[FRIAM] On telos- was: When are telic attributions appropriate in physical descriptions?

[glen]

Nick and I had a lengthy argument about the ambiguity in telicity. He sticking to his conception that telicity is indicated by objectives, purpose, desire, etc. Me sticking to my conception that telicity is (merely) anything posed in consideration of a final state.

Whether the conversation's about Ukraine as a conflux of monists cleansing the land of pluralists or, as Eric emphasizes, providing narrative scaffolding (like a state with which one might identify), the gist is the same: What is the *scope* of the causal agents? And is there a heterarchy of causal scopes? Or are there primary (then secondary, tertiary, ...) scopes?

Such arguments must (yes, must) End up in arguments about free will, determinism, and the ontological status of stochasticity, as long as there's no shared value system amongst the discussants that includes a metaphysical commitment to (or against) the primacy of randomness. A clever method for denying randomness without sacrificing the distinction between the two conceptions of telicity is to commit to Lewisian possible worlds (or the weaker concept of parallel universes). But in all cases ruled by humility and agnosticism, pluralism is the winner; and any type of monism is the loser.

Either telicity can be disambiguated by allowing for false objectives (those aspired to but not obtained, via ignorance, limited understanding) *or* by allowing for a manipulable/controllable universe (via limited power).

And because this post is already too long, I'll tell a story. At Friday's Salon, a fellow anarcho-syndicalist argued that holding shares via a market in a publicly traded company is strongly analogous to betting on the final state of a roulette wheel. I tried, and failed, to point out that the market is co-constructed by not only the players of the game, but the co-evolving environment in which the game is played. So it's nothing like a roulette wheel, at all, which is painstakingly engineered to be "fair", with minimal friction mechanisms and whatnot. But his (meta)narrative was way too strong. He's infected by the lefty rhetoric that the stock market is Just a rent-seeking form of gambling and the dividends come purely from the exploitation of the wage slaves. I even brought up recent news of shareholder rebellions (Tesla, Exxon, ...) as evidence that publicly traded companies may be "better" than privately held companies. In the end, it made me more skeptical of his commitment to syndicalism. >8^D


On 8/10/24 21:36, Santafe wrote:
> Quick comment from me, not to the direct point in this post, which I like too, but on something about Snyder which I learned (just off-hand) from a colleague within the past 2 weeks.
> 
> These ideas about the language of inevitability as one of the devices of tyrants was, I think, argued in much the same terms by Hannah Arendt, and Snyder continues in that framework, continuing to test and develop it.
> 
> What I learned is that he expanded another of her ideas in a place she didn’t get to.
> 
> This question of whether ethno-states are the only long-term attractor forms for states is being tested again in this era, to a degree it never really was before.  Somewhat in the early 20th century, but the notion that rights-based states would fill the world was still nascent then.
> 
> Arendt argues that the “universal rights of man” were articulated at a time when the number and sizes of groups of stateless people was on the rise.  But at the end of the various competitions, this notion of “man” was diaphanous enough that these supposed “rights” didn’t actually protect anybody who wasn’t already being protected by a state under its charter.  The waves of the stateless was both a human calamity in its own terms, but also a source of stress that the totalitarians were able to use to activate the masses into motion in “the movements” as she calls them.  She even called the Israel-Palestine disaster exactly, right away at the beginning of its formation.  Saying that, because Europe had never properly corrected its problem of generating stateless people, it then exported that problem to the middle east by constructing a new class of stateless people, now the Palestinian Arabs.  Much else, of course, has always been ongoing in the region, with its local 
> interests and competitions, of course, so one doesn’t want to seek one-factor analyses.  But this one factor, for the part it plays, seems exactly rightly articulated by her, to me.
> 
> What the colleague told me is that Snyder wanted to check whether this was a good argument, and followed it up by a comparison of the situation of Romanian Jews, who were given statehood, to the many others who were not, through the era of the two world wars.  He concludes that Arendt’s analysis is a good one, though there were other stresses in Romania at the time that make deconvolving the various threads of causation something one has to put in work to do.
> 
> I like these kinds of work put in by historians, when they are done really well.
> 
> Eric
> 
> 
> 
>> On Aug 11, 2024, at 5:46, Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I appreciate Timothy's warning for why historians should be sensitive to the use of telic political exposition. That is, he shows why defining telos in terms of finality or pre-determination is both useful and important. In the lecture, Timothy describes a well-known tyrant's *love letter* to a nation, which I find strangely reminiscent of Frank Booth's threat to Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet. The telos expressed is one of inevitability. Timothy warns:
>>
>> "When a tyrant makes an argument for how history *has to be*, then some of the forces that are actually resonant in history get classified as being ahistorical or nonhistorical or exotic or alien."
>>
>> He then elaborates on how this Tyrant's premise and derived predicates lead to a logic of ethnic cleansing, a foundation or a rationale for war. I have just started the lecture series. I hope it remains this rich. For those interested, the lecture is queued to where this post is intended to be a reference.
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_&index=1&t=720s <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_&index=1&t=720s>
>>
>> While I am personally appalled at what is happening in Ukraine, I am not intending to post here on politics. I am interested in Timothy's modelling of the argument, how important it is to his argument that one does not erase human agency when describing human history. His perspective reminds me of why it is important to know *for what use* a person fixes the meaning of a word like telos.

-- 
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ