>>Now is scientific practice 'revolutionary practice'? Will 'revolutionary practice' inform scientific practice? Well, one of the purposes of my blog, if you'll check its archive, is to track the breakdown of rationality in decaying bourgeois society, including the sciences and especially their popularization, as they strain at the cutting edge of their theories and problems--cosmology, evolutionary psychology (sociobiology), cognitive science, artificial intelligence--and begin to disintegrate at the limits of their world-conception. But no philosophy can dictate a positive way forward; it can only exercise a critical and thematic function. As for the relation between political revolution and a revolution in prevailing scientific orientations, there is a diffuse, general relationship in that felt dissatisfaction and need for alternatives may lead to rethinking of assumptions and changes of direction, but the specific 'revolutionary practice' in science must be intrinsically related to its own development. The changes in orientation that are societally broad as well as specifically cognitive must include a challenge to the vacillation within bourgeois thought between positivism and mysticism. << Comment I actually believe this is very well stated. "But no philosophy can dictate a positive way forward; it can only exercise a critical and thematic function." >From time to time on this list, the general development of Marx method of inquiry and its presuppositions, have riveted around arguments concerning how the concepts of quantity and quality are presented for instance. I have registered my "positive critique" - if you will, on this matter and proposed reformulating the meaning of the dialectic of quantify and quality as "the qualitative addition or emergence of a new quality, halts the development of the process - any process, on the old basis." I do not consider such formations as being within the field of philosophy but rather observation. Such formulations and exposition are markedly different from presentation during the Stalin era or what you refer to as Stalinism and what I reference as the standard Soviet presentation bookmarked with the 1937 Textbook of Marxist Philosophy. There is of course the presentation of the conceptual meaning of antagonism. My approach is different that the exposition in the 1937 Textbook, which is generally refereed to as an industrial form of dialectics. On and off I have tried to present an exposition form of the most general law of emergence and why the human eye can only see that which has emerged. This means that we are observing the second phase of a process because we are really incapable of seeing emergence, although one can generalize and make a general prediction based on available material. One cannot synthesis or achieve this kind of thinking on the basis of revolutionary practice or simply the experience of property because intellectual activity is by definition a different process taking place in correspondence with - not an expression of, an environment. Soviet experience cannot clarify the dialectic. Rather, increasing clarity on application of the meaning of dieletrics - in light of the scientific advance, clarify Soviet experience. Practice, knowledge, more practice, more knowledge is a rather primitive concept of cognitive functioning, reasoning and the learning curve. No slight meant to Chairman Mao and his Four Essays on Philosophy, which really just mimic the 1937 Textbook of Marxist Philosophy, but not as good for the time frame in which it was produced. I believe the landmark achievement of applied dialectics, as the living story of society moving in class antagonism, is the propositions that the two basic classes of a social system are never free to overthrow it and cannot overthrow the system of which they constitute. Something else must happen - emerge, that undermines, unravels and brings to a halt expansion of the social system of which the two basic classes constitute, on the old basis and then . . . only then does an epoch of social revolution begins. As far as I am concerned this completes Marx vision of society moving in class antagonism and its meaning. It is this actual movement of things - the revolution in the mode of production rather than Soviet practice, that defines the meaning of antagonism as distinct from class conflict and class struggle. Melvin P.
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