Meta-contexts

Following up on this post, from this IPS post in the pomo/complexity thread:

Cilliars' article "Complexity, deconstruction and relativism" is instructive is confronting the ill-informed arguments of relativism and performative contradiction within a complexity frame. This passage reveals the hidden positivist and objectivist (i.e., formal) assumption of the argument, one I examined in the real/false reason thread.

"The performative contradiction is predicated on the assumption that one can adequately distinguish between the performative and the locutionary levels, and, in the terms Habermas uses to criticize Derrida, between logic and rhetoric. However, in order to make this distinction clearly, one would need to take in a position that can characterize what is being said from an external vantage point. In the language of complexity, that would mean that one has access to a framework that is not the result of a strategic choice, i.e. some objective meta-framework. This is exactly what the view from complexity is sceptical about."

We see the same formal, objectivist assumptions underlying the mathematical model of hierarchical complexity as well as the "restricted" chaos theorists. Again, see the real/false reason thread.


Note the word "meta-framework." Now if that term is contexualized to mean just one framework looking at another one, even one that is more comprehensive, then that's acceptable. Of course, we'd have to define how it is more comprehensive, and again, in what contexts and to whom. But who or what decides which context is ultimately more comprehensive? The kennilingus meta-framework, as well as the MHC, also posit an absolute, objective meta-frame like satori or Platonic ideals outside of all relative contexts and which grounds them ultimately. And therein lies the metaphysical rub, both east and west.

From Women, Fire and Dangerous Things:

"The classical theory of categories provides a link between objectivist metaphysics and and set-theoretical models.... Objectivist metaphysics goes beyond the metaphysics of basic realism...[which] merely assumes that there is a reality of some sort.... It additionally assumes that reality is correctly and completely structured in a way that can be modeled by set-theoretic models" (159).

He argues that this arises from the correspondence-representation model, aka formal reasoning.