GWOT Threat - Simple or Complex?

[marct]

Hi WM,

Some more grist for your mill.

Always fun to talk about and, at the same time, discover more on the limits of this mode of communication .

Your presuppositions are showing here. Where I come from, 'rational' simply means giving reasons for one's position. It does not specify how many or what kind of reasons count as enough. We could define a sliding scale of rationality as follows: to be more or less rational is to justify more or fewer of your beliefs with reasons. That, however is not what I had in mind.

Interesting, and it does appear that we are defining "rational" somewhat differently. Probably not surprising. I would define "rational" as operating within a system of logics and accepted truths, including axiomatic assumptions, that are culture bound. That definition comes out of both Popper and Alfred Schutz

Logic is also not merely mathematical reasoning a la Whitehead, Russell, Quine, Tarski, etc. Nor is it just a Pythagorean harmony of the spheres. Logic is a set of rules for a method of enquiry. In addition to truth functional logic (which need not just be two-valued, as in true or false), we have, among others, epistemic logics, deontic logics, modal logics, and, my personal favorite, interrogative logics. This last is the kind of thing we find in Platonic dialectic/the Socratic Method, Aristotle's Organon, and Hegel's Transcendental Dialectic, to mention some of the big names. I think the most lucid description of it, however is Collingwood's logic of question and answer.

A via negativa definition of logic? Well, I agree with you that "logic is a set of rules for a method of inquiry". Of course, the existence of a method of inquiry requires a desire on the part of some person or group to achieve "answers" to some "question". I would, however, argue that both the question and the method are defined by the culture which asks them.

I think this last smacks of the worst sort of relativism, derived from what I take to be the misinterpretation of the work of William Graham Sumner. I also don't drink from the Foucault and Derida post-structuralist Kool-Aid. And I don't necessarily agree with the "language as semiotics" interpretations of folks following in the wake of C.S. Peirce. Some things about who and what we are just are not up for grabs--we are all, after all, members of the same species. As a result we all have some of the same basic needs (although they may not follow Maslow's hierarchy).

Personally, I have never really enjoyed Sumner's work. Nor would I follow the post-modernist thinking either. As for "relativism", yes my own thinking is somewhat relativist - the relativism of Boas, Sapir and Benedict which, ultimately, derives from Wm. Von Humbolt's arguments and is often grossly misunderstood thanks, in part, to the very Kool Aid pedlar's you refer to.

One of the greatest problems I have seen recently is the idea that "relativism" must be taken as an absolute. I totally disagree with that position, and with the misreading of Boas that has supported it. As with you, I do hold that all humans have certain basic needs, although I tend to use Malinowski's system (e.g. A Scientific Theory of Culture and The Dynamics of Culture Change) rather than Maslow.

Malinowski was drawing large parts of his ideas out of Korzybski's Science and Sanity, which, given its limitations, provided what I consider to be a fairly good background. We do, however, know a lot more, now, about how the brain functions and, as a result, I have become increasingly influenced by evolutionary psychologists such as Jerome Barkow and, in particular, his conception of human universals. I have also found that Alan Fiske's work on Relational Models to be quite useful.

All of this is a rather round about way of saying that the extreme relativist position and the extreme universalist position are equally wrong.

We probably best know ourselves by knowing others around us.
This last is a long way around getting to the point that others mentioned. We can best train ourselves for operations in another cultural milieu by training ourselves in another cultural milieu.

Actually, I agree with you .

Marc