George,
thanks for the thoughtful response, and the Rorty article.
For a long time now I've had a mental image of the French post-structuralists--Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, Derrida, Badiou et al--zigzagging around the desert like the Lost Patrol, the zigzag being dialectical reasoning, and I wonder about all the ground that gets missed via this linear method, and also about the antifoundational place it's led them to.
Define "truth"? The idea is that there is no single truth; there's nothing more slippery than truth. Our truth is the product of everything we are. This brings our vaunted reasoning down to Earth, a specious species-peculiarity, with no more extension or universality than whale song (as I've said before).
As I think my posts bear out, I'm interested in materialism, but the great thing about deconstruction--and all those above are variously diluted Marxists--is that it purges ideology (that is if it's seriously considered. Just as evolutionary theory dispels creationism--if only creationists would read it!). We are the puppets of ideology, and ideology is the hegemonic cement that binds this terrible materialism we're stuck with together. Just look at the cacophony of differing opinion and squabbling on OLO, and in society---what we call "reasoning"! Each one of us believing utterly in our truth, our interpretation of the world, our infallible logic--all of which we use to rationalise our egocentrism--our egocentrism in turn rationalising its position in the world and the world to itself; "all's for the best in the best of all possible worlds". We're all petty Panglosses!
The world is a damned mess and our narcissistic reasoning (ideology) maintains it!
Hence the recourse to Marx, or rather to materialism and to ethics. Reform is only possible when ideology is purged.
I think postmodernism is a crock btw, but if you want to get a better handle on it read Lyotard. I'll see if I've got a link to a short piece of his.

Squeers:

Good one on that last. Dr Pangloss it is! What fun.

Back to 22 February 2010 5:02:14 AM

And of course our physical “reality”, the tangible stuff we see and smell and touch, is nothing more than temporary form, composed of atoms and their component parts etc. None of which is to say that we shouldn’t reason, but we should direct it first at the only material reality we have and the problem of how we should live. Rather than reason for its own sake--which I’ve tried to show is non sequitur--or using reason irresponsibly to create technologies, with little consideration of their effects, we should reason an ethical foundation for life, upon which we might build sustainably.
Neither rationalism nor religion offers a viable alternative as neither has its feet on the ground

You are using "rationalism" as "reason for it's own sake"? yes?

Rather, rationalism that accepts our tangible reality as annoyingly persistent is what I mean, and what I think you mean. We have to herd those camels, and eat our pumpkin, and brush our teeth, and not hit other boys (or see what happens?). Those atoms are bloody persistent too. The few types that *won't* survive another 16GY are notable and precious. The forms they take have their own persistence.

Rusty

Severin,
If you are debating with Christians over Creation / evolution you must use their authorative source material.

You might not accept the Biblical text but they and I do, and the subject is the Christian Church and evolution, so the material must deal with the text upon which belief is based.

George,
As a Catholic you would know better than I. Whenever the Pope makes a public comment, for example, on a controversy being debated in certain countries, does his opinion automatically enter into Catholic doctrine?

I’ll have a guess and say that I think not.

I think we’re roughly in agreement as to what might be core beliefs and what are not.

Graham Young said that evolution was core Catholic belief. I challenged this and I still do. To my understanding, for the Catholic church, a core belief might be something like Jesus’ teachings in the Bible, or the Eucharist, or the Nicene Creed.

Squeers,

Thanks for your thoughts as well; especially the first sentence which - I presume - is an interesting (your?) description of postmodernism/poststructuralism (and not a caricature).

>>Define "truth"? The idea is that there is no single truth; there's nothing more slippery than truth. Our truth is the product of everything we are.<<
Well, if you do not define (or explain) a concept, it is hard to evaluate the statements you make about it. Unless you leave it undefined on purpose (like the Christian concept of God illuminated - or not - only through other undefined concepts) in which case your statements constitute a belief system, for or against which one cannot argue. This is what I meant by saying that I could accept Rorty’s maxim, which is more or less a tautology if one assumes that “truth is the product of everything we are” as you put it.

For those for whom the concept of God does not make sense cannot argue about it. Is that perhaps your (and Rorty’s) position about the concept of truth?

With due respect, also your exhortation about the “cacophony of differing opinions … each one of us believing utterly in our truth, our interpretation of the world, our infallible logic--all of which we use to rationalise our egocentrism” sounds to me more like a sermon than a position I could argue against.

Most of what I know of Lyotard is from the book I quoted in the previous post: actually the chapter devoted to him follows the chapter devoted to Latour. I am not going to quote again, just mention that Lyotard makes an excursion this time into mathematics, not realising that the mathematical term “catastrophe” - dealing with bifurcation theory in the study of dynamical systems (usually systems of DE) - has nothing to do with the everyday use of the word “catastrophe” as disaster. Like the term topological space has nothing to do with the space you are looking for when parking your car.

So I am tempted to just repeat the second last sentence of my previous post.

Rusty,
I have enormous respect for scientific method, so far as it goes, but it should be reigned in by ethics and our modest earthly constraints; instead, it follows an obtuse path of liberal rationalism, working hand in glove with directionless capitalism.

George,
the Lost Patrol image is very much mine, so far as I know, and is both a description and a caricature; the desert, of course, is the desert of Lacan's 'Real'. T'would make a great book cover!
I suppose we all get things wrong sometimes--maybe all the time!
Back to truth. I thought I was clear on that, and indeed the concept is simple; what's true for you is not true for me etc. There is no "truth", surely? I would venture the truth that good is better than bad, but that's a value and might be meaningless outside human culture; it seems to be meaningless in nature, and in the stupid universe? Antifoundationalism is part of the Copernican revolution--it just acknowledges our apparent insignificance in the scheme of things, shedding centuries of hubris. Similarly, Darwin trumped creation and Lacan trumped Freud--egocentrism is theorised as nothing more than a confluence of cultural discourses. The Self is an abstraction. Reality (and truth) is mediated by unstable language (Lacan's "symbolic order"); a shimmering human "creation" with no purchase on reality--purely "rhetorical".
What is truth for you?
I was conscious above of sounding a bit sententious (sorry about that), but we were debating "reason" in the abstract, and my position is that our vaunted reason is not only fallible, but hopeless, like that lost patrol! Surely if reason was effective we would have found the "truth" by now?
None of this constitutes a belief system for me. I don't believe in belief; following my hero, Montaigne, I'm too conscious of my ignorance--and like him, not afraid to make it public:-)