting here a house cut off and on its own cannot exist and utility relations require houses to go too. We also have the power source and water source. We can ask then for a house and power source are the connecting relations also a thing: a third thing. Its similar to the problem of housing on "private roads" who pays for the upkeep of the road. how could any up keep work, each looks after the road outside their property or they forma collective to do the whole road. ie is the road then an aggregate of lots of peopels bit of induvial privately owned and reasonable road, or is it a collective issue addressed as whole by a "third thing" a committee. There is a third thing for the "atomised road" too that is its one road, it it being one road an additional fact to its privately owned atoms. This then cuts into the issue in terms of metaphysical continuity and discontinuity. its more weird than that though since the person at number one house only uses the first bit of road themselves but all other house owners use this first bit and so. Its not just an abstract problem the Thirty Years Bagan over such issues concerning shared river use.) At the moment my work on Bradley/Russell creates more confusion than it clears. I intend to try and address Kaufman's lecture using this sort of thing if possible, but its not going that well at the moment.
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  3. Here are some of my notes in case of interest. (Its an interesting point: A person A has an opinion on an fact S, and another person B has an opinion on a fact S. A liberal might imagine A's opinion on S, is wholly independent of B's opinion on S. That though means: for A, B's opinion on S is just a fact along side S, and For B, A's opinion on S is just a fact along side S. This shows certain subjective solipsistic idealism is in play. The A world contains only facts S and B and B's opinion of S. The B world contains only facts like S A and A's opinion on S. Now the classic critique is that A's S cannot be shown or established to be the same S as B's S. ergo The Relation: "The same S" in that statement is problematic. We might opt then for a realism that S is the real independent fact, and there is then A's opinion of S and B's opinion of S. This forces the opinions As and Bs to be absolutely independent of each other but that they absolutely agree there is the same S for both of them, they agree on the existence of S, its reference, but absolutely disagree on what kind of thing or properties S has. The problem is then the real S would have to be either independent of all its kinds and properties, or have kinds and propertesi I don't think i know that book. Many thanks. I'm having a go at approaching the liberalism/woke(Social Justice) debate from the view that both are idealist or at least both organise the world in opposite but similar ways. I'm going to draw on the early 20th century philosophy debate between F.H. Bradley and Bertrand Russell. Bradley took the view that these kinds of dialectic oppositions are best seen though the problem of Relations or liberal individualism has to establish absolute internal relations for a thing, and the social justice has to establish absolute external relations for things. The liberalisms claim to individual facts has to be a kind of subjective idealism ie for any liberal all other liberals and their view are like facts like any other fact. The Social Justice on the other hand has to assume a view of the whole and that everything in that whole is wholly related to everything else. The later can be classed as idealist just because objects are so only externally related, there is nothing left of the objects at all. Maybe we might claim a bare reference pointing or a unique number for the object and everything else is external relations eg kind and property are all relations. So for example any endowment or property are always seen in relations with others eg of the same kind or not of the same kind. and then how the kinds relate. In a way Social justice is a system of differences in kinds ie relations and about transfer of property from one to the other. The former liberal position as asserting the individual has the claim internal relations for that to be an individual. On the one hand this might be said to mean a pluralism as opposed to the social justice "monism" but really its a subjective idealism of one individual in which their view is the whole world. Social Justice then would be absolute idealism. Thus while they differ on the roles of relations, both are idealist. If a person A has an opinion on a fact S "S is P", and another person B has an opinion on a fact S: "S is Q", we are quickly forced into the question whether as well as fact Person A and a fact Person B , is there is an additional fact "Person A "and" Person B. That is whether B is just and only a fact for A, and A is just and only a fact for B. Or there is A's opinion of S and B's opinion of S and just the fact S. Both views require some third thing of relation eg A and B are not mutually reducible to each other meaning there is a problematic transcendent fact or relation "A related to B" as a fact. I don't think I know that book many thanks I'll check it out. I've written several attempted responses to your "two of them makes three opinions". I'm trying to use the early 20th century debate between F.H. Bradley and Bertrand Russell on the reality of relations. They took this as the key question separating realism from idealism, or here liberalism verses Social Justice. Non of my responses coming from this debate so far are adequate and so I wont post yet. I started using this kind of approach on a Novara Media discussion on the debate on the Kings speech. One example that came up from me was like you can't build houses where there are no utilities but you won't have utilities going to places with no houses. The philosophy of relations (internal and external ) shows up something interesting here a house cut off and on its own cannot exist and utility relations require houses to go too. We also have the power source and water source. We can ask then for a house and power source are the connecting relations also a thing...
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  4. One of the claims made of Bradley by Stewart Candlish "The Russell/Bradley Disput." but not so much in David Pears "Bertrand Russell and the British Tradition in Philosophy", is that facts are to be understood in relations of justification and judgement. that would be for both liberalism and social Justice but I think with or "in" very different logical spaces of justification. what is: 1. seen exclusively by liberals as belonging to individual essences (internal relations) and then accidental properties (external relations), and reasons, is 2. seen as all in terms of external relations in the Social whole. We have then two idealist positions here, both of which seem untenable on their own. Bradley calls them contradictory. His Critique i hope to use to show the difference between two ways of thinking Categories here as the subjects immediate context with immediate local relations verses, Categories as understood as the actions of an administration of the whole. In the long philosophical tradition its Aristotle verses a Categories functions Platonism. Two very different notions of fact/justification and action/legitimacy and "two concepts of responsibility" emerge here with very different spaces of freedom and modes of action. Methodologically, since we are 100 years on from this debate and much has changed, its not clear where to begin, ie with what are the terms of the problem and contradiction and what are the terms and moves of an escape from the terms driving the contradictions.
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  7. Part A1: OK So I'm on the case of interpreting the Bradley/Russell debate. The background for this here and Kaufman's approach w.r.t. social science and population statistics is that statistical data can pair together two data sets for correlations and although they cant help themselves to claim one "causes" the other, they can with a pragmatic approach claim a statistical correlation, and that means they can then take many such correlational (not association) pairings and then apply a Bayesian if..then. inference (not anticipation), or with data a Bayesian algorithm and talk about probability of outcomes for a logically consequent set under a antecedent set. This approach brings together early work from Frege on one to one set pairings with the interpretations of probability that followed Frank Ramsey's views. Bayes allows a rational that can take many correlation together and make a general probability or metadata meta sets "synthesis". Pragmatism then allows for rationality of probability of an outcome given the antecedent data. then they can talk about risk and so attach a probability of utility and make a normative claim. But what they do is subtlety switch from using the word probability which is a terms for empirical outcomes (between 0 and 1 for a relation between two a time slice or dedicand cuts), to using the modal or metaphysical terms possibility. But possibility sits with the terms necessity and actuality, and these frame 0-1 probability assignments. But the following the Post modern Marxist Deleuze: while we can acknowledge various probabilities within a fixed possibility necessity and actuality frame, we can also make sense of radical changes in probabilities will open up for an affordance or praxis to shift the modalities framed space. that is in the old terms radical empirical difference will create a shift in the modal frame. ie what was outside of modal possibility at some time "t", because it would be thought violate the necessity condition for wff datasets, can become inside as a probability assigned within a new frame of possibility and necessity at time "t+1". The distinction then between modal categorical metaphysical terms, and the empirical probabilities cannot be the radical distinction the rationalist would have claimed in the 19th century. (This I developed from long debates in the 2000's with Deleuzians over his 1968 book "Difference and Repetition") So there appears rational for collapsing and equivocating the term probability and possibility. So for example to say "the probability of a change in possibility..." would have been a kind of contradiction of terms, can now appear to make sense when we think more about time and radical change in frames. But the equivocations do not end there for they now subtley switch from using “possibility” to “potentiality”. This is a very different term for potentiality implies now not just a fixed frame but one bounded and determined by a fixed end. It surreptitiously now claims against Deleuze that the whole probability space is tendentious to one particular teleological outcome. But worse still they then anthropomorphise this as if it’s an intention even a plan an aim. They can then wrongly attribute this by an imposition of the end to a “social or group aim” and individual aims and intentions. Because of a lack of philosophical reflection in serious and popular science talk in the media, we don’t notice this and definitions of word alone, make this equivocation even harder to see. The term potentiality is Aristotelian and sits with actuality (as the aim or end or telos), and is a depiction of nature that includes purpose and end and we might say intention in the picture. So the slide from probability to possibility to potentiality is serious if subtle for most people shift. The focus on language here is from Peter Geach, but attention of equivocations and ambiguity is from Kant originally.
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  8. Part A2: Now what is happening is the general equivocation of intentional terms like anticipation and expectation and purpose, with scientific terms and structure like set to set correlations. There used to be much criticism of this in terms of the inability to cite causal laws between data sets and to scientifically penetrate into poles minds and intentions. Now of course by assigning risk utilities to potentialities they don’t need to talk about case or intention just risk and pragmatic policy. And just surreptitiously switch to responsibility. Now in the McDowell lecture “Can cognitive science determine epistemology?” McDowell suggests a similar sliding or equivocation in which a human comprehension in experience would have to be bounded by the cognitive linguistic psychology approach in a similar way with data sets. But now for an agent an intuition and experience at a time and place, from a point of view, could be no more than a complex of linguistic items that have their content from mass data sets and their application or use as if imposing limit to experience in just these terms. In this they suppose or impose on the human mind and impose their view of human experience as if its is structured modally and empirically like the academic medical industrial systems and structures of empirical psychology and its laboratory’s and architecture. They set up the architecture of a lab and the frames for wff data sets and then say this is what our minds and experience is like. Then they just make the same moves as I outlined above with social science to get to potentiality aim and impose intention and limit where there is non.
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  9. Part A3: Now in the McDowell/ Pippin debate McDowell argues from the Kant claim “that the unity in the judgement is the same unity in the object” this though equivocates between categorical unity in “representation” (now translated from Kant away from “representation to “Presentation” Pluhar), with the original intuition of an object or within an object in our practical lives. Indeed even Frege made a claim like this that the object is an original unity. This is then an excess of a special sort to the categorical unity of the object. Here the synthetic unity through the categories (eg modal actuality possibility and necessity) is a parasitic unity that requires an original intuition or is the nature of an intuition. That is “representation/presentation” begins with a kind of prior organic unity that Cognition and representation then break up and re-synthesise. But the analysis- synthesis method surreptitiously leads us to think the object is just the product of synthesis ie activity and so as if there is no experiential value to intuition other than that via synthesis. Ie Intuition is neither prior or excess to Categorical architecture. In fact the problem is the reverse, ie not how to get to the object via activity all the way down, but what is the relation we have to an object as an original whole with respect to the kind of analysis –synthesis Critiqueal method. These are questions now in Kant between the nouminal object and phenomenal object like: “are these two different objects?” and so on. How can we cognise that which is outside or prior to cognition. My view is the original object is not an excess of the object in cognition but it is rather split up “abstracted” into separate sets or function and then a recombination of those abstract sets or functions. In modern terms from Russell there appear two different notions of reference here different notions of meaning and concepts. For me the type of reference via categories is secondary and derivative and uses concepts as functions and sets as if existing as activity in a intuition or government apparatus.(Bernard Williams on government house morality in “Ethic and limits of philosophy”). It means among other things: those working from institutions with data and terms or concepts and definitions via science and law impose on our language use and life as if we are working, our activity in the world in life is like that of an institution and its relation to the world via acquisition of statistical knowledge data and action with it through policy. Its again a kind of equivocation or conflation. Indeed they talk about the “institution of the family” and describe an agent as if they are like a miniature company or miniature regulative institution. The final reverse equivocation then is when they talk of “the family of man”. The first move is a extreme reduction and silencing of ordinary experience and its warrant or justification while the latter is just an imposition, a bad metaphor, that ignores all structure and meaning difference that’s make them incongruent. This then is how the question of bias must be addressed, there are two different notions of bias in play that we need to separate but also relate as opposed to equivocate.
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  11. Part B1 (A1previously) Up to 17:00 mins (in previous post) you need to get a better grip on the debate between F. H. Bradley and Bertrand Russell from late 19th to early 20th century. So I think the key to this debate is that Bradley holds that "a judgement" or in logic just "judgement" is an act, that is, a verb: a doing word. This he expresses as a position on judgement from just the point of view of logic as being that the parts of the "judgement", must be "internally related". That can be said to mean the "parts" of a "judgement" are not radically distinct terms. In an older view it can mean that for any object there are properties that are essential. So a name has certain properties necessarily, such that certain predicates are not really substitutional or eliminable. I think then an apparent logical operator, like negation, cannot really be said to cover all possible predicates. (note Bradley view the judgement as a name with an idea or sometimes as two ideas put together, or joined). This means in modern terminology that the whole judgement is not bounded or determinable w.r.t negation. Bradley then sees the logical depiction of "judgement" as too liberal to the point where there would be so much substitution and negation of predicates that the "thing" the object would really cease to be, or would be a mere empty symbol signifying an absence. It look like a version of the old essence and accident distinction from Aristotle, but Bradley here is addressing limits on logical substitutivity, using the expression that some parts of a "judgement" are internally related. This leads him to claim "the unity thought in the judgement is the same unity in the object". My view is then he is thinking and expressing with "relation" the logical or formal structure of judgment needs structure here, expressed in terms of internal relations, and this creates a place w.r.t. logic form for the notion that "judgement" is better thought of as "a judgement" something some does with respect to experience. It is now a short step, we could make say as a further revealing of more internal relations to the form of judgment, that judgement involves something like agency, authorship, responsibility. Once that is granted then we would move by revealing more internal relations, that judgement requires the judger to exist, and then what other things might follow as what we might call an unfolding wider view of what makes a judgment possible, its conditions of possibility. Today we would add things like reasons for the judgement justification and legitimacy. This revealing of the conditions that make possible persons capacity and capability of judgment, places judging then as apparently conditioned by a wider structure and its goings on. But now that means if these are properly speaking internally related to a judgement, then effecting aspects of the whole architecture that judgement necessarily sits in will effect or even reduce the power of the judgement. This is to acknowledge a much wider substantive limiting condition than we would have in say 20th century epistemology. Although recent Critical work on epistemology seems to have moved in this direction of such recognition eg feminist and post colonial epistemologies to add to virtue epistemology and capacity epistemology. But once we move beyond logical form and simple epistemology as just an a add on to it, what are revealed as conditions of being able to judge, become sites for a Critique of the content of a judgment. So if we say food and shelter are prior conditions for judging, then if someone is without food and shelter, then their judgement lacks proper conditions, and so can be just ignored, rejected outright as opposed to actually arguing against it. These days it is more common to find issues of bias in judgement in terms of the judger’s gender race and ethnicity or even social status and wealth and authority. For example back in the day authority and status did much of the work in warranting a judgement, but now high status and authority seems to imply bias itself e.g. “the elites”.
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  12. Part B2: (previously Part A2 in other post at Podcast of lutus eaters) ) : Russell’s view of judgement in logic was deeply empirical in content, but his theory of names and predication as formal like an algebraic equation (from Frege) meant an unlimited substitutability of the parts of judgements. The key thing for Russell was the analysis was limited only by the judgment expressing a sense ie something true or false in the states of affairs in the world as known. This makes what is called “judgement” more a matter of checking substitutable parts of a judgement make possible sense as true or false. Explicating “Judgement” turns away from the object judged and the judger and towards exchanges and substations and the structure of Language or meaning as also revealed in this way. Indeed Russell ended up talking not about judgement at all but the proposition ie a proposal before looking at the object. Over the 20th century more and more structure was revealed within the proposition, sometimes expressed as adjacent areas of logic like modal logic involving time and propositional connections of necessity or sometimes as metaphysical. Whereas the Critical tradition of epistemology raised sceptical problems of “the given”, problems of the fit of epistemological content into the logical form were forgotten ie the relations internal to logic and relations of justification in epistemology are seen as spreadable and independent issues eg externally related. I think Bradleys motivation then is not just his critique of empiricism, but a Critique of the kind of unlimited substitutability of content in form, and so the separablity or externality of empirical content, words or Bradley refers to “ideas”. The radically different approaches create very different discussions around the justification and the Critique of judgement. As the man said the 20th century was to belong to Russell. One can’t help but think that Russell’s is an odd critical response to Hegelianism because while his theory of judgement is very attached to abstraction and substation, it too like Hegel would be the appropriate logic for the State to come and then for that State to operates though machines like computers with people. I don’t know if Russell missed Frege who also thought the object came as an original “whole” like Bradley. For Bradley the role of substitutable ideas projects too wide an mechanically from the object judged, while the lack of any internal relations in the judgement permits so much freedom of substation that the object disappears leaving a symbol in the judgement only. While Russell, the libertarian socialist but critical though of the Socialist State, ends up with a substitutional liberalism that will cohere with the mechanical aspects of post structuralism that will becomes the new logic of the state. So when people, following Russell and post structuralism reason about the world, much of what this involves is not judgement but substitutions. I imagine it does not feel like an act of responsibility to the object judged, rather like an act of moving pieces around a chess board or playing scrabble. Indeed try this at home: compare looking at an object and judging something about it, with having a number of words on a table and then arranging them in some way to depict the object. They are really asymmetric activities or oppositely directed. Bradley begins with the object as a whole seeking to make a judgement, while Russell begins with a “list” of words (Bradley’s view of Russell’s “ideas”) a ledger if you like and sees which arrangement to use for the depiction. I think these represent very different intentional relations, ironically the one beginning with the object wrings out more responsibility than the one beginning with the words. Why might that be.
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  13. Part B3: (previously my Part A3 for Pc o LE3 )Part A3: In politics the need for quick fire responses and the need to try and make some new relations or show an existing relation of connection, along with trying to disassemble others, favours substitutional technique a mechanical activity with already made existing judgements and relations and just swapping bits around. The objects “judged” or “proposed” here are quickly forgotten, the object is seen as more of a limited resource for substitutions. Same with opponent’s arguments and judgements. What is interesting and is also in Bradley is this substutionality involves necessarily inconsistent relations between ideas or predicates. Working from substitution creates contradictions in the whole, because of the way it imagines the ease of breaking and making relations. The game has become substutions and relations to show the opponents contradictions. I am proposing the substitutional method along with no responsibility for propositions does not delimit consistency but necessitates inconsistency. All we have is a half Russell response to this: that of are your proposition true, if not then delete and cancel as opposed to critique and demonstration as false. Also the political correctness limits on substitution are just more squares for substitutions. In the game of find contradictions. making illegal then also paces them and their pieces into a silence prior to truth and falsity, but the limits oppose to responsibility, since due to the limits the issue becomes only about compliance under force not responsibility. The more I work on this the more it seems a for runner of both Habermas and Geach. I arrived at a similar view on judgment and object but from a piece on Kant by H. and later the similarity of this debate and the McDowell Pippin debate on Kant’s B Deduction of the CPR. I 15 years ago used the analogy of bricks in a wall to express that the wall is first then abstracting out bricks rather than the wall “is” the separated bricks first and then put together. Bradley it turn out used a very similar analogy that of cubes cut out of a piece of wood. (Stewart Candlish “The Russell/Bradley Dispute”.)
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  14. Note between Parts B and C. In part C i will go into the main areas of discussion on Bradley on relations, but first a a bit of a heads up on where i am going with this. So today a News piece on GB News said that men are being asked if they are pregnant when they go for an x ray ect. Now it is possible to imagine a rational risk reduction program could come up with this. : the property of "Being Pregnant" "actually pregnant" is propositional predicate that we can thinking of as "possible" with relation to a group of animals a sub set of a group of living things. that is the General logic of sets. Now we can have a person who would put “male” as a gender on an medical form when entering hospital. But then “being pregnant” or “possibly pregnant” is entirely contingent for the whole set. I think this is not just a possibility through surgery, but also at the level of DNA gender is not a simple matter, and at the level of intuition either. In the old vocabulary of essences and intrinsic natures (intrinsic relations) the possibility of being pregnant rests on a natural potentiality that could be used as a definition of female. Then it would be a logical and natural impossibility for man to be pregnant. The term can be used metaphorically: “to be giving birth to a PhD thesis” which was a common phrase in this world a few years ago. That aside if a man was pregnant then by definition he must “be a woman”. In an ideal rational system everything is a property, and so properties do not hang together but rather are infinity variable external relations to each other: “Person with penis gives birth”. Definitions are possible here but generally this is a pragmatic choice where to pin down properties into necessary by definition and accidental or contingent. Being might not be a predicate but the type of Being ie in the vocabulary of species genius and subsumptive judgement in Kant, remains an open question and so then do the Generla logic of sets inside sets and so to reference; a members of a set A as to if it is also a member of a set B by definition. This approach though will suffer from logical mathematic structural Category or Group problems (from Galois). The logic of Transitivity commutivity and so on will not hold. Rather they would be in a kind of inexpressible rational space of inconsistency undecidiblity and incompleteness. That is if we “symbolically” imagine the above radical contingency then General logic relations of inferences will not hold for objects. This because space time inference relation for objects (not sets) will not hold. If we emphasize or ground this in a logic of inference for an object then the general logic of sets collapses. Why? Well I think when we have a general set logic we imagine this might be rationally prior to the logic over object relations in space and time. But the logic of sets can be seen as parasitic upon the lateral logic for an object. This is to say if an object A has property power p (a relation to another object) then just with this property in play the general logic will hold. But if we include another property p(2) of A the lateral relation are only for p(2). This means p and p(2) are meant to be external to each other. But for example Kant talks about cinnabar changing in both colour and density on being heated. The idea is I think that there can be no single property change that leaves the others external and un related. The “abstractive act” of governmentality and its general logic has beneath it, and prior to it, a dependency on the transitivity necessity of one property for an object (in agent an patent relations). But if this is the case for all property of all objects generating Gender logic then internal relations will become inter property conflict. The result is internecine conflict and contradiction at the level of General Logic, manifest in one real object having multiple properties. The politics of intersectionality is a pragmatic attempt to stave this problem that is really deep within the erred logic and metaphysics in play here. The lateral logic and the general logic only consistent with each other and internally for one property at a time. As McDowell says in the “Can Cognitive science determine epistemology” the general logic actually rests on judgement at the lateral level of and between objects, that general logic then abstracts from. The inconsistencies in general logic with multiple properties, are derivative secondary and parasitic on lateral judgment with multiple property’s of objects. Compare a gladiator to a decathlon contestant, or compare a Fourier analysis to the real objects degrees of freedom in a complex harmonic motion. Judgement of objects is the real and General logic is derivative idea an abstract (not the Hegelain Real) the solution to the rational inconstancies is not more set theory but a diagnosis of this original abstraction of the properties in a judgment. Rationalists that give a priority or privilege to consistency of relations in sets of abstracted separate properties, results in inconstancy’s for the object with many properties. The solution is not like a Russell type problem of sets of all sets or a Badiou type problem, it the abstraction and forgetting of the constraints on judged of actual objects. That is that in the judgement we also judge relativity both towards the objects and towards the whole. Nore a telescope and micro scope cannot be placed in one dimension ie along one continuum for a property as is commonly presented. A person stands between micro scope and telescope. The two structures of micro deep and macro expansive can only appear to be on a single continuum for one abstracted property metric. A picture of an atom and a galaxy can be placed in a metric relation of size but this ignores the actual movement of change in both are really incongruent spaces of change is scale. I know this is unclear but I’m working on it.
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