The Practical Dependency and Context of Qualification

arsenic to the dessert offered to B) qualifies as being some other fact (e.g. of murder), the only answer I can give to it is negative.

Notionally, qualification can be understood in a meaningful way

4 1 POPPER (1959), p. 423.

only and exclusively as the description of a historically well-defined practice (e.g. as the usual characterization of an event at a given time and place by a given community). In this sense, qualification is a proposition formulated as true or false on another statement. At the same time, by its linguistic formulation, qualifica-tion disanthropomorphizes into events with added meaning, what are in fact coincidental series of individual human acts based upon a series of separate evaluation, the occurrence and the given combination of which is far from being necessary. For instance, to qualify a manipulation with arsenic as murder means only and exclusively that some given members of the given community (i.e. a majority or at least a dominant part of them) are used to qualify the given act in the given way at the given time and place.

Consequently, the question whether manipulation with arsenic is or is not murder here and now can be answered only and exclusively through the manipulation being qualified, that is, by the stand taken by human decision, which constitutes the linkage in question by the way of propositional transformation.

(Of course, any such linkage is also, for the most part, to be justified by the community—either through a special procedure or in the due course of communication. Reference to past practice and to historically justified tradition has a decisive part to play in justification. Needless to say that reference to practice is not equal to practice referred to. It follows that practice referred to cannot be taken as a criterium by itself. Moreover, it cannot even be considered in itself as abstracted from the overall practice of justification.)

Now, it can be stated at this point of analysis: in case of non-equivalent transformation, events do not classify but become classified. What do I have in mind when I refer to non-equival-ency and lack of reciprocity? Transformability is not an issue of what is to be transformed into a more general or differentiated menial representation. In other words: the mental representation into which the transformation is to be made does not entail the menial representation from which the transformation has been made. (Neither the chemical "facticity" of the composition of a

compound, nor the biological "facticity" of the end of life has in itself anything to do with what we regard as murder in the community here and now. Or, similarly, to define what is meant by "book" with the limitation of the minimum number of printed pages will only serve as a definition of another definition. It will not respond to the original question of what is meant by "book"

and, consequently, it will not offer a solution to the everyday routine problem met by any cataloguing librarian. In the same way, the well-known compound of oxygen and hydrogen is good only for the chemical definition of water. It fails to provide an answer for the nuclear problem of heavy water or for the diffe-rentiation of meteoric water, rainwater and drinking water. For any further question can only be answered through its own fonnalizing-simplifying definition, without offering any dif-ferentiation in another direction.)

Accordingly, equivalency can only be found in relationship between entities established by abstract, conceptual definidon.

That is, between mathematical and logical classes, between their quantitative conceptual derivations. For instance, if I define that

"A added to B is equal to C", then A added to B will be equal to C indeed, by the only and exclusive force of my definition. It is to be noted, however, that even in such a case there will remain some ambiguity. For instance, I can weigh anything by the swing of the balance beam. But how may I interpret the result upon the basis of this definition if the excursion is due to the balance's breakdown, to the change of centrifugal force or to the interven-tion of magnetic force? Similarly, in average cases of forensic medicine, quantifying methods may perform quite a good job. But how is it to be interpreted if the proven degree of alcoholic concentration in the blood (which is the notional criterium of drunkenness) is caused by some non-alcoholic compound, maybe not even bound to cause a dazed stale?

All this explanation is meant to emphasize how constitutive and genuinely creative the operations of non-equivalent trans-formation are, i.e. operations that form the core of any human cognitive process. It is to say that human cognition is entirely

embedded in the social practice of man. It is why it is, both in whole and in any part of it, justifiable only as part of social practice, definable within social totality.

Human cognition displays at the same time a disanthropomor-phizing tendency. This tendency is basically directed at conceal-ing its actual anthropomorphous tendency, i.e. the fact that cognition is a result of individual human activity—which is, in its turn, a function of social practice. In other words, disanthro-pomorphization aims at homogenizing cognition in order to lift it out of its underlying practical heterogeneity. Accordingly, cognition is at no level "a quasi photographic, mechanically adequate copying of reality". Human mental representation is notwithstanding a kind of copying, a kind of copying which is, both "in regard of its determination" and "of its concrete tendency", inseparable, "genetically speaking, from the social reproduction of life, originally, from human labour".^{4 8} To be sure, the social determination of human cognition is not synony-mous with its deformation or mechanical dependency. Social environment is to be understood simply as its medium. Lukacs cites the example of wind to describe the apparent paradox lying in the fact that "the wind will only become the subject of social objectification in a given concrete process" (that is, the percep-tion of its qualities, their comparison with other qualities, and also their evaluation "are only thinkable within this complex of existence"), on the one hand, while the features in question qualify "as the ones they are in this connection in a manner which is objective and not subjective", on the other.⁴' That is to say, all the features we can at all perceive at the various levels of analysis are objective and also praxis-dependent. For it is human practice that guarantees the objectivity of cognition by estab-lishing, through continued feedback, a relative unity in its tendencies.

LUKACS (1971) II, p. 38.

Idem, pp. 355-356.

3.6. Descriptivity Excluded from the Normative Sphere