TortoiseDream
08-05-2010, 10:47 PM
First of all this applies to real, honest, productive discussions, not the retarded reps vs dems "debates". I posted this on my blog, but I thought I'd see what others here thought about it. In particular, I'm thinking about how this applies to debates we have with those of other political thought. We're all guilty of it, however.
The problem, in a word, is the abstract collective. Human beings naturally abstract things to understand them better. For example one doesn't look at a glass of water and consider the Avogadro's number of water molecules; instead one creates an abstraction called a "glass" of water to understand it. In this case there is no danger because we hardly ever care about size of things on the order of an angstrom, that is, we hardly ever need to worry about a particular water molecule.
In political discussions we do the same abstraction process, but I believe there is much overlooked danger in doing so. Consider the following terms: poor people, rich people, the upper-class, the middle-class, a country, a union, conservatives, liberals, democrats, republicans, the Americans, the Europeans, the Iraqis, the Iranians, the Jews, Christians, Muslims, the Israelis, etc, etc, etc. In the same way "glass" collectivizes individuals molecules that have a certain property (in this case is water, or H2O), all of these terms are supposed to represent groups of individual human beings seen as a whole. However in these cases it is a mistake to forget the atomic scale. In this case individual human beings are the "atoms" of the abstraction. What I'm saying is that we can pretty much neglect the individual water molecules, but losing sight of individual people when using a collective term in political discourse is dangerous, as in it leads to bad policy and bad philosophy. The reason, of course, is simple; abstracting carelessly removes the thinker from reality. Individual human beings are the practical entities of reality in social situations, and when considering empirically sound, rational philosophies one must ultimately address these entities. If an abstraction cannot be traced back to reality, it should be rejected. The abstractions are not real in this sense, no more real than the number 3, or the sine function.
There is a similar problem in mathematics, speaking of which. Absolutely formally, all mathematical objects are actually things called "sets", or collections of mathematical objects (even the numbers are sets). All sets are written as collectors, i.e. {the x's such that -list of properties of x-}. Frequently these collectors can become very large to write, and so definitions, which in this case correspond to abstractions, are invented. That is, instead of writing out a big long collector that may take up 4 lines on my page, I'll just define that long thing to be named "BIG THING." Then whenever I want to talk about that long collector, instead of writing it out I just write "BIG THING" in its place. In this case there is no danger because I have a concrete definition of what "BIG THING" is, as in I can write "BIG THING = {"the big collector"}", and thus name all of the atomic parts that comprise it (the members of the collector). There is great danger in saying, for example, that I will define a thing called "TREE" which is "the collection of all trees". Such a thing is really undefined, nebulous, vague, and can be misinterpreted by many sources, since from that description alone I cannot write "TREE = ______". Such heuristic definitions in mathematics are often rejected because they are not reducible to the atoms of the system (members of sets).
As a more political example, when some guy says he thinks the "US" should bomb "Iran", his he really fully aware that his proposition involves some actual people murdering other people? No, the proposition is abstracted out of meaning, and its true meaning hidden under that abstraction. One cannot see that the proposition is inherently evil, immoral, and outrageous. I encourage those reading to consider this problem and just make sure, at the end of the day, you can break things back down to the atomic constituents and still be happy with your philosophy. I mean this on a personal level, as well as for when we share our thoughts, among ourselves and with others. It's something I believe all of us are guilty of forgetting.
Lastly, which goes without saying, too many layers of abstraction without rigorous foundation produces vague arguments (which is just a consequence of my original point, and the more important one). For example, say I defined a new object "FOREST" that was defined in terms of my previously undefined term "TREE". If I continued to operate in this way, things would just get worse, and worse, and worse...This is because the abstractions become harder to define the more numerous their parts.
Just what is America? - for example.
- TortoiseDream
The problem, in a word, is the abstract collective. Human beings naturally abstract things to understand them better. For example one doesn't look at a glass of water and consider the Avogadro's number of water molecules; instead one creates an abstraction called a "glass" of water to understand it. In this case there is no danger because we hardly ever care about size of things on the order of an angstrom, that is, we hardly ever need to worry about a particular water molecule.
In political discussions we do the same abstraction process, but I believe there is much overlooked danger in doing so. Consider the following terms: poor people, rich people, the upper-class, the middle-class, a country, a union, conservatives, liberals, democrats, republicans, the Americans, the Europeans, the Iraqis, the Iranians, the Jews, Christians, Muslims, the Israelis, etc, etc, etc. In the same way "glass" collectivizes individuals molecules that have a certain property (in this case is water, or H2O), all of these terms are supposed to represent groups of individual human beings seen as a whole. However in these cases it is a mistake to forget the atomic scale. In this case individual human beings are the "atoms" of the abstraction. What I'm saying is that we can pretty much neglect the individual water molecules, but losing sight of individual people when using a collective term in political discourse is dangerous, as in it leads to bad policy and bad philosophy. The reason, of course, is simple; abstracting carelessly removes the thinker from reality. Individual human beings are the practical entities of reality in social situations, and when considering empirically sound, rational philosophies one must ultimately address these entities. If an abstraction cannot be traced back to reality, it should be rejected. The abstractions are not real in this sense, no more real than the number 3, or the sine function.
There is a similar problem in mathematics, speaking of which. Absolutely formally, all mathematical objects are actually things called "sets", or collections of mathematical objects (even the numbers are sets). All sets are written as collectors, i.e. {the x's such that -list of properties of x-}. Frequently these collectors can become very large to write, and so definitions, which in this case correspond to abstractions, are invented. That is, instead of writing out a big long collector that may take up 4 lines on my page, I'll just define that long thing to be named "BIG THING." Then whenever I want to talk about that long collector, instead of writing it out I just write "BIG THING" in its place. In this case there is no danger because I have a concrete definition of what "BIG THING" is, as in I can write "BIG THING = {"the big collector"}", and thus name all of the atomic parts that comprise it (the members of the collector). There is great danger in saying, for example, that I will define a thing called "TREE" which is "the collection of all trees". Such a thing is really undefined, nebulous, vague, and can be misinterpreted by many sources, since from that description alone I cannot write "TREE = ______". Such heuristic definitions in mathematics are often rejected because they are not reducible to the atoms of the system (members of sets).
As a more political example, when some guy says he thinks the "US" should bomb "Iran", his he really fully aware that his proposition involves some actual people murdering other people? No, the proposition is abstracted out of meaning, and its true meaning hidden under that abstraction. One cannot see that the proposition is inherently evil, immoral, and outrageous. I encourage those reading to consider this problem and just make sure, at the end of the day, you can break things back down to the atomic constituents and still be happy with your philosophy. I mean this on a personal level, as well as for when we share our thoughts, among ourselves and with others. It's something I believe all of us are guilty of forgetting.
Lastly, which goes without saying, too many layers of abstraction without rigorous foundation produces vague arguments (which is just a consequence of my original point, and the more important one). For example, say I defined a new object "FOREST" that was defined in terms of my previously undefined term "TREE". If I continued to operate in this way, things would just get worse, and worse, and worse...This is because the abstractions become harder to define the more numerous their parts.
Just what is America? - for example.
- TortoiseDream