From: Ian Wright (wrighti@ACM.ORG)
Date: Mon Dec 19 2005 - 20:16:39 EST
Hi Howard, One small observation regarding overdetermination and Freud. Freud made enormous strides in ontology. He began as a kind of neuro-physicist, but rejected the idea that what we can see when we open up brains exhausts the ontology of the mind. His creative modelling efforts to identify an embryonic information processing level of description (id, ego, super-ego, libidinal energy etc.) that attempts to explain various clinical phenomena, such as repression, are not only quite brilliant, but also primarily about conjecturing the existence of underlying mechanisms to account for visible behaviour, the stream of events. Freud's methodology and work is not at all connected to the idea of "constituitive causality", if that means there is no depth, no levels, no enduring dispositions and essences. One of his great scientific achievements was precisely to posit a hitherto hidden depth and verticality -- the unconscious, a collection of hidden agencies responsible for various surface phenomena. -Ian.
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