The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
I wonder if Bakhtin would say to Brandom that there’s no such thing as noninferential beliefs, so reliabilism is unsound from the start.
I reached the same conclusion as Hösle (see quote below) and believe it’s what makes Wittgenstein’s pragmatism compatible with Marxist materialist accounts of meaning, particularly if one believes that Wittgenstein’s “meaning-use” isn’t anything-goes pragmatism but a pragmatics rooted in inferentialism between rational subjects in reciprocal recognition.
As I’ve held, once one allows for “family resemblance” then one must also accept that there’s a naturalism at work in Wittgenstein’s pragmatism: “The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.” And then one merely defines Wittgenstein’s naturalism in materialist terms: epistemic reification and some degree of stasis such as the encyclopedia entry, dictionary definition, school lesson, knowledge work, and so on.
Simply put, the inferential moments bearing normativity are dialectical (involve contradictions) lest there be no change in language and meaning:
“Hösle argues that Sellars, Brandom, and McDowell ignore the dialectical features of Hegel’s thought, thus depriving themselves of possible resources for overcoming the contingency and relativism that threatens their anti-empiricist account of concepts.”
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-dimensions-of-hegel-s-dialectic/
Paragraph 62 or “the linguistic turn,” Frege’s The Foundations of Arithmetic.
As a matter of fact, this substratum has no reality; it is merely a symbol intended to recall unceasingly to our consciousness the artificial character of the process by which the attention places clean-cut states side by side, where actually there is a continuity which unfolds.
Q: How does one reconcile Levels of Abstraction (LoA) and Emergentism if one “level” cannot in its entirety (ontologically) be reduced to its lower, more fundamental level, e.g., biology to chemistry, chemistry to physics?
Per Mill and Broad, there are novel properties introduced at each level of increasing organizational complexity of matter, that is, ”primitive high-level causal interactions that are additional to those of the more fundamental levels.”
Or, per Alexander, do these “additional causal interactions represent macroscopic patterns [already] running through those very microscopic interactions [where] [e]mergent qualities are something truly new under the sun, but the world’s fundamental dynamics remain unchanged”?
Simply put, can one still speak of levels of abstraction as explanation if levels remain incommensurable due to novel properties specific to each level?
Note: Couldn’t the orthodox Marxist who aims to protect class antagonism as the driving force of history turn to emergentism to fend off some challenges (i.e., via levels of abstraction) to those dialectics? Yes, yes, to protect Marxist reductionism? [Fodor addresses this?]
STEVEN WEXLER 