[OPE] Bhaskar as Marx's method?

Dave,

I did not propose a "binary characterization of entities being 'true' or
'false'". Nothing what I said refers to this. What I said was that either an
entity exists, or it doesn't exist, it cannot ordinarily both exist and not
exist at the same time.

We can then hypothesize that it does exist, and find some empirical
corroboration for this, without being able to prove definitely that it does
exist.

A bona fide scientist will then say, "I think it exists, but in truth I
don't know for sure". A pseudoscientist will say "dialectically, the math
proves it is there". That's the difference.

Sure, you can construct an elegant metaphor and test out the quantitative
implications of the metaphor, but there is no guarantee it captures anything
about reality. A model is not a theory. A model is a likeness, an
isopmorphism, a simplifying analogy for some of the features of the subject
studied. A theory provides an in-depth, comprehensive causal explanation.

I am very wel aware that, in the words of your favourite elite philosopher
Althusser "there is no innocent reading". The problem though is that most of
the existing literature of Marx's Capital Vol. 3 does not even respect the
intention of Marx's analysis; falsely presents the arguments made; and
blithely disregards the text when it's inconvenient to the interpretation
being made. This can be proved without any shred of doubt, simply by
relating what is being claimed by the "interpreters" to the original sources
themselves.

This includes Althusser himself, incidentally, who - as Scott Hamilton
notes - admitted in his autobiography The Future Lasts A Long Time that he
never read most of Marx, let alone Hegel; got his best ideas by
'eavesdropping' on graduate students in university cafeterias; and invented
some of the quotes and references in his most famous works. In fact, the
"heroes" of the Left all turn out to be very dubious weirdos on closer
inspection, who don't really have much knowledge of Marx at all. I am
supposed to respect these people even though they are a bunch of quacks and
charlatans!

I don't really think though there is anything I could write, that could
dislodge the many false Marxist-Leninist and New Left interpretations of
Marx. I think that with some ideas, they just have to die off, i.e. they die
off because the generation that fervently believes in those ideas dies off.
In the history of the human species, the Neanderthals finaly died out, and
homo sapiens developed further and evolved. In the same way, the ideas of
the New Marxist Exploiting Class, the parasitic knowledge bureaucrats, is a
"dead end" for social science. The spectacle is just that people still try
to breathe new life into the old crap, even when it is plain as day that it
is crap.

Jurriaan

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Received on Thu Feb 10 12:50:00 2011