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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (78648)	3/1/2003 5:03:20 PM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Frank, I don't think one can make a case that's a certainty True. The world is contingent. The further from the present, the more contingent or vague is our knowlege, prediction, etc. Degrees of probability are what we get. There are also requirements for action, such as ethical parameters, which must be considered. Such arguments have to be cobbling various things together and... Discussion of Foreign Affairs depends from cobbling together of, hopefully, related information. It helps if the 'descriptions', and 'propositions' deriving from them, are well embedded in reality or, in other words, reasonably close to 'true'. and arguing (a) a revolutionary situation exists based on the cobbled pieces and (b) an Iraq invasion by the US tips the balance (guessing beyond the cobbles). It's the ultimate version of the sorites problem and it's where we see a direct application of philosophy to "real life." Foreign affairs discussion can helpfully be seen as a large series of propositions and arguments. That there be as few as possible errors of description and logic, I think is helpful because an accumulation of small errors can lead to mistaken conclusions and sometimes mistaken action and tragedy. This is why I criticized, for instance, the author's take on terrorism as propaganda-by-action. 9/11 is a symbolic act but his take on the nature of the symbol, the interpretation of it, the response to it, and the intent of the authors seemed flawed. We're probably going to have to "guess" anyway, so it's best that we do it on the basis of least flawed description and logic. I think I've a lot to say about this. Most of it wrong, so I'm going to garden for a while.