Scott,
We do all sorts of carrying on here, including about philosophy. But I agree
with you and Michael P that it is best done in a civil manner, although as
you see I often fail in that respect.
>
>This is sort of what I was getting at; we are looking at positivism pretty
>much from different sides of the fence. (No wonder we disagree about so
>much!) I would argue that dialectical materialism also has a great respect
>for natural science and the scientific method (or methods!--since they are
>not precisely the same in all the sciences).
I don't think much of the diamat. I love Hegel, and study his dialectics
with care, but the Diamat seems to me, well, undialectical as well as fairly
uninteresting in its own right. At least the Diamat of former official
Soviet philosophy was dreary and dull, and the versions refracted into
Englsih by Cornforth and other aficianados of the Soviet version seem
unilluminating.
Of course there was Lysenko, but
>then he wasn't much of a Marxist OR a biologist.
But Lysenko wasn't the only instance of the politicization science in the
FSU.
And while some people place
>dialectic logic in opposition to formal logic, I do not.
They're not even the same subject matter. Hegel's Logic is a kind of
metaphysics, concerned with necessary relations among concepts like Being
and Essence. Formal mathemartical logic is a branch of mathematics concerned
with logical relations among propositions/
I agree with the
>importance of empirical evidence in support of one's theories (and indeed
>that practice is primary over theory) and the importance of formal logic
>and
>general rationality. I don't think the view of the logical positivists (and
>apparently all other positivists too), that they were basing their outlook
>and methods more on science than any previous philosophy, is justified.
I don't think the LPs thought they were; they were especially concerned with
natural science and in particular modern physics as a form of knowledge, and
they were frustrated with the endless repetitions and dead ends of
traditional metaphysics. They also imagined that their practice was more
like that of scientists--working on discrete, cleraly defined problems,
rather than putting forward global theories. In that regard they were right,
but it's not clear that is the best approach to philosophy. Certainly it is
not the only valid one.
It is
>important to remember that many philosophies SAY they are scientific, or
>even
>the MOST scientific. (Heck, even the Creationists say that!) But this is
>something for actual practice to demonstrate, not simply something to be
>proclaimed by people.
Well, not so. At least not in the modern sense. Wissenschaftlich, e.g.,
doesn't mean "like what physicists do"; in Hegel it means rigorous and
necessary knowledge.
>
>Marxism also believes that many traditional philosophical debates were of
>little or no value, and in fact has a whole theory of ideology to explain
>why
>such debates were (and usually still are) typically conducted in
>purposefully
>obscurantist language.
Sure.
>
>You also mention in your paragraph above the "positivist's skepticism about
>sharp differences between the study of humans and the rest of nature". Is
>that what you meant to say?
Yes. For example, Neurath founded a series on The Unity of Science, which
published, among other things, Kuhn's Scientific Revolutions book. The Unity
of Science, methodologically and practically, is a key positivist tenet.
>It sounds more like the Marxist view to me.
Well, Neurath was a Marxist, and most of the main LPs were radical
socialists sympathetic to Marxist ideas, partly because of Neurath's
influence.
In
>general, non-Marxist philosophies tend to be quite skeptical about the
>possibilities for a science of society and history, which Marxism, of
>course,
>claims to provide.
>
Depends on the non-Marxist philosophy. Old-fashioned Comtean Positivism,
Millean empiricism, Weberian and Durkheimian sociolology, structuralism, and
plain old bourgeois economics, political science, and sociology all claim to
offer scientific analyses of society, just to name a few.
I don't think that Wittgenstein's vague
>sympathies for the Soviet Union count for much in his philosophy, however.
>I
>see no signs of Marxism in either his early or later philosophies. Indeed,
>I
>wonder if he was very familiar with Marxist ideas at all.
It's possible that his later philosophy was influenced by Marxist ideas. He
acknowledges the influence of Piero Sraffa, a very distinguished
neo-Ricardan economist, and a hard core Stalinist, in the beginning of the
Phil Investigations. The turn towards the social in the later W may reflect
this influence. I agree that it is rather attenuated.
. You call Russell a "radical
>socialist". I don't know what you mean by that. How exactly was he so
>radical? Wasn't he actually just an ordinary, Fabian-style social democrat?
God no. He dispised those people and their ideas and believed in rabble
rousing a
>I view Marxism itself as a scientifically
>oriented philosophy,
I agree.
>and Marxism is not positivism (even if Neurath thought
>so!).
Well, some Marxism is positivist--Neurath's, for example. There is a
tradition of lefts cholarship that views 2d International MArxism as fairly
positivistic in the old sense--not LP, of course! And GA Cohen's
revitalization of the 2d I's theory of history is pretty positivist. In your
broad sense, analytical Marxism is positivist.
I am trying to get away
>from the whole idea which you seem to be championing, that logical
>positivism
>is the center of the positivist universe, the only real and true form of
>positivism. We Marxists just don't look at it that way.
Right, it's just what I know most about. I think, though, that if you have
an alternative notion of P you have to put it on the table, and it has to
respect the distinctions people draw, for example, it can't make Popper a
positivist.
>
>We view Popper as a positivist because we see him do things that epitomize
>what we call positivism--not what you, or Otto Neurath may have called
>positivism. For example, he denies that a science of society or history is
>even possible.
But, as I have explained, this is not a positivist doctrine. On the
contrary. Comte, Mill, and Hempel, to name three, leaving aside Neurath,
believed that social science was possible and prettys imilar
methodologically to natural science. It's actually an antipositivist trope
coming out of Hegel and going into the Geisteswissenschaften debate that
denies the possibility of social science, mainly.
Who "we"? Marxists? You can't speak for all Marxists. Many of the disagree
with you.
>That is actually an extreme case of opposition to scientific
>theorizing, and that is one of the central characteristics of positivism as
>we use the term.
And as a pragmatist influenced by logical positivism, I abhor philosophical
arguments that some or other form of empirical knowledge is "impossible." I
wrote a dissertation attacking that sort of argument, and defending the
possibility of a scentific study of human behavior. So I'm not a positivist
in your broad sense?
> What term would you use for views like that?
Views that argue on philosophical grounds against the possibility of social
science? Metaphysical (thus showing my positivist roots), a priorist. Not
positivist.
>I did not say that Lenin is the "last
>word" on anything, but just that his 'Materialism and Empirio-criticism'
>"is
>a great book, well worth reading today,
It's worth reading. It's OK, It has many bad arguments and crude mistakes
mixed in with some good stuff.
and shows in many ways a profundity
>that professional bourgeois philosophers cannot possibly comprehend". It is
>especially important for those who are weak in their appreciation of
>materialism--as in fact all positivists are.
What do you mean by "materialism" and what is it to be "weak in appreciating
it"? Rejecting it? Thinking it's meaningless? By the way, Popper is a hard
core metaphysical realist,a nd thinks that the positivist rejection of the
meaningfulness of talk about the reality of the external world is very
confused.
>
>You know, it is a strange thing about philosophy that many views were
>devastatingly destroyed--from a theoretical perspective, anyway--before
>they
>ever became popular. Epicurus, for example, invented the "problem of evil"
>which shows that the Christian God is a logical impossibility (given the
>patently obvious fact that there is evil in the world), long before
>Christianity itself even arose!
But the theologians did not fail to appreciate the point, and have various
rejoinders, many of them subtle and interesting.
Lenin's 1908 book similarly shoots down a
>number of idealist views which actually became more popular much later on.
Not, however, the LP's views.
>
>You say Lenin's book can't be relevant to logical positivism which only
>arose
>in the 1930's.
No, just that it can't be said to adequately refute LP, which it does not
engage. To the extent that it engages Mach, who held views similar to some
the LP's developed, it does not do so adequately. Lenin claims that Mach is
really a Berkeleyean idealist. This charge cannot be credibly levelled
against the LPs, for reasons I have explained.
>
>(An aside: The San Francisco Public Library threw out tens of thousands of
>"old useless, obsolete books" when it moved into its new building a few
>years
>back. Marxist and political books about Russia and China were especially
>selected for dumping. No doubt they would agree that there cannot possibly
>be
>much of interest and contemporary relevance in the writings of a man who
>died
>in 1924. [OK, I'm sorry. I know that is not quite what you are saying. But
>it
>does suggest a certain affinity...])
This is a slander. I am a Marx scholar who publishes on Marxism.
>
>>
>Er, I hate to say this yet again, but we are not much concerned with
>logical
>positivism specifically.
That "we" again.
>It is precisely the general sins of LP, which are
>also sins of Mach and Avernarius and lots of others, that we Marxists are
>concerned to criticize. The fact that we criticize them all together
>because
>they share these same general views, does not mean that we think that there
>are no differences between them. We just do not CARE much about those
>differences.
Some Marxists, not all. And what common views, besides the supposed
rejection of the science of society, which in fact most positivists do not
reject?
There are plenty of
>people, who we lump under the name "positivists", and who include Popper,
>who
>do in fact take a hostile line toward scientific theorization--especially
>in
>areas where they do not have their own theories to champion.
But Popper was not hostile to scientific theory. He wasn't even hostile to
social science. He just thought--as many social scientists do--that it
couldn't be predictive or involve general laws.
MI really don't think the case
>is that much different with LP, but if it is then I apologize for lumping
>them with Popper.
Read Hempel's essay on Explanation in History.
>> > --jks
> >
>
>I beg to differ. They were entirely philosophical. (And Einstein's Brownian
>motion paper was not published until 1905, if memory serves. Are you really
>saying it was reasonable to doubt the existence of atoms up until then?!)
You are mistaken. You are thinking of the paper on special relativity. And
yes, I do think it was reasonable to doubt the existence of atoms until
Einstein had proved, empirically, that they exist--a demonstration for which
he won the Nobel Prize in physics.
>
>According to Jeremy Bernstein's introduction to a new edition of Mach's
>"Popular Scientific Lectures", "After Mach's death on February 19, 1916,
>his
>son Ludwig found the following passage among his father's papers: 'I do not
>consider the Newtonian principles as completed and perfect; yet in my old
>age, I can accept the theory of relativity just as little as I can accept
>the
>existence of atoms and other such dogma.'" So perhaps Mach's prior
>admission
>that he might have been wrong in denying the existence of atoms was not
>entirely sincere.
We don't know when this paper was dated. But it's not uncommon for people to
have difficultya ccepting new ideas. Einstein himself refusedto accept
quantum theory. "God does not play with dice!" he said, because he could not
reconcile himself to a nondeterministic universe. That was a genuinely
philosophical objection, and not a scientific one.
>
>Mach, more so than most other positivists, was something of a doctrinaire
>nut.
>
This is just crude. Mach was a brilliant and distinguished physicist and a
very able amateur philosopher whose philosophy of science was very fruitful
in laying the groundwork for relativity theory.
>
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