Scott and dialectics

[MSalter1@aol.com]

<<  MICHAEL Well, and following Adorno, I have learned to be very suspicious
of
 > attempts to settle substantive issues by definitional means, most of all
in
 > the area of dialectics. Adorno is spot on when he (following Hegel's
prewface
 > to the PofS) insists that step by step phenomenological "demonstration"
from
 > the bottom up must precede real definition; and that top-down
 > general/abstract definitions are as much part of the problem as a
solution.
 
STEVE replies 

 Alas, Michael, I see the relationship between phenomenological
 demonstrations and definitions/theory as dialectical and am
 unwilling to give priority to either. But perhaps in a practical
 sense it is right that I as an academic be especially cognizant
 of the former since I get (and give) so much of the latter! 

 Best,
 Steve >>

MICHAEL RE-REPLIES

But, both of us refuse to reduce the topics of our analysis to either

1/. phenomenogical demonstration (some nominal / provisional "definition"
must already be presupposed in order to even identify let alone delimit the
borders of the field)  or
2/. a dogmatically imposed, supposedly universal and self-sufficient
"definition" whose fixed "identity" , from the outset, prescribes the
signifiance of all mere empirical/experiential content which is subsumed
under it.

Then we are still at a prelimary stage of dialectics. Here the either/or-ism
of the underlying dualism is still implicitly "framing" our analysis; the
movement from either/or (understood as a reduction to one of two mutually
exclusive and positive contraries, e.g., abstract definition vs. concrete
experiential demonstration ) to a more reflexive neither/nor position is
coherent. The latter stage prescribes the limits of "negative contraries" and
which seems to characterise Steve's quite appropriate response "refusing to
priorities either". 

This movement certainly takes us some way forward. But it only takes us some
way forward towards fulfilling the possibility of "dialectics" in a more
fulsome sense, i.e.,as a concrete way of doing empirical research, as
distinct from simply adopting a abstractly universal theoretical stance
definable as a "method" at the outset "free" of any empirical references.

By the way has civility suddenly broken out? 

Michael