This is. November. There’s a lot to be said back and forth about the concept of martyrdom, but it’s still important that our dead be remembered. (After all, as Benjamin noted social democrats point us toward the future in order to rob us of our past, of the hatred it provides and the strength that offers.) Utah Phillips says on one of his records somewhere that we need to also remember people who were just trying to get by, just do a job, and still ended up in unmarked graves. In november we remember not only folks who stood up and got shot down, but people who were cut short for all sorts of reasons. It’s tempting to quote Vaneigem - survival is dying slowly, suicide on the installment plan - and so to univeralize the condition, but that risks blunting the point.
This is on my mind because the Twin Cities GMB of the IWW is hosting a forum to commemorate all this, and to make the link to the IWW today (we are not a branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism). I’m speaking very briefly tomorrow on the Everett Massacre. I’ve been reading a bit about it, I forget the name of the book offhand but it’s all about the free speech fights waged by the union and is told in the words of participants (combination of oral history and reprinting of articles that participants wrote about their experiences). There’s a great piece by Jack Leonard, one of the 74 Wobblies jailed and charged with murder - a cop (ie, hired goon) was killed when they opened fired on the boat that the IWW members took from Seattle to Everett, killing five unarmed workers. It’s very likely the cop was killed by ‘friendly fire’, as only a handful of the IWWs were armed. Anyway, Leonard goes through the organizational structure and tactics used by the jailed Wobs to exact concessions from the jailers. Yet more evidence against the common leftist presumption (which I still fall into a lot) that people are weak and stupid and inarticulate and incapable. If that were so then the activities Leonard describes could never have happened.
It’s one of many stories that both angers and inspires, and reminds me I want to look for a copy of Gisela Bock’s book on the IWW. It was published first in Germany then translated into Italian where it had a big impact (along with the work of Karl Heinz Roth) on the early operaisti. I’d love to read it because it’s about the IWW, and it’d also be quite interesting to see what some of the operaismo folks made of it. If I’m lucky it’s been translated into Spanish, as my German and my Italian are both not great.
The free speech fights are worth revisiting, as many debates about strategy and tactics play out there. Some members of the union thought that picking fights with the state over the banning of public oratory by union members was of limited efficacy and a distraction from continuing to organize. I don’t know what I think, but it strikes me that the summit-hopping vs community organizing debates that happened in some North American alter-globalist circles a few years ago touch on similar thematics.
Here’s the text I used as the basis for the talk at the labor history forum. It was an event of the St Paul labor speakers’ bureau, which bills itself as a labor free speech group. Nothing special (done at the very last minute, unfortunately), but it’s what I’ve got. Also, a quick quote from this Foner book, p7, “by the time the IWW was founded a dispossessed, homeless proletariat - the migratory workers - had been created in the [US] West. It was a roaming army of several million, who were not attached to any particular locality or to any special industry.” It goes on. Sounds a lot like some descriptions of the multitude and the poor in Negri. Which reminds me, I need to finish translating the Virno ‘Immaterial Workers of the World’ article, find my copy of Nick Thoburn’s article on Deleuze and the IWW, and look up the Ranciere quote on precarity being the general proletarian condition.
*
Fellow workers and friends… I start with this traditional IWW opening. Thank you for your time tonight. I’m honored by the chance to speak at this labor free speech forum, and appropriately enough I’m going to talk a bit about the IWW free speech fights. My main focus will be the Everett massacre, but first I want to talk about the background of the free speech fights. As far as I know, the era of the big free speech fights was from 1906-1916. Most of what I know is from a book on the matter by Philip S. Foner.
The IWW defined a free speech fight as “the struggle for the use of the streets for free speech and the right to organize”. (Foner p12) The Bill of Rights was effectively denied to many workers in the early 20th century, as it is today. For immigrant and temporary workers, speech on the street was key because there was no other hiring hall or meeting place. Speaking on the street served as a way to organize and agitate, as well as a way to pass the hat to raise money. The bosses and politicians knew this, which is why they worked so hard to prevent it.
When a free speech fight started, the local union would send out a call, and out of work wobblies would come to town. The strategy was to keep violating the ban on public speech, to fill the jails. Once in jail, the wobblies organized themselves to fight for better treatment,
to make life hard on the jailers, to share stories and educate each other, and make plans for their trials. The wobs also worked to make the trials as slow as possible. All of this put a drain on local resources, so that in many cases it was easiest to lift the free speech ban. (A la the jail solidarity tactics used in Seattle 1999.)
All that is the upside of the free speech fights. The downsides are that the free speech fights sometimes distracted and took resources from workplace organizing, and that the cops and vigilante groups used very brutal methods to fight the union, which cost a lot of wobblies their livelihoods and lives. These vigilante groups included and were supported by high level citizens. This quote demonstrates who was involved and their violence: In Minot, ND, in response to violence against workers someone asked a judge “Can’t you do something to prevent the beating of the innocent men?” The judge replied, “Prevent Hell. We’ll drive the god-damned sons of bitches into the river and drown them. We’ll starve them. We’ll kill every damned man of them or drive them together with the Socialists from the city.” (p19)
That quote sets the tone for what happened in Everett in 1916, one of the last if not the last of the free speech fights. “Fellow workers and friends…” is how many IWW orators used to start their public speeches. (For the record, an ‘orator’ was not a special class in the union, but could be anyone who stepped on a soapbox to start a conversation about union matters.) These words started many a free speech fight, and they contrast with the lethal force used against the wobblies by the bosses and their cronies.
In Everett lumber workers were organizing. Picketers had already been jailed in a crackdown. [International Shingle Workers Union of America, struck May 1.] The IWW got involved in July and there was an increasing cycle of public speeches and arrests through October. Along the way the Everett Commercial Club, a bosses’ organization, put together a semi-private army of deputies, run by Sheriff McRae. These deputies, usually drunk at the time, harrassed workers and kept watch for wobblies. McRae and his goons beat IWW organizer James Rowan in custody, then let him go to stumble to find a hospital in Seattle.
On October 30, 1916 a passenger boat to Everett were stopped at the dock. All the passengers were interrogated. McRae and his 300 deputies beat the 41 admitted Wobblies onboard the ship, and beat some other passengers as well. The beaten were then put on trucks and driven to a Seattle suburb, where they were beaten again, one at a time. Many of them ended up hospitalized.
The Everett Tribune ran a story attacking the IWW and defending the atrocities. Incidentally, a December 1916 issue of the Minneapolis Labor Review reports on what local papers around the Twin Cities here were saying about instances of local unrest. The Biwbik Times here in Minnesota wrote of organizing here: “There is but one way to stop this outrage, that is to do as did the citizins of Everett, Washington.” In Everett, local businesses and townspeople disagreed with what ‘the citizens’ did. Some businesses put up signs in their windows reading “Not a member of the Commercial Club” (the bosses’ organization that funded, planned, and some of whom participated personally in the violence). A mass meeting was called for November 5th. On the 5th 260 wobblies got on the boat the Verona (the same boat as on October 30), and another 38 were on a smaller boat, toward Everett for the free speech fight. The idea was that this many people would not be victims of violence.
The goons in Everett built barricades on the docks, and waited for the boats to arrive. When the Verona docked at 2pm McRae demanded “Who is your leader?” The crowd on the boat shouted back “We’re all leaders!” McRae drew his gun and said the boat could not land. “Like hell!” was the response and the wobblies started off the boat. The deputies opened fire.
Some IWWs on the boat returned fire and all hell broke loose. [Estimates vary, but the highest figure, that of the public prosecutor against the IWW, is 25 armed men among the wobblies, versus several hundred armed deputies.] The wobblies with guns soon ran out of ammunition and at the end of it - an end which only came when the engineer of the boat backed it away from the dock without a pilot at the helm - there were a number of dead and wounded. There were five confirmed dead among the IWW, and some estimates go as high as 14. There were definitely men drowned, but no bodies recovered. There were countless injured as well. Also dead was one cop, with 20 deputies and vigilantes wounded. I didn’t write down his name. They don’t record our names in situations like this much of the time. I don’t think he desreves to be remembered. The remaining deputies became a mob patrolling the streets of Everett, threatening and attacking people. A great many people voiced support for the IWW after what happened.
The Verona headed back to Seattle, and met the smaller boat on they way, advising that they do the same. In Seattle the IWW members were all arrested. One of the deaths, that of Felix Baran, is attibuted to slow treatment of a gunshot wound due to arrest. The city of Seattle refused to release the bodies to the families and to the union, because the authorities feared that the site of the men’s condition would provoke a riot. Meanwhile, the dead murdering cop got military honors.
Of the jailed wobblies, 74 were then put on trial for the ‘murder’ of the cop who died. This officer may well have been killed by wobbly gunfire, though it’s equally plausible that it was friendly fire, but the record is very clear that the IWWs were defending themselves. The Mayor of Seattle, no IWW sympathizer, later called the deputies and vigilantes cowards and said the IWW members had acted in self-defense against the illegal attacks, much like Governor Altgeld spoke about the Haymarket Martyrs after the fact. The trial ended in acquittal, and cost Everett and Snohomish County a great deal. It also cost the wobblies involved a lot, of course.
That’s a quick overview of the Everett Massacre. There’s a lot more info if anyone’s interested. The IWW website has a lot of material on this for download, including at least one book on the subject. I’d like to take just one more moment to talk about something connected to this.
One of the best sources I read on the Everett events is a piece by a wob named Jack Leonard (a pseudonym), who was on the Verona and was jailed. His piece was printed in the Industrial Worker in 1946. Leonard is clearly and rightfully angry, but he spends most of his time talking about how the wobs organized themselves in jail. Like Kelley was saying before about Joe Hill, the point is not to mourn but to organize. What’s great about Leonard’s article is the detail he presents of how the IWWs did what they did - the committee structures they used to prevent favoritism and the actions they used against the jailers. When we talk about labor martyrs we need to remember not only who died and how, and not only the values they stood for, but we also need to remember that they were oftentimes killed because they had the ability to act effectively on their values. We need to remember those forms of effective action, in order to learn from them in our own organizing.
I’d like to close with a quote from Utah Phillips, which echoes the sentiments that Dave started us off with tonight, about the costs of the class war in the US and all the unnamed murdered workers over our history. On one of his records Utah Phillips talks about labor movement heroes, and how we need to not only remember our Joe Hills and Frank Littles but also the people whose names we don’t know - people who had to use pseuodnyms like Jack Leonard, and people who ended up in unmarked graves. Some of those people were killed for standing up for themselves, but some of them were killed by the work itself. “There’s never a mine blown skyward but we’re buried alive for you” as it says in a line from the old song “We’ve Fed You All For A Thousand Years”. We need to remember that too, that work is often lethal and will continue to be so as long as waged work exists. The founders of the IWW knew that. I can only really speak for myself, but it seems to me that that same sensibility, and anger over the costs of all this, is what makes those of us involved today stay involved and try to keep create a new history of the working class by organizing today. Thanks for listening. We’d love to hear from you all if you want to discuss. Questions about labor history will be deferred to Jeff, he knows more about that. I can speak a little bit about stuff happening today in our union in you’re interested. I’m done now. Thank you.
Comment by Nate — November 28, 2005 @ 7:08 pm
hey Pedro,
Let’s be clear: I don’t always agree with the people at Long Sunday, but I like them. And that affection to me is much more important than agreement. s0metim3s in particular is a good friend of mine. If you’re going to just heap abuse on these folks, then fuck off. And also keep the “hos” “dykes” “eunuchs” etc shit out of here. If it’s meant ironically it doesn’t carry in print. If it’s not meant ironically than you’re simply not someone I want to talk with. I will be deleting this last comment of yours eventually because it’s not the kind of stuff I want around my site. I’m keeping the others for now. If you want to talk and can do so in a way we can both agree on then that’s just fine, otherwise you’re wasting both of our time. If you do want to have a respectful exchange of ideas, depending on what those ideas are, I’m happy to do that as time allows. Okay?
As for the rest (trying to see if the respectful exchange of idea will work)… I don’t know what you mean by bourgeois concept of justice. If you mean in terms of class origins, then I’m not concerned. Just because the bosses made it doesn’t mean we can’t use it or want it. If you mean in terms of some kind of unique counter-revolutionary effect of the idea, then you need to present how that would work because I’m not convinced. Personally, I’m continually surprised at people’s abilities to do really amazing things with ideas that I think are fundamentally stupid: millenarian christian communists had all sorts of dumb religious ideas, and yet did inspiring and exciting things in terms of organization and militant conduct of class war. So “bourgeois” as an epithet doesn’t resonate with me, unless you’ve got a more worked out argument. If you do then please, by all means convince me.
My own views on violence may be inconsistent, but that doesn’t bother me. At a minimum, at this point I can say with great certainty that forms of violence (in the sense of deliberate bodily harm) will not be pragmatically effective for the goals I have (a case study on this would be the Red Brigades in Italy - armed guerilla war on the state necessitates a clandestiny that erodes the bases out of which movements grow, we can also see this in the cases of guerrilla groups throughout Latin America) and the organization I’m involved in, the IWW, doesn’t endorse it.
It should be noted, though, that the Benjamin essay under discussion at Long Sunday has an expanded and technical sense of the term: in German it’s “gewalt” which means force: any action on another that is not entirely consensual might fall under this term. So withdrawal of labor by striking workers is a form of gewalt, though it’s not a type of violence in the sense of bodily harm, and it’s one I’m all for. In that expanded sense, I’m generally all for all sorts of acts of force on people (and I’m particulary interested in there being more of some types, like those that win us working people more control over our own lives). I get squeamish around bodily harm for a number of reasons.
As for the IWW, the union’s website, www.iww.org has a
wealth of resources to look at. Abbey’s probably not the best source for much on our union. I’ll have to take a look at the Pynchon, I’m always keen to see how the IWW (and collective action and organization more generally) gets treated in literature.
You’ve actually got it reversed regarding “skilled” vs “unskilled” labor in the IWW. It’s been primarily “unskilled”, though part of the effect of the IWW has been to show those categories as political more than substantive. Some of the founders of the IWW were involved in some kinds of marxism, at least in a theoretical sense, but I don’t think that’s particularly important for or against. Our constitution is, to my mind, a powerful revolutionary document (also on the union’s website) in its own right, and our organizational model is a good one. (In my local branch we met someone on staff from the UFCW who was very excited about this ‘new idea’ that his union is going to use as a strategy, and it’s exactly what the UE is doing now in campaigns like the North Carolina university service workers, and it’s a model that our union has been using for 100 years.) I also want to make very clear that I don’t speak for the IWW, I’m a member and my opinions are my own. My own sense is that we’re a tremendously varied group, and in a pretty good way. Through the union I’ve met a number of very intelligent and committed people with a solid grasp on all sorts of things I think are important, and who are directly engaged in concrete organizing activity that builds greater working class power at least at the level of individual shops or geographic/economic areas. That’s why I joined, because I was impressed by the members I’d met. It’s also much more free of much of the meanspirited namecalling, self-importance, and ideological/”party line” kinds of fights that have been involved in much of my other experiences with various sectors of the organized left. The focus is very much on pragmatic questions, and aims to take our lofty goals like abolition of waged labor and address them by looking at what we can do incrementally toward acting on that goal. (Which involves, to my mind, acquiring skills, understanding, and class anger, all of which helps keep us trying to move concretely toward our goals. All of which at least parts of the IWW has done for 100 years and are doing now.)
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 3, 2005 @ 7:27 am
Great topic. I got my copy of the IWW history comic the other day. It’s stupidly expensive (thanks Verso…) but, wow, it’s awesome. My favourite quote on it is “I am PROUD that I have climbed high enough for the lightning to hit me”, which was one wobbly’s reply when he was foud guilty of sedition or something like that. Fuck, that’s amazing. The language sears through history and jumps out of the page like a spark. To think someone stood up in court in the US, in the 1920s and said that - it’s very moving, the courage is so awesome, it makes what we do look sort of pale. Nobody talks like that anymore.
I might not swap all of Benjamin for that single speech act, but I would swap all the commentary on Benjamin.
Speaking of which, I humbly submit you get rid of this vicious troll, Nate. Some guy who goes on about ‘dykes and eunuchs’ and goes around assaulting our comrades should not be tolerated - and that is what this fucker is up to.
Comment by TCO — December 3, 2005 @ 1:32 pm
hi Thiago,
It’s funny you mention that book, I just started reading it this morning. I bought my copy at the event I gave the talk at, a local lefty bookshop had a book stall there. I’m a big fan of graphic novels, and of course am into the IWW as you know, so the combo works great for me. I agree that there’s a lot of inspiring history in the IWW (not that wobblies have any kind of monopoly), everything I read about the history of the union is very inspiring - though inspiring of different emotions depending on the stories. My friend Jeff, the secretary-treasurer of our local branch here, took a trip up to a mountain range in the north of our state to this local history center. He dug around in their archives (photo boxes turned in by the relatives of deceased elderly folks, including family pictures and all kinds of stuff). He found strikes photos from the 1910s with all sorts of IWW banners in them, and they have a copy of a charter from a branch from 1916, it’s all very exciting. Particularly because it’s a history that didn’t happen in France or Spain or somewhere like that (I for one have certainly had a de facto feeling at times along the lines of “if only we were in Italy/Argentina/Chiapas/etc), it’s quite powerful to see that all of this was done where I live and contributed to the conditions we live in now (in the sense of impacting the changing class composition). If you have a chance and can find a copy, the book Fellow Workers and Friends edited by Philip Foner is worth a look. It’s all material written by members of the union about their experiences with the free speech fights.
As for Pedro, I’m swayed by what you say Thiago.
Pedro, I’d like you to apologize here for dissing on my friends and comrades, and then I’ll be happy to keep discussing with you after editing the offending stuff out of your prior posts. Otherwise I’ll delete your posts, past and future. I won’t have people I care about insulted in my space. I’m much more invested in their feelings of being comfortable and welcome here than I am in yours because I don’t know you and I don’t agree with the things you’ve said. You don’t have to like or even respect the same people I do, but treating disrespectfully here is a no go and puts us at odds. Please let me know how you want to proceed.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 3, 2005 @ 5:36 pm
You’re not a leftist or wobbly, Nateski. YR another PC aesthete and a coward, and realy I suspect a closet case Christian.
Moreover you don’t know crap about philosophy, or indeed about politics.
Comment by Pedro — December 3, 2005 @ 5:50 pm
hi Pedro,
I’ll leave this post because it’s funny. As for my not being a wobbly, please don’t out me to the rest of the union, okay? Do drop back by later, I’m keen to hear how many of your scab friends from your boardgame playing group disapprove of me: the contempt of the contemptible is a tremendous ego boost. It’s like being disliked by the boss - shows one is doing something right - only with none of the downsides because bosses are actually effective at some things. Good luck with finishing up at university. I’m sure you’ll like the management position waiting for you.
Fuck off and die,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 3, 2005 @ 6:16 pm
Nate: ignore Pedro. He’s the person referred to as “The Troll of Sorrow” and apparently has twenty-four hours a day to spend posting crap in the various blogs related, in one way or another, to The Weblog and Long Sunday. More, I’m sure.
He’s the reason why Long Sunday has changed its commenting system, and why others have started screening comments. Don’t encourage him; he is not to be taken seriously.
Comment by Anon — December 4, 2005 @ 4:06 am
Any serious logician will tell you that there is no such thing as a monolithic method know as “deduction” nor “induction.” Logic systems are created, or if you like, generated out of axioms which are themselves unproven. Some modern speculation on reason additionally adds that any sufficiently complex system will be incomplete. For an introductory perspective please refer to Plato’s Sophist and Parmenides as well as the later texts of the Skeptics.
Please also don’t forget also that Kant developed an entire critique dedicated to aesthetics. Indeed, in relation to teleological and aesthetic judgement, a seperate form of analytics is required. As for Kant’s introspection, can we deny that the whole second section in the 1st critique on transcendental logic (genesis of the categories, transcendental deduction etc.) is not based on introspection.
Owl really needs to familiarize himself with the nature of logic and reasoning as well as read some more Kant before speaking further.
Comment by Tzuchien — December 4, 2005 @ 7:32 am
hi Anon,
Thanks for the heads up. I’ve got it sussed by now. He works in the IT industry and so has a lot of screentime and few social skills. I’m deleting him as he posts, and not responding anymore. I figure it takes me less time to click delete than it takes him to write, even with all the monosyllabic words, so in terms of balance sheet of time spent I win. And winning rules.
I also figure I’m doing the rest of humanity a service by sucking up bits of this guy’s time now and then and deleting what is produced. It’s a shame I can’t do that in one fell swoop, but my finger is not on the big red button. Yet. Someday, I hope.
Tzuchien, thanks for the support, but don’t lower yourself to his level. Besides, feeding them just encourages them. My troll detecting magics are weak, but since the magi at Long Sunday and elsewhere have tipped me off now I know.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 4, 2005 @ 8:33 am
hey Tzuchien,
Another thought after re-reading your comment. I’ve been thinking recently about the principle of sufficient reason, in regard to the political theology conversations we had when you were in town here and some half-remember remark that Bowie made about many views upon scrutiny turning out to be either tautology or infinite regress. Anyway, principle of sufficient reason: is there sufficient reason for it? In the light of what you say about axios it seems the answer might be ‘no’. Is that right or do I misunderstand?
take care,
Nate
ps- have you read the papers by AT over at that blog? The ones on fanaticism and truth?
Comment by Nate — December 4, 2005 @ 8:39 am
no, i have only skimmed AT’s papers at this point. The one of manichaeism provokes most interest. My mentor Dr. Bassler responded to some of my comments the other day by asking me if the guys i’m reading (Negri etc.) are drawing from the Medieval gnostic controversies… I told him I’d get back to him. I think AT might be able to do so better.
The principle of sufficient reason is there a reason for it? Yes. itself. Leibniz has a 1714 discourse called “Principles of Nature and Grace, based on Reason” Its a nice little elucidation of what he means.
Reason is grounded in the investigation of substance if you agree with Leibniz (and Spinoza) but there is of course wide contestation over this. Indeed, one of Kant’s remarkable contributions to this problem of logic’s grounding (detailed in the 3 critiques and more) is that the whole question involves us in transcendental argumentation. Davidson recently revived this debate in the analytic tradition. But I think Graham Priest wrote the definitive survey book on the modern treatment of this issue: “Beyond the limits of thought” There’s also a nice workbook on the nuts and bolts of “pluralistic” logic by Priest: “An introduction to Non-Classical logic.” In the latter he details multi-valued logic which historically extends all the way from the Scholastic Buddhist tradition to modern computation theory.
Sorry, but I think this Graham Priest guy is really great.
But I think most take not the “P of sufficient reason” to be the primary axiom, but the principle of non-contradiction.
Actually, in my view, one of the fascinating movements in this controversy over axioms is to be found in the work of LEJ Brouwer. He develops a proof theory (for mathematical objects) independently of formal logic. There are few guys working on carrying out his projects. Basically the view is that demonstrations have nothing to do with formal systems (although they can be subsequently formalized) but rather rely on phenomenological sources for their “ground.” In this way, the whole question of formal axiomatics is out the window.
Here I return to Leibniz. There are many ways of viewing what the early moderns were doing. David Lewis famously takes inspiration from the Theodicy for his “modal” discourse which Kripke’s formalization largely shares. But theres something here that misses the point. I think its misleading to think of what the early moderns were doing as being anywhere concerned with formalization; its an anachronistic reading. Rather, I think we do better to focus on concepts like substance, being, cause and interaction -rather than axioms and entailment.
ps. Since I come from a largely analytic institution, I have found that it has sometimes been effective to show that when some interlocutors dismiss our conversations as “fashionable European nonsense” that one merely needs to show them that such an understanding comes out of ignorance rather than insight. Some elementary demonstrations can accomplish that task effectively.
Comment by Tzuchien — December 4, 2005 @ 9:20 am
hey Tzuchien,
I don’t know re: the gnostics and all that. I know Negri wrote a book on the Book of Job while he was in prison. I’ve got a copy but haven’t gotten to reading it yet. Thanks for the recommendations, I’ll check them out (albeit slowly). My intro to this stuff was largely through Bowie. I remember him presenting Schelling et al, who turned to questions like “why is there a world at all?” I don’t remember if this was Bowie’s take or just my response to it, but I took the point to be a tremendous relativizing gesture along the lines of taking a certain claim “everything has its cause” and asking it to self-reflexively justify itself, asking what the cause of that might be. For me this was quite powerful, primarily directed against a certain species of orthodox marxism and a certain conservative anglo-american/analytic mode of thought that I’d encountered. I’ve never really followed up on much of this, beyond developing an interest (as you know) in pragmatism, pragmatist-esque sensibilities, and appropriations of other work for those pursoses.
I hope you’re well. I’m still working on all the Badiou/Mao stuff you sent me, I couldn’t get it to print so that slows me down a lot. I wish that you and Colin and a few of the rest of us could just get paid to read and argue together.
un abraccio,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 4, 2005 @ 8:26 pm
Erm, have you read Badiou on set theory? That really is ‘fashionable European nonsense’, in my opinion. It’s so stupid it hurts.
It’s kinda funny. I come from phenomenology background, but mostly, I think that is a pointless project now, largely for the reasons Searle and Austen gave. I think that this sort of project, actually the entire concern with ‘proof theory’ that is really abot proving something in some transcendental sense, rather than proof-in-a-system, well, that’s just silly. What makes you think logic would have a ‘foundation’? No doubt, actual mathematical work can be described phenomenologically in some way or another, and perhaps it would be shown that there are pre-formal acts of induction and mentalizations of various objects - who knows - but that’s sort of besides the point, since the conditions for something in mathematic being valid inference or true are not the possession or otherwise of these mental states. What are they? Well, I think the formal account is precisely the answer to this question. What else is there to be said after that? Do I really gather a better understanding of what makes two and two four if I look into the phenomenologically revealed processes of addition? I am afraid I am firmly with Frege on that these days.
Comment by TCO — December 5, 2005 @ 5:04 am
hi Thiago,
I know you’re anti-Badiou, I don’t him or set theory well enough to comment. I’d actually be quite keen to see you and Tzuchien hash this out, as you’re both among the list of friends of mine who are so smart you go over my heads sometimes. Actually, that said, I might not be able follow said hashing. I’d certainly try, though.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 5, 2005 @ 5:45 am
1. I hope that this does not come off as insulting, TCO, but I think problems with Badiou often come out of the way in which we read it.
I think the stuff on set theory is some of the more interesting things. First, a lot hinge on whether you take the old Greek (Pythagorean) problem - is being number? Is number being? There are Platonic sources to understand it, Aristotle worries about it and so does (in a way) Descartes Galileo and Leibniz.
Rather than asking what kind of being number is, and asking rather how the science of being is really the science of number, I think Badiou’s problems become more interesting.
2. I think logic is all about foundations. Logic is the study of how arguments can ground themselves, comming up with precise definitions of what counts as truth, evidence, etc.. I can understand language games and such, but its a rather problematic gesture when applied to logic. I think here, we might be in danger of abandoning logic altogether when we believe that foundations don’t matter. Maybe that’s what you want… in that case, fine.
Historically, the formalists lost. Frege’s entire project was abandoned after Russell’s letter on the “Groundlaws for Arithmetic,” I don’t see how Frege can continue to be a viable option. But, here I might be guilty of not reading correctly. On this point, I anticipate correction.
3. The relation between proof theory and phenomenology has nothing to do with mental states. It rather has to do with experience and the possibility of experience. More on this later.
Comment by Tzuchien — December 6, 2005 @ 7:24 pm
more on 3.
What makes a proof a successful one? According to one modern sense of “proof,” that which you (TCO) invoked, the Hilbert axiomatic version, most of Euclid’s geometry is out the window. Especially some of the more important one which invoke construction. (the ones concerning finding the midpoint of a circle’s diameter for example)
It is not too radical to say, in fact, i think quite reasonable to say that these proofs demonstrate something.
I think, historically, we can make more sense out of Euclid, the Pythagoreans, not to mention Galileo’s arguments in the two new sciences and such if we see the force of demonstration. I think that is what we miss when we focus myopically on formalistic accounts of proof, esp. in geometry.
I am by no means saying that it is an essential task nor an easy task, but being intellectually responsible is also neither of these.
Finally, the phenomenalogistic approach to proof has to do with “possible” experiences and not actual ones. Thus it has nothing to do with mental states. One place to begin is by looking at the Kantian schematism where the question of experience is posed as a question of relating concepts to sensibility; each provides a limit of the other. Thus, what results is a question of experience concieved as a “possible.” Not what your or I experience, but the form of experience necessary for experience itself. The hope is that by investigating this intersection of thought and senses, we can develop a clearer picture to what counts as a “convincing” proof -especially (for me at least) as it pertains to geometry and mathematics.
Comment by Tzuchien — December 7, 2005 @ 9:17 am
Well, I am not a logicist. By invoking Frege, I just wanted to make the point that when we investigate the meaning of a proposition, we turn to the circumstances in which it can turn out to be true or false, rather than to the various processes that go on in my consciouness whilst I figure this out. Like Searle, I don’t dismiss phenomenology, but I think it is very limited. I think the claim, taken from Husserl, that we can somehow perceive ‘possible’ experience, is just rubbish. I don’t perceive thought and the possibility of thought - that’s just a rearrangement of words, and moreover, it is phenomenologically false. That also bugs me about phenomenology, how unphenomenological it often seems.
With numbers, I don’t understand the question. I have no idea what it may mean to say that beings are number, or numbers are beings. I am strongly inclined to think that that sentences like these pop out from oddities of language, they make little or no sense to me, I’d need some kind of explanation to begin talking about it.
I think it is a very serious mistake to think that logic is about foundations, or that it helps a lot with the conduct of political arguments or even most of science. One of the problem is an embarrassment of riches. I can construct an n value logic - so what? What does this show? I can also construct boring old propositional logic - so what? What does that show? Some of these things capture our intuitions about things, which is to say they partially mirror or explicate the way natural language or political and social cognition work. But they suceed or fail to the extent that they explain, we chose the ones that seem adequate.
Comment by TCO — December 7, 2005 @ 10:21 am
hi Tzuchien, Thiago,
Interesting stuff, though I don’t get all of it. Tzuchien, following on from Thiago’s remark, when you say ‘logic is about foundation’ do you mean that as … an internal or external foundation? That is, do you mean ‘logic needs to be founded’ and/or do you mean ‘logic founds’? I agree with Thiago what I take to be his skepticism (sp?) about the latter. That said, I quite enjoy hearing about this stuff and I like it when it provides rhetorical examples to use negatively against certain types of foundationalism I run into once in a while, to break up something that’s held to be fixed (not that I’m anti-fixity, just when a certain type is thrown up as an obstacle to something I’m interested). It’s like the story that Dennis guy told us in Washington DC, that he teaches logic to undergrads and they start to act in keeping with logic, but only out of the threat of bad grades, something which formal logic doesn’t account for.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 7, 2005 @ 1:24 pm