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Just Plain Wrong: Assumptions

We're The Great Old Ones Now

13:28 / 07.06.02

Following on from the Derrida thread: can you have assumptions which are not 'wrong' by virtue of being assumptions? What does 'wrong' mean, given the difficulty of a definition of 'knowledge'? List your correct assumptions...

13:32 / 07.06.02

As I said in that thread, if you question your assumptions at a sufficiently fundamental level then the concept of "wrong" is not well defined.

12:37 / 08.06.02

Wrong and right being assumptions in and of themselves of course, this is a profoundly difficult question to answer. I imagine people could make a case for mathematics not being wrong in as much as everything within it is a tremendously complex and useful set of tautologies - a self-defining system with implications outside itself that may or may not be true.

There's a gripping piece of Derrida on truth in which he argues that the concept itself has tremendous power and utility - that it's a kind of mechanism that DOES things - but that it does not 'mean' what it claims to mean. I think assumptions and truth in this context are very similar - a claim to truth refers to some kind of unknowable reality with a bit of plausibility and likelihood mixed in too.

In a sense every assumption isn't 'wrong' nor 'right' but functionally useful and consistent within a system of human language and comprehension that we cannot escape without becoming inhuman. The warring engines of Derridean deconstruction would probably demonstrate the interdependence of right and wrong in human ideation - locate our comprehension of our absolutes within this space, and then suggest an attempt at a state of continual flux and movement of concept and assumption... So in a sense, every assumption would always be right (useful in a context) and wrong (useless in a context) and the trick would be generation of continual new assumptions etc.

Or to take a completely different tactic - perhaps one could refer to assumptions in the same way as we do theories - for every effect there are an infinity of potential causes - a multiplicity of spectra of explanations. This being the case assumptions can never be proven, only disproven - meaning in essence that there will never be a theory that you can claim to be right, only theories that you can one by one label 'wrong'.

02:11 / 11.06.02

This being the case assumptions can never be proven, only disproven - meaning in essence that there will never be a theory that you can claim to be right, only theories that you can one by one label 'wrong'.

Wouldn't that be more 'found to be less likely'? If an assumption cannot be proven, then it cannot be 'proven' to be false. More a process of "I believe this now more than that".

07:14 / 11.06.02

This is all linguistics, no? It all depends on your definition of "assumption" and "wrong."

Right?

I feel that if you call anything wrong, whether it's an assumption or a blatant statement, you should also be aware that it is right, right and wrong simultaneously, neither right nor wrong, neither right nor wrong yet still right and wrong simultaneously, etc. etc. etc. We're talking yin and yang everything/nothing all one big chaotic relative nothingness/everythingness here. An enlightenment of the wider spectrum and the "we all have our own realities and perceptions" deal. We're communicating through language, right? (wrong!) So as long as we realize our assumptions about what is "right" and what is "wrong" are relative, we should assumptionimize on. Because if I think something is "right," it is right. For me. It's also everything else, including wrong and meainingless. I'm simply choosing to focus on how it is "right."

17:10 / 11.06.02

what she said.

in logic, there is "right" and "wrong," but it doesn't matter as much as "valid" and "invalid".

I think "assumption" probably belongs in the same realm of meaning as "validity" - the realm where it's all about whether your thought-machine is working, rather than where your thought-machine is taking you.

09:35 / 12.06.02

Saying it's all linguistics is a bit of a strange thing to say, since most of Derrida's work is an extension from work that was itself an extension of Structural Linguistics. So yes. It is.

13:13 / 12.06.02

I feel that if you call anything wrong, whether it's an assumption or a blatant statement, you should also be aware that it is right, right and wrong simultaneously, neither right nor wrong, neither right nor wrong yet still right and wrong simultaneously, etc. etc. etc. We're talking yin and yang everything/nothing all one big chaotic relative nothingness/everythingness here.

Unmitigated nonsense invoking a widely misunderstood mystical philosophy is still unmitigated nonsense, it just has an irritating veneer of cultural ignorance.

In what way is every statement simultaneously 'right' and 'wrong'? No quantum answers, please. Are you suggesting that the entire universe is malleable, or that language is fundamentally incapable of expressing accurate descriptions of it? Or that there is no such thing as 'truth'? Or making the rather more banal claim that a statement about context, taken out of context, is meaningless?

If everything is as relative as you say, we're back to square one, and we just have to make it up or drown in inaction and incommensurability and non-communication.

16:39 / 12.06.02

it's fucking wrong to hurt people, and the more you hurt them the more wrong it is. deconstruction be damned on this one.

17:02 / 12.06.02

I assume you don’t really hold the position that it’s wrong to give someone a tattoo. Or to break up with someone who needs you obsessively. Or to use violence to stop someone from tortuting a cat.

17:08 / 12.06.02

It doesn’t bother me to think that right and wrong are subjective and conditional judgements. My best analogy for a moral code is a piano keyboard. No single key is inherently wrong to play in all circumstances, and no key is always correct. One has to create a harmonious whole.

Is morality ultimately an aesthetic judgement? Perhaps.

19:11 / 12.06.02

what i mean is that the broad deconstructive thought pattern has now completely drifted into our social consciousness that no one seems capable of deciding their way out of a paper bag, much less a global moral dillema. george bush's actions, his undecideability, his wavering back and forth between stances on israel and the environment are starting to come across like a baudrillard book. there's absolutely no moral backbone in leadership anymore, no one has a fucking clue what's right or wrong, and seeing everything from all possible side may simply not be the answer.

in the global political apocalypse we've got cooking now, we really need to start judging what's right and wrong, because every seems to just be shooting into the darkness and hoping it's ok. we can see things from the palestinians' side, from the isaelis' side, from the corporate executives' side, from the eco side -- we can smugly and cleverly understand the relative value of all these sides up until we're all fucking exterminated, and there are no sides.

yes, of course it's wrong to use violence to stop someone from hurting a cat. and to break someone's heart. it's wrong, and you do it anyway, because you judge that something else is of more value and so you make a decision. at the end of the day, you acted as if there's decideability, you have to negotiate the fact that you've done wrong while hopefully trying to do good. so why pretend it's a sementic / relativistic problem?

23:20 / 12.06.02

george bush's actions, his undecideability, his wavering back and forth between stances on israel and the environment are starting to come across like a baudrillard book. there's absolutely no moral backbone in leadership anymore, no one has a fucking clue what's right or wrong, and seeing everything from all possible side may simply not be the answer.

This is an interesting reading of GB's actions. I don't think he's wavering over israel at all, its a mess there and there are no easy answers. And lets not forget it not just what GB thinks that becomes policy (thank god), there are a multitude of competing interests that go into the formulation of US foreign policy.

As to moral backbone. Whose morals? Are you talking about white anglo-saxon protestant morals? Or white irish catholic morals? How about eastern european orthodox morals? Muslim morals? Buddhist morals? Shinto morals?

I would much prefer an ethical government than a 'moral' government.

in the global political apocalypse we've got cooking now, we really need to start judging what's right and wrong, because every seems to just be shooting into the darkness and hoping it's ok. we can see things from the palestinians' side, from the isaelis' side, from the corporate executives' side, from the eco side -- we can smugly and cleverly understand the relative value of all these sides up until we're all fucking exterminated, and there are no sides.

So what are you saying? Let's take sides, decide that various people are wrong and take action against them. Isn't that what the 'war on terror' is all about? Seeing in colour is too hard, black and white is easy so let's do that! I hardly think people are smug in the comprehension of multiple perspectives and I don't see how this is worse than pretending that other perspectives are not relevant in the hope of achieveing action.

I think I know what your trying to say. About how pure relativism can disable critical thought. But let's not throw baby with bathwater. Both have their place.

23:53 / 12.06.02

i'm trying on a new belief. i have in the past been a totally relativistic, infinitely deconstructive type... and i'm realizing that it's very easy to adopt and play with those concepts when you are not being tested. havent had to make serious ethical choices in my life, i've only had to imagine what it would be like to make them. most americans seem to exist in this mental place of sincerely believing they are good people without ever having to find out, under pressure and crisis, if this is true. adhereing the the american conception of what is good, the general population seems to believe that freedom is the most important value, and that expression in personal action of that freedom is the ethical expression of that good.

which leads to a lot of rhetoric these days from people who say that giving up SUVs in an absurd reponse to the energy problem and the middle east. if someone were to say we have to make an strong ethical judgement here and force people to give things up for the greater good, it would be countered by the assumption that "freedom" is being given up. the flaw, obviously, revolves around the question of "freedom for whom"

i'm trying, for the sake of the question posed at the top of this thread, to claim an assumption that is true. maybe it's a mistake to be limiting my understanding here to ethics -- maybe the sort of assumptions that work better are "mathematics is universally true" or something. but i'm thinking about the value of assumptions in general -- i think assumptions are things that you act on, not things that you debate the truth value of. those latter things are "arguments" or postulates" or "givens" -- assumptions seem to have a human, emotional characteristic, and are generally the cause of both wars and solutions to wars. and derrida doesn't seem able to touch that, because his political work comes in after the fact, looking at actions that have already been taking and showing how there is dissonance between their stated goal and their outcome.

20:03 / 30.06.02

it's fucking wrong to hurt people, and the more you hurt them the more wrong it is. deconstruction be damned on this one.

Actually, 'deconstruction' has said exactly that, loudly, clearly, and repeatedly.

What do you mean by Derrida's political work coming after the fact, btw?