Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

FINISHED MY WORK ON RORTY. (eh.)

His criticism of the metaphysical project is accurate. His definition of truth as ‘whatever we agree upon’ is just a justification for postmodern verbal deception. It’s a justification not a description.

Waste of time.

Sigh.

As for political philosophy, we are back to the philosophy of science, but where instead of testing hypotheses against the regular patterns of the physical universe, we are testing hypotheses against the willingness to enter voluntary exchanges.

Of course, the universe has a fairly constant periodicity at the newtonian scale of our human actions (albeit at much faster and slower, larger and smaller, that’s something else entirely). But human beings exhibit any number of periodic patterns due to age, generation, state of current knowledge, arrangement of current resources, and arrangement of humans into complex webs of production that we call a division of labor, all of which is signalled by prices made possible by the commensurability of money, subject to flocking and swarming, and external shocks from the physical world.

Just as we hypothesize that the universe expands and contracts, so does our civilization, as we gain new knowledge of how to more effectively extract calories from the world’s resources, then via fertility, consume the incremental value of that knowledge.

Meanwhile we school like fish to national opportunities, until they too are exhausted via boom and bust. And within that boom and bust the constant signaling necessary for mating and reproduction take place giving rise to subtle differences in fashion and aesthetics, which are the micro-applications of those advances in our capture of calories from the material world.

Truth is a description of actions that if repeated, reproduce previous results among categories with a similar periodicity. This is somewhat problematic because first, periodicity becomes extremely complicated outside of the newtonian physical world, or, among humans, outside of the family.

Second because production cycles and therefore all the categories of measurement, randomly fall apart and then are recreated in response to changing demand on one and and availability of solutions on the other.

Truth is not what we agree it is. Ambitions may be whatever we agree upon. Even if those ambitions are metaphorically, a-rationally or irrationally stated.

It may be true that we can chant false things often enough that people will for some time believe them long enough to implement som policy or other. In fact, that is what happens most of the time. That is the purpose of the progressive-postmodern program.

But truth in the physical world and truth in the world of human action are different in the sense that the actions needed to replicate something in the physical world will remain constant, and actions needed to replicate something in the human world will not remain constant.

In either case, any true statement is a statement about the set of actions, not about the thing or process itself (which doesn’t exist as a set of conditions except as a collection of statements or symbols or stimuli). Most confusion is caused by this confusion. We can make statements. We can test these statements.These statements under test, will either reproduce prior results (true) or not (false), or be inconclusive (not true, not false, but simply non logical).

True statements are true by means of analogies constructed of abstract categories we call actions – and they are indeed categories. And these statements are just statements. They are statements that if imitated, produce consistent results each time that they are tested. And without additional information they will not change. But since we are always subject to new information, they are constantly open to possible change, even if that change is largely only an increase in the detail provided by smaller and larger, or faster and slower scales.

Humans must be able to reduce conceptual analogies to something that can be processed by the brain in two or three seconds. Most of our work is to produce some means by which we create causal categories that can be submitted to our senses in a form that we can associate with other associations in three seconds or less.

Lots of associative power. Short periodicity for processing that much information.