JKS writes: > Ages ago I went to one of those Rethinking Marxism > conferences at UMAss Amherst, got into a conversationw > itha Resnick & Wolff student about someone, I forget > what, but it was a or involved a question of empirical > fact that I didn't know the answer to. So I suggested > taht to find out we see if someone had conducted a > study or done a survey or something of the sort. The > young man reacted with horror. "But that's > empiricism!" said he.
that's funny -- and rings very true. Their theory says that everything depends on everything else and that (basically) nothing is more important than anything else. So the only way to settle any question would be through empirical research. Some go that way, but some dwell in the realm of abstraction and the constant critique of others for "essentialism" or "reductionism." Jim D.
