Friday, November 02, 2012

A Response to [T]he Barefootbum

So I've become a bit excited over reading Larry at The Barefootbum, and what a way to get back into this whole blogging thing again then to tray and do something I've never really done here before... You know, politics... No doubt I'm getting myself into a world of shit, but what the hell, I like to learn....

See Larry's post HERE. His words in blue below, my comments in black.

From the top:
“Social constructions are socially and subjectively created facts: a social construction labels some entity that exists only in the minds of (most) people in society. The most obvious example of a social construction is an agreement between two people. The agreement itself does not name any entity in the external, objective world (the physical world that does not include our minds); it names just the fact that some particular mental state is shared between the two people.”

I’m not so sure this distinction works all the way through. You’re explicitly making a mind-matter distinction as it relates to social constructs. So when you say:

“Ownership, as distinct from possession, is a social construct. Ownership might reference possession, but ownership and possession are different concepts. Possession is a physical fact; ownership is a shared idea…”

You’re essentially saying because possession has some phenomenal characteristic that it’s objective and therefore not a construct, but the “essence” of possession (or so it seems). But there too this defines possession rather narrowly as merely the appearance of (let’s say) person “X” having something in their hand. How, though, is that any less of a social construct? In a way this tugs a bit at the “found vs. made” distinction where one would like to say, “we created the idea of a banking system, but the idea of a rock in hand is a phenomenon that was always there whether or not there was anyone there to make that distinction.” But the world (even though it may cause us to think, believe and say certain things) doesn’t supply us the reasons for thinking, believing, and saying certain things, we do. As such I’m really not sure that we can make any sense of the distinction and would argue that possession is every bit a social construct as ownership is. From there the difference between ownership and possession is a bit trivial in that possession is just the adjective we apply to persons who have things but don’t own things; it’s merely the application of either-or social convention. So the question here would be, how is “possession” any less a shared fact than “ownership” once we get rid of the distinction that there are subjective facts vs. objective facts? Why should we want to make that distinction?

So when you continue on to say:
“Even were we to all agree that possession, and only possession, entails ownership, possession would label the physical fact of having some object in a person's physical control, an external fact; ownership would label the ideas in our minds that physical possession was legitimate.”

Well, I’d argue that no, it’s only because you’re creating a distinction between “external facts” and “social conventions” that’s leading you to such a conclusion. If both are merely separate social conventions for two separate ideas, then conflating the two wouldn’t make sense for other reason outside of the external/internal distinction.

Next you state:
“Libertarianism (with absentee ownership) defines a specific social construction of ownership, one that does not correspond to possession.”

This seems rather trivial though. Why state “specific”? Why should ownership entail possession?

Continued:
“As best I can figure out, Libertarianism establishes ownership as only the unbroken chain of voluntary transfer of property from the original creator to the current owner, and the near-absolute power of the owners of property to use, not use, or destroy that property as they please.”

My open question to myself is, “what’s wrong with that?” Suppose that (and I imagine this is going to be the case in most cases) we’re talking about rental property. Why would a person get themselves involved in a social contract with an individual who has absentee ownership when your temporary “possession” of that property isn’t assured by anything?

Moving on you state:
“It's more difficult to decide between social constructions than external referents. Both are, in a sense, socially created (e.g. we have simply agreed that the word "mass" refers to an object's tendency to resist acceleration), but a social construction does not refer to anything in the external world, and we cannot distinguish between conflicting social constructions directly on a scientific basis.”

I’m not sure I really follow you here. Perhaps it’s the other way around in that you’re giving more to the word possession than it should really have? But even before that I don’t see how it’s more difficult to decide between “social constructs” and “external referents” because the difference between the two relates to a distinction I don’t think we can make any sense out of. You refer to scientific evidence as though we can “scientifically prove” that Bob posses “X” by virtue (for example) of just testing it out with our eyes as though testing for ownership by looking at a Title or Deed would be any different. The difference has to do with how we define the social construct, not that one is “objective” and one is “subjective”.

You state:
“Hence the oft-repeated question: why should we prefer to legitimatize the Libertarian social construction of ownership to alternative social constructions of ownership?”

This would make sense only if we can make sense of the distinction between internal and external, and I don’t think we can.

So when you continue:
“It cannot be that the Libertarian construction is scientifically determinable, because "ownership comes from the unbroken voluntary transfer from the original creator" does not directly reference anything in the external world”

I would suggest that it doesn’t make any sense to say that it’s scientifically determinable, or that it even should be. That’s a distinction that you’re creating, although perhaps at the same time that’s what Libertarians would like to argue. I certainly wouldn’t.

To be continued…..

8 comments:

  1. As I mentioned over at my blog, I'm not really sure what you're objecting to.

    Do you believe there are no differences between our ideas about the physical, external world, and our moral/political/ideological ideas?

    If so, which way do you go? Do you believe our moral/political/ideological ideas are just as physically referential as our ideas about the physical world? Or do you believe the other way, that our ideas about the physical world are free of meaningful referents?

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  2. Yeah, I have to admit that I don't find that purely physical definition of ownership to be particularly coherent, nor do I think that its relationship with ownership has been accurately identified.

    To wit: when is something "some object in a person's physical control"? Does that mean that I can decide to immediately control that object? If so, at any given moment I probably only possess my clothes. I certainly wouldn't possess, say, the glass of water on the table next to me, because I have to reach over to it before I can physically control it. But then if you start to extend my domain of possession, as it were, then other people are going to possess my stuff at the same time that I do, and vice versa, and things start to get really confusing. Or, even better, say that I'm on my computer looking at a website that allows me to remotely control a camera in Japan - do I, therefore, possess the camera? Maybe in some sense or other, I guess, but it's not a clean answer one way or the other.

    The next problem is this: "ownership would label the ideas in our minds that physical possession was legitimate." That can't possibly be right, because I own all sorts of things that are not currently in my physical control - and, as in the case of the remote-controlled camera, I also fail to own some things that are in (some degree of) my legitimate physical control.

    Some of this can be resolved with fuzzy logic - though at what cost to what comes later, I don't know. But some of it just seems really fundamentally misguided.

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  3. Larry,
    you state:
    "Do you believe there are no differences between our ideas about the physical, external world, and our moral/political/ideological ideas?"

    Not to the degree that we can split the differences in the manner that you do.

    As to:
    "If so, which way do you go? Do you believe our moral/political/ideological ideas are just as physically referential as our ideas about the physical world? Or do you believe the other way, that our ideas about the physical world are free of meaningful referents?"

    What I would say is that "physically referential" has no special status beyond the rhetorical and that all of our thinking is necessarily causal. The world causes us to believe in political ideas just as it causes us to believe in scientific ones. Saying that one is "physically referential" and that another isn't calls into question two things for me, A.) if the other isn’t physically referential, than what’s the causal referent, and B.) If one has the special status of being physically referential, then what are the grounds by which we justify its truth that doesn’t beg the question.?

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  4. Sorry, Andrew, I still have no idea where you stand here.

    Do you believe there's a real world outside our minds? Do you think we can have beliefs about that external world that are in some broad sense either correct or mistaken? Why or why not?

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  5. My underlying point in the discussion is that Libertarians use our intuition about ordinary physical property that we typically (broadly speaking) physically possess (and typically need for a reasonably comfortable life) and extend those intuition to property that's owned abstractly.

    With all good luck, we will avoid the philosophically weak idea that if there is no perfect bright line between two categories (i.e. there are ambiguous or equivocal instances where the correct categories cannot be determined) then the categories are identical.

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  6. Well, okay...

    "With all good luck, we will avoid the philosophically weak idea that if there is no perfect bright line between two categories (i.e. there are ambiguous or equivocal instances where the correct categories cannot be determined) then the categories are identical."

    ...sure. But I'm not the one who said that "a social construction does not refer to anything in the external world." That seems like an awfully bright and liney kind of statement, not much amenable to ambiguity or equivocation.

    For instance: it sure seems to wreck the idea that ownership ("legitimate possession") is a social construction, because the "possession" part of "legitimate possession" has been stipulated to be a "thing in the external world." Again, I'm perfectly happy to say that there are some things that are more socially constructed than others, where the degree of social construction is the degree to which the concept depends on human input instead of (other) physical input, but an immediate consequence of that is that social constructs can and do "refer to anything in the external world."

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  7. Larry, you state:
    “Do you believe there's a real world outside our minds?”

    Of Course.

    Then:
    “Do you think we can have beliefs about that external world that are in some broad sense either correct or mistaken?”

    Well, I’m a “words are tools” and “beliefs are habits of action” sorta guy. This question sort of tugs at the idea that the world contains all the facts or speaks a certain language that we’re all supposed to interpret, therefore believing something wrong about the world becomes a matter of misinterpreting the world – and I think that’s a bit nonsensical. I mean sure, I think we can have beliefs that are incorrect, but not about the world specifically in itself as the truths we speak are relative to an audience and exist within a certain context. To go another way, I had said earlier that the world may cause us to have beliefs, but it doesn’t supply us with the reasons for having the beliefs we do. I mean the world may have caused you to believe that you’ve seen a cow (and it was really a horse), but it didn’t supply you with the reason for that belief which could just be that now, since I’ve moved to Colorado, I was baked. On the other hand it could just be that where you come from that’s what you call horses.

    So then when you come down here and say:
    “My underlying point in the discussion is that Libertarians use our intuition about ordinary physical property that we typically (broadly speaking) physically possess (and typically need for a reasonably comfortable life) and extend those intuition to property that's owned abstractly.”

    Okay, so I guess I just don’t really understand what you mean by abstract ownership and physical property. For example, I own a house where I live with my wife and kids. Do I physically own that house, or do I just own it abstractly? Suppose to that in town I own a few houses that I rent out (top and bottom) to some people (and that’s my main source of income). Do I physically own those houses, or do I just own them abstractly? Again, I don’t think we can make any sense out of this idea that there’s some “real / physical / intuitively driven ownership” on the one hand, and on the other this abstract thing. Ownership is simply what we define it as being. If you want to say something like, physical ownership means that I actually reside in the place I own, where abstract ownership means that I don’t actually reside in the place I own, perhaps that would be a better distinction. However the ownership in both of these cases is still contractual and still socially constructed. Thereto, I don’t think our intuitions on ownership have anything to do with physically residing anyway (if that’s what you mean) and everything to do with contractual ownership (i.e. I own this or that thing because I have the deed, or the title, or the receipt, etc. it doesn’t matter where it physically resides and/or if I’m ever around it).

    You seem to want to make this distinction so that you can say something later (or because it’s consistent with) your socialist sentiments (which I’m not totally against at the moment, so no dig there). In other words we should do away with this abstract thingy (because it’s abstract) and only have this other physical thing, which ultimately becomes that thing owned physically by the state. But that only works if your distinction works that only physical ownership should matter because it’s somehow objective and not a social construct.

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