From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Wed Jan 31 2007 - 13:33:27 EST
In reply to Rakesh: I do not know anything about Z.A. Jordan's biography, I think he was a Pole originally interested in maths, who branched out into sociology. His book on diamat contains a lot of useful information but I think it is not always accurate, and of course, a little bit dated nowadays. But his book influenced me considerably in my student years. In reply to Howard: Do the real forces impelling the things of the world, including human behavior, include unobservable entities not in themselves capable, even in principle, of experiential or practical verification, but verifiable only in their effects? Obviously I think so. The human mind is a good example of that. In e.g. astronomy also, entities are not infrequently postulated the existence of which is implied by what we know, even although we don't have a way yet of verifying that. If so, that is, if verifiable experiment does not offer direct sensory access to all of the causal forces actually operating in the world or in human life, then how is access possible at all except in function of theories which, insofar as they are at all complicated, become loosely systems of one sort or another, e.g. the theoretical system of quantum mechanics? Well, the theoretical extrapolation is still grounded at least to some extent in observables. Scientific statements, in contrast to metaphysical statements, are fallible statements (they could be wrong) and it is a requirement that at least in principle they are testable in some way with recourse to observables, even if currently we do not know how to do that yet. Popper had a point with his "bold hypotheses" but his falsification theory is wrong. Scientists do not mainly want to falsify theories, but instead generate useable knowledge, i.e. they seek mainly to confirm theories. Scientific statements are not necessarily falsifiable statements but rather fallible statements. There is I think nothing wrong with theoretical systems, indeed it can be a good thing if we are very systematic about our theories rather than slap-dash and eclectic, though there is also room for eclecticism, if we don't yet know exactly how to theorise something systematically. I think Marx's critique is not directed at theoretical systems per se, but at the processes by which they are built, i.e. how generalisations are arrived at. What he objected to was speculatively built theoretical systems with grand pretensions to the truth, ideological distortions, linguistic concoctions, vacuous generalisations etc. I'm interested in the reference to generalizations which go beyond verifiable experience as being 'philosophical abstractions'. Does the phrase 'philosophical abstraction' refer to concepts about the world only, say one ideological form or another, or can it refer to unobservable causal structures that function as forces impelling human or other natural behavior? I am not quite sure what you mean there. This is a tricky area, but I think it is really precisely an area which Marx was concerned with in his critiques. That is, the philosophers and political economists he was concerned with often juggled with concepts and through this claimed to arrive at the essence of unobservable structures. Yet he himself sifted critically through the actual concepts people had used, and related this to observable experience. You cannot directly observe "value" as such, but you can observe human valuations (prices, labour-hours, trading ratios, preferences, the rule of law, moral conduct etc.). But experience and logic can show that some concepts of value are better than others, in the given case, i.e. have more explanatory power. Notice I've asked a series of what seem to be philosophical questions. Yet there is nothing in the questions themselves or even in the answers one might be tempted to give to them that presupposes a commitment to any philosophical effort at all other than one fully continuous with the inquiries and methods of science. Well I cannot offer any easy "demarcation criterion" between science and philosophy, and as I said I think Marx & Engels were a bit too hasty in their dismissal of philosophising. Philosophy can free up your thinking and have an emancipatory effect. It can produce a useful cross-fertilisation of different scientific theories etc. Philosophy is often a meta-theory about something, which can be useful. Rather than say Marx rejected the philosophical mode of inquiry, I'd be more inclined to say that he foreshadowed today's sophisticated scientific realism. Well, that's probably fair comment. But really I think Marx himself was not very concerned with the question of whether there was a knowable, mind-independent world out there. He took that more or less for granted, he was increasingly concerned with how to obtain knowledge about it. This is clear from the second Thesis on Feuerbach: "The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth - i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question." Dialectical materialism offered a grand cosmology that provided a secular alternative to religious views. But this cosmology was largely metaphysical as well, i.e. presented in advance of scientific evidence as an infallible theory. It is true that all people operate with some metaphysical ideas, including scientists. But I think it is morally wrong to force you own metaphysical theory down other people's throats, this is a totalitarian idea that could amount to spiritual rape. People are entitled to their own metaphysical beliefs, just as they are entitled to criticize those beliefs. Stalin and Mao saw religion as an obstacle to modernisation, and tried to wipe it out. But in the process Marxism-Leninism became a state religion. And now that Marxism-Leninism is largely gone, people revert to other religions. Which is to say that modern humanists have not yet created a satisfactory secular interpretation of human spirituality, or maybe even fully understood the power of religion, i.e. the propensity of people to sway or be persuaded by, other people's metaphysical beliefs. Regards Jurriaan
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