From: brian@quake.sylmar.ca.us (Brian K. Yoder)
Subject: Re: Philosophy 101
Organization: Quake Public Access
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1992 11:19:00 GMT

In article <1992Oct7.024522.12603@panix.com> gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>| gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>| > My existence is dependent on being in a society.  Human beings
>| > are extremely social animals.  Very few of us could survive in
>| > isolation from human society.  And without language, a tool
>| > or mental organ that does not exist apart from society, I
>| > could certainly not conceive of political or philosophical
>| > ideas, much less post them on Usenet.  I could make free
>| > judgments, perhaps, about which banana to pluck....

>thant@void.esd.sgi.com (Thant Tessman) writes:
>| A methodological nit to pick:
>| From Human_Action by Ludwig von Mises:
 
>| Praxeology deals with the actions of individual men.  It is only in the
>| further course of its inquiries that cognition of human cooperation is
>| attained and social action is treated as a special case of the more
>| universal category of human action as such.  ...

>I wouldn't call this a nit, I'd call it a separate subject.

On the contrary, I think he's restating the same issue.  If you think that 
"society" can learn, make decisions, etc.  How can that occur outside of
individuals having such a capacity?

>Brian Yoder was, I thought, denying the existence or
>signficance of collectivities.  

Oh come on.  You know very well that wasn't what I was talking about.  
There are certainly such things as groups of people, and they do have
some "significance".  The point of all this was that individuals are not 
cognitive cogs in the social machine replicating ideas learned by others.
Individual people can make individual observations and reach individual 
judgements outside any determination by "social conditioning".  What started
all of this was that someone denied one of my statements by asserting that
I couldn't help having such ideas because my "culture" wouldn't allow
anything else.  I pointed out that my posession of free will contradicts 
that assertion.

>I was reminding him of some
>of them, not denying the existence or significance of 
>individuals or "The Individual."

I didn't deny that I get some benefits from living in society, but that has 
nothing to do with the subject here.  The point at issue is whether I can
think for myself or not.  Whether I can buy a loaf of bread easier than I
can bake one myself is neither controversial nor the subject of this thread.

>However, I would disagree with von Mises.  To my mind, in
>doing science or philosophy, one starts with what is before
>one.  When studying gasses, Science did not start with
>molecules or quarks, although these surely underly the gas
>and explain much of its behavior.  Gasses were studied long
>before molecules were understood.

What a lame argument.  What is directly perceivable in terms of understanding
humans and social relations is INDIVIDUALS, not groups.  How could you hope
to explain anything at all about political movements, religion, markets,
families, and other institutions without knowing anything about individuals
(things like ideas, desires, psychology, biology, etc.)? To what ends do you
consider these collective entities act?  By what means?  To have anything 
intelligent to say about either of these, you have to know a lot about
individuals.  In particular, you need to presuppose that you, and individual,
are competent to investigate the question and arrive at a correct answer.
If you cannot do so, your conclusions are worthless.  If you CAN reach any
worthwhile conclusions, then this contradicts the conclusion, and thus 
shows an error.  You can't win. 

>We have a much better idea of individuals, however, so they
>present themselves to us _at_the_same_time_ as their
>collectivities.  

Can you not even conceive of an individual apart from his collective
relationships?  Apples always present themselves to us _at_the_same_time_
as their gravitational relationships to various heavenly bodies too, but
that doesn't mean that apples have to be understood outside of their 
"fruity" nature.

>And there is no point -- to me -- in saying
>one has to start with one, and go to the other.  The fact
>that a human being can belong to a number of collectivities
>at once does not seem crucial to me, just as it is not
>crucial that a collectivity can persist even if all the
>individuals in it are replaced.

Since cognition is an activity that ONLY individuals engage in, it cannot
be understood in a social context.  That is not to say that cognition 
never has anything to do with social relationships (for example, we learn 
some things from others), but it does mean than understanding what thought
is and how it works through the study of collectives is about as fruitful ;-)
as trying to understand the taste of an apply by observing it's gravitational
relationships.

--Brian