Pannekoek’s theory of science

[twc]

In other words, anomaly is, in Hegelian terms, contradiction. It is the only source of dialectical change in a coherent/consistent theory. Otherwise a coherent/consistent theory remains static. Why should it change?We should welcome anomalous observation.

[ALB]

It was NOT Albert Einstein who wrote:

The German idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte circa 1800 did say “If theory conflicts with the facts, so much the worse for the facts.”   The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs in his “Tactics and Ethics” (1923) echoed the same quotation.

Apparently Lukacs did say something like this, but not the whole phrase, only the last part "so much the worse for the facts". At least this is how Leszek Kolalowski in his Main Currents of Marxism (not regarded, I know, as reliable as some here because he is an anti-communist) summarises Lukacs's view:

Quote:

Thus Marx's theory of revolution and socialism can be based only on a global understanding of society that cannot be achieved by any detailed, factual analysis. This is why opportunists and revisionists always appeal to facts, knowing that there is no logical transition from facts to the revolutionary transformation of society. Empiricism is the ideologjcal foundation of revisionism and reformism in the workers' movement. 'And every orthodox Marxist who realizes that the moment has come when capital is only an obstacle to production and that it is time to expropriate the exploiters, will reply in the words of Fichte, one of the greatest of the classical German philosophers, when vulgar Marxists adduce "facts" that appear to contradict the process: "So much the worse for the facts!'" (Tactics and Ethics, p. 30).Lukacs does not appear to have used this phrase elsewhere in his attacks on empiricism, but his attitude on the point remained unchanged. In History and Class-Consciousness he emphasizes that a theory which simply takes account of facts as they are directly given is, by the same token, locating itself within capitalist society. But to understand the meaning of facts is to situate them in a ‘conrete whole' and to discover the 'mediation' between them and the whole, which of course is not directly given. The truth of the part resides in the whole, and if each part is properly examined the whole can be discerned in it. (p.999) 

Personally i'm not too keen on Lukacs (too much of a Hegelian for my liking and also a super-Leninist with his theory that the party can encapsulate the consciousness of the whole working class), but the wikipedia entry seems unfair and would seem to be an attempt to discredit all Marxists as dogmatists whereas, as far as I can see, Lukacs was making the (valid) point (that we've been discussing here) that you can't understand isolated facts outside the context of the whole of which they are just a part.I don't know if Fichte was trying to make a similar point but I'm afraid German Classical philosophy is not my cup of tea.

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

Leszek Kolakowski wrote:

Thus Marx's theory of revolution and socialism can be based only on a global understanding of society that cannot be achieved by any detailed, factual analysis.

[my bold]No, No, NO!Kolakowski must tell us which theory he's employing which determines the 'facts' to be selected for this 'detailed, factual analysis' which prove that 'Marx's theory of revolution' 'cannot achieve'.From a 'Communist perspective', it can be based on an understanding that is achieved by a detailed, factual analysis.From an 'Anti-Communist perspective', it cannot be based on an understanding that is achieved by a detailed, factual analysis.The 'facts' will be chosen from the innumerable stream to fit the assumptions of the theoretical framework, as Pannekoek and Dietzgen argue. The human social subject cannot be removed from the process of generating 'knowledge'. On one hand, the 'stream' must contain the 'facts' to be 'selected', but, on the other, the selection of what is determined to be 'relevant' is done by humans, in their society, which means 'class cognition'.The 'theory will determine what can be observed', to echo Einstein.The position of the observer must be revealed.'Facts' do not present themselves unbidden to the impartial observer. That is naive realism.'Facts' are produced as part of a pre-existing social and theoretical framework.Kolakowski is an anti-Communist.If anyone wants to employ Kolakowski's theory of cognition, fine.But declare that one is doing so.

[LBird]

On the sun/earth debate, and the ‘social content’ of the truth of their relationship:

Ernest Untermann, Science and Revolution, pp. 7-8 wrote:

In this sense, then, I declare that my science is a proletarian science. Not that I do not appreciate what the bourgeois scientists of the past have accomplished, or what the bourgeois scientists of to-day are doing in the way of accumulating material for the storehouse of human knowledge. But proletarian science is the expression of the revolutionary fact that the proletariat has learned to think for itself, that it refuses to accept the teachings of members of other classes without critical reservation, that it prefers to think for itself in all other sciences as it does in economics and politics, that it interprets the facts of its terrestrial and cosmic environment as it sees them from its own standpoint.

[my bold]I expose my position: that of Marx, Pannekoek, Dietzgen and, now, Untermann.

[DJP]

OK fine, but that still doesn't explain how the facts of astronomy are relative to one's position in class society.And was Pannekoek a bourgeois scientist or a proletarian one? I'm guessing he was employed by the Dutch state…Like it or not but it seems to me you are a cognitive relativist….I agree that the content of a theory (it's facts) does determine what is observed and what is disregarded, but the absolute truth of the matter lies not within the theory itself or within those professing but out there in the real world, in nature. Whether or not we can ever fully grasp this truth is another matter…

[ALB]

LBird wrote:

ALB wrote:

Leszek Kolakowski wrote:

Thus Marx's theory of revolution and socialism can be based only on a global understanding of society that cannot be achieved by any detailed, factual analysis.

[my bold]No, No, NO!Kolakowski must tell us which theory he's employing which determines the 'facts' to be selected for this 'detailed, factual analysis' which prove that 'Marx's theory of revolution' 'cannot achieve'.

I think you've got the wrong end of the stick. Kolakowski is not giving his own views here, but is trying to summarise Lukacs's, from what I've read of Lukacs accurately enough. So who you are criticising here is not Kolalowski but Lukacs.I thought you might have agreed with Lukacs's criticism here of naive "empiricism" (what you've been calling "positivism"). Read again the passage I quoted from Kolakowski summarising Lukacs and see if you don't agree with Lukacs's view that isolated facts in themselves cannot be understood except as parts of a larger whole.

[ALB]

LBird wrote:

I expose my position: that of Marx, Pannekoek, Dietzgen and, now, Untermann.

While you're drumming up support what do you think of this article by Eugene Dietzgen, Joseph's son?http://i-studies.com/library/reviews/dietzgen.shtml

[twc]

Observation Precedes TheoryThe following discursive account of the quantum revolution of the 1920s perfectly exemplifies Kuhn’s theory of scientific paradigm shift, and strikingly reveals just what is and isn’t possible when people consciously set out to cause an [abstract] paradigm shift entirely in the world of ideas freed from concrete empiricism.Einstein somewhere implies that he created general relativity independently of observation.   So we’ll examine Einstein in a following post.Physicist Freeman Dyson, The World on a String, New York Review [May 13, 2004].

Dyson wrote:

In the 1920s, the golden age of quantum theory, the young revolutionaries were Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac, making their great discoveries at the age of twenty-five, and the old conservative was Ernest Rutherford, dismissing them with his famous statement, “They play games with their [abstract] symbols but we turn out the real [objective] facts of Nature.”   Rutherford was a great scientist, left behind by the [abstract] revolution that he had helped to bring about.   That is the normal state of affairs.[In the 1950s], the revolutionaries were old and the conservatives were young.   The old revolutionaries were Albert Einstein, Dirac, Heisenberg, Max Born, and Erwin Schrödinger.   Every one of them had a crazy [abstract] theory that he thought would be the key to understanding everything.Einstein had his unified field theory, Heisenberg had his fundamental length theory, Born had a new version of quantum theory that he called reciprocity, Schrödinger had a new version of Einstein’s unified field theory that he called the Final Affine Field Laws, and Dirac had a weird version of quantum theory in which every [quantum] state had probability of either ±2.Each of the five old men believed that physics needed another [abstract] revolution as profound as the quantum revolution that they had led twenty-five years earlier.   Each of them believed that his pet [abstract] idea was the crucial first step along a road that would lead to the next big [abstract] breakthrough.Young people like me saw all these famous old men making fools of themselves, and so we became [abstract] conservatives.   The chief young players then were Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman in America and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga in Japan.Anyone who knew Feynman might be surprised to hear him labeled an [abstract] conservative, but the label is accurate.   Feynman’s style was ebullient and wonderfully original, but the substance of his [abstract] science was [abstractly] conservative.   He and Schwinger and Tomonaga understood that the [abstract] physics they had inherited from the [abstract] quantum revolution was pretty good.The [abstract] physical ideas were basically correct.   They did not need to start another [abstract] revolution.   They only needed to take the existing [abstract] physical theories and clean up the [abstract] details.The result of our [abstract] efforts was the modern [abstract] theory of quantum electrodynamics, the theory that accurately [concretely] describes the way atoms and radiation behave.This [abstract] theory was a triumph of [abstract] conservatism.   We took the [abstract] theories that Dirac and Heisenberg had invented in the 1920s, and changed as little as possible to make the [abstract] theories [abstractly] self-consistent and user-friendly.[Concrete] Nature smiled on our [abstract] efforts.   When new [concrete] experiments were done to test the [abstract] theory, the [concrete] results agreed with the [abstract] theory to eleven decimal places.But the old [abstract] revolutionaries were still not convinced.After the [concrete] results of the first experiments had been announced, I brashly accosted Dirac and asked him whether he was happy with the big success of the [abstract] theory that he had created twenty-five years earlier.   Dirac, as usual, stayed silent for a while before replying.   “I might have thought that the new [abstact] ideas were correct,” he said, “if they had not been so ugly.”   That was the end of the conversation.Einstein too was unimpressed by our [concrete] success.   During the time that the young physicists at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton were deeply engaged in developing the new [abstract] electrodynamics, Einstein was working in the same building and walking every day past our windows on his way to and from the Institute.   He never came to our seminars and never asked us about our [abstract] work.   To the end of his life, he remained faithful to his [abstract] unified field theory.Looking back on this history, I feel no shame in being an [abstract] conservative today.   I belong to a generation that saw [abstract] conservatism triumph, and I remain faithful to our [abstract] ideals just as Einstein remained [abstractly] faithful to his.

[twc]

For those interested, the equation given in post #160 on http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/organisation-work-and-free-access?page=15 describes the standard [quantum] model of particles and their interactions.It is the current tidied up form of the revolutionary equations developed by the “revolutionary” physicists of the 1920s [previous post]: Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac and others, as fleshed out by their “conservative” followers Feynman and others.As with Marx for historical materialism [Kuhn for scientific theory, and Gould for natural evolution], stasis is the norm.   Revolution is the exception.   That is a constraint we must comprehend.

[LBird]

LBird wrote:

alanjjohnstone wrote:

I hope someone is going to eventually explain this thread to the rest of us in an easy to understand way so we know what it's all about

Yeah, absolutely!If these issues, complex though they appear, can't be explained to those without the requisite detailed reading to participate in this discussion at present, then we will have failed as Communists.The use of analogies, of situations with which comrades are familiar and already understand, must be employed to make these vital issues understandable and relevant to all Communists.I've had a discussion over the weekend with my son, and we're now of the opinion that computer programming methods might make this easier to understand. Are you familiar with 'programming' in any way ajj? If not, I'll have to get my thinking cap on, again!

In line with alanjjohnstone’s request for someone to try to ‘explain this thread to the rest of us in an easy to understand way so we know what it's all about’, and my suggestion that the world of computers might help, I’ll make an attempt to use the analogy of ‘building a computer system’. Of course, the problem with analogies is that, if they’re taken too literally, they obscure rather than illuminate the real issue. So, please bear this in mind, and ask questions if something seems to present a problem, rather than take something which is irrelevant to the explanation and erroneously try to follow that wrong turn and completely misunderstand.If we think of the process of building a computer system, say, for the NHS.The NHS really exists, prior to the attempt to build a computer system for it.The business analysts who ask questions of the doctors, nurses and administrators of the NHS to try to gain an understanding of the workings of the NHS, the system designers who interpret the analysis and produce a paper design of something which should work, the programmers who actively write the code following the design, and the testers who ensure that the code ‘works’ in line with the design, are all humans with pre-existing ideas, both of their own jobs, each others’ jobs, and the NHS itself. These humans have to extract relevant information from the NHS, actively design, write and use a plan reflecting the NHS.The end result of this human active process is a new product, an NHS Computer System, which in some way reflects the workings of the NHS, but is clearly not a ‘carbon copy’ of the NHS, but only a comprehensive attempt to replicate the features regarded as essential and relevant to the computer system.So, in terms of the separate entities of Schaff’s tripartite theory of cognition:the NHS is the ‘object’;the human analysts, designers, coders and testers, are the ‘subject’;the NHS Computer System is the ‘knowledge’.Is the System a ‘true’ reflection of the NHS? Yes, if it works as proposed.Is the System an identical copy of the NHS? Of course not. Another System could be built, produced by different analysts, designers, coders and testers, with different ideas about what the NHS is, and what purposes and interests the System should serve, and this second System can also be regarded as a ‘true reflection’ of the NHS, whilst still being different to the other ‘true reflection’ of the first System.As another example of this tripartite schema, perhaps posters remember DJP’s likening ‘nature’ (object) to ‘evidence’, and my response that ‘evidence’ instead was similar to ‘knowledge’ which had been selected from a ‘crime scene’. In this example, the ‘crime scene’ (object) forms the basis of an active examination by the legal offices (subject) who then build a case of evidence (knowledge).This is the cognitive method of science: scientists (subject) actively interrogate the universe (object) and employ the product (knowledge) to prove itself.Perhaps one could say that ‘knowledge’ is a representation accurate enough for the purposes of the producer. Thus, knowledge is formed by humans from the entity it represents for a reason, and the ability of the knowledge to be used for those reasons proves its accuracy.But… knowledge is not the object; knowledge is not an identical copy of object; knowledge is a selection made by an interested subject.I hope this all helps, comrades. I would appreciate some feedback from those readers who didn’t feel that they properly understood the more arcane parts of this thread, but that now they do (or don’t, as it may be).Of course, if it doesn’t work, or comrades disagree with the usefulness of the analogy, or comrades wish to explore further some things left implicit (relevant, interests, reasons, purposes, etc.), then we can continue to discuss.

[Brian]

Thanks for that.  However, it seems to me you are assuming that knowledge by default = understanding.  This is not always necessarily so because we have come across endless "scientific experts" who seem to possess the 'knowledge' but fail miserably when providing an understanding of that knowledge.  Indeed when they are reminded that change is a constant they visibly shrink at the thought that their 'knowledge'  could effectively become redundant with the paradigm shift in understanding.

[LBird]

Brian wrote:

Thanks for that. However, it seems to me you are assuming that knowledge by default = understanding. This is not always necessarily so because we have come across endless "scientific experts" who seem to possess the 'knowledge' but fail miserably when providing an understanding of that knowledge.

Thanks for the feedback.The issue of 'knowledge not equalling understanding', is I think, a problem with the bourgeois version of 'scientific knowledge'.Within a Communist society, where we would expect science to be a mass activity, then the idea of 'experts producing a knowledge that most don't understand' would not be allowed to prevail. We would expect our human science to be available to everybody. That is, a 'scientist' would be defined as someone who can explain. I suspect the few who can't explain would be regarded as 'mystics' of some sort.

Brian wrote:

Indeed when they are reminded that change is a constant they visibly shrink at the thought that their 'knowledge' could effectively become redundant with the paradigm shift in understanding.

[my bold]I don't think that Kuhn's ideology of 'paradigms' and their 'shifts' is the best one to employ. I prefer Lakatos' 'research programmes'. The essential difference, I think, is that 'paradigms' are in 'series', so that a later one replaces an earlier one (a 'shift'). In contrast, 'research programmes' are in 'parallel', so that more than one is usually operative at the same time.This can be seen in my argument earlier, that two 'computer systems' reflecting the same business can both be 'true' whilst at the same time being different.Broadly speaking, I'm in favour of multiplicities of choices and democratic decisions between them. This is essentially an 'anti-authoritarian' approach to human society. Unlike 'bourgeois science', which people quote as an authority that can't be questioned: 'as science tells us…' or 'we know from science…'. The assumption here is that science produces 'The Truth', which is always an identical copy of the object. As I've tried to show, this can't be done, and amounts to 19th century positivism.

[DJP]

Earlier on in the discussion an SPGB education bulletin on science was mentioned. It has now been transcribed and uploaded here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/science-and-socialist

[LBird]

Some notable extracts from DJP's link, which shed some light on our discussions on this thread, I think.

SPGB wrote:

Why then should we reserve a privileged place for science? Why exempt physical science, one of the cultural products which capitalism finds most useful, from this analysis? What else can science be but the creation of social actors in definite historical circumstances?

Relevant to our 'sun/earth' debate? That the 'truth' of their orbits is a 'creation of social actors in definite historical circumstances'. The 'sun going round the earth' was true for those in the 17th century, for their concrete purposes.

SPGB wrote:

Here defenders of the conventional view of science have little choice but to assert that there is no science except the current orthodoxy. They must accept a creed which glorifies the science of now and, in a most unhistorical way, deny that anything can be learned from the past, for it is all error to them.

And again? The 'orthodox' argument that what's 'true' now (earth goes round the sun) was 'true' then. 'A most unhistorical way', of conceiving science, knowledge and truth?

SPGB wrote:

"A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost”, said A.N.Whitehead the mathematician. Such historical forgetfulness is a necessary condition for a science which is held to be the sacred truth to which all classes can appeal. But, with each change of theory, when the last lot of founders are forgotten, it requires that the picture of the world as seen by the scientists must change. Yet each generation tries to project its theories as being consistent, coherent and complete – scientific.

Yes, 'science' as 'classless sacred truth'. TINA. An authority outside of our democratic control.

[twc]

LBird wrote:

I don't think that Kuhn's ideology of 'paradigms' and their 'shifts' is the best one to employ.  I prefer Lakatos' 'research programmes'.  The essential difference, I think, is that 'paradigms' are in 'series', so that a later one replaces an earlier one (a 'shift'). In contrast, 'research programmes' are in 'parallel', so that more than one is usually operative at the same time.

False.  Kuhnian paradigms, such as general relativity and quantum mechanics have no choice but to work in parallel.  Nobody convincingly yet knows how to unite them inside a common framework.Furthermore, Lakatos totally agreed that science progresses through successive paradigms.  He never challenged Kuhn’s revolutionary insight.  Rather it became the rock-solid foundation of his future thoughts on scientific practice.The discovery of scientific paradigms was, in its own Kuhnian terms, revolutionary science.  The deliberate invention of Lakatos’s research programs was, in Kuhnian terms, normal science, conducted inside Kuhn’s new conceptual framework.Why normal science?Firstly, because participation in a Lakatosian research program demands absolute allegiance to its hard core [abstract] principles.  However, that’s not even normal science, but trivial science.  It is a scientific necessity that was radically discovered and established over two millennia ago, and handed down to us by Euclid.  Nobody has ever seriously doubted it since.[Well, not nobody.  The rabid Popperian Fuller maligns such allegiance to principles as Kuhnian dictatorship.]Secondly, Lakatos’s research program accepts that the Kuhnian paradigm has effectively demolished Popperian falsification.But Lakatos wants to resurrect falsification in a new [post-Kuhnian] form inside his constructed research programs.  Popper’s disciple is not prepared to give up his master’s celebrated falsificationism without a fight.So Lakatos’s whole research program is an exercise conducted in the shadow of Kuhn’s paradigms precisely because they demolished comforting falsifiability.  Lakatos can never repudiate Kuhn’s paradigms without removing the ground on which he stands.Paradigms are the very edifices he seeks to amend.  Oh yes, he accepts them alright.To put it in this thread’s terminology:  the Kuhnian paradigm is Lakatos’s [abstract] object of cognition.But Lakatos has a higher allegiance than to his mentor and that is to his own past, that he must now come to terms with.  So Lakatos invents aberrant research programs as a mechanism for smuggling Popperian falsificationism into Kuhnian paradigms through the back door after Kuhn has gently but firmly shut the front door.So Lakatos’s research programs admit auxiliary hypotheses that are to be considered as non-binding ad hoc expendable [abstract] principles — kite flying exercises — to handle anomalous evidence.What an amazingly brilliant discovery — enough to immortalize a man!  Except that this is a well-known, but often dubious, practice for handling anomaly since science began.  When crisis mounts, this fringe practice ceases to be the exception, and increasingly takes centre stage, announcing itself as none other than Kuhnian revolutionary science.Lakatosian auxiliary hypotheses can’t even be dignified as normal science because they’re in part an overt endorsement of the unstoppable, but totally speculative, scientific practice which always goes on at the fringes of normal science.This Lakatosian endorsement of fringe speculative practice, of course, aligns with Popperian views of what normal scientific practice ought to be.  Popper, the revolutionary, lives on in Lakatos.One can’t help being reminded of the 1950s aging revolutionaries Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac enjoying themselves in lofty isolation within their scientific dotage, ever willing on [abstract] revolution when there was none to foment.Their younger contemporaries like Feynman simply rejected the speculative Lakatosian research programs of their former heroes, accepted the Kuhnian paradigm, got on with it, and gave us modern particle physics, modern cosmology — our modern universe.And Lakatos has the intellectual hide to accuse that miraculous achievement — ancient epicyclic astronomy — of being pseudo science, precisely because it necessarily behaved like his flexible research programs, but under totally different historical circumstances.And, of course, this is the very same Lakatos whose effulgent scientific acumen shines through his agreement, with his mentor Popper, that Darwinian evolution is not scientific to the exacting standards of the normally speculative Dr Lakatos.Poor modest Kuhn fled the field he plowed, leaving it to the grand egotists Lakatos and Feyerabend to pitch their tents upon their own precious patches of the field.  No sooner had Lakatos permitted formal flexibility, than Feyerabend ripped into it by pointing out that, in revolutionary science, formality be damned — “anything goes”.And the social sciences ignorantly lapped it all up, discovering in Kuhnian paradigms, as filtered through his speculative successors, ready-made support for “revolutionary” post-modernism.  We are all “revolutionaries” now, just like Popper, Lakatos and Feyerabend told us to be!It was Marx, Kuhn and Gould who pointed out that stasis [a social formation, a scientific framework, a species] is the norm, and revolution is the exception [social revolution, paradigm shift, speciation].But, to return to Lakatos.  Just suppose he did manage to salvage falsifiability, doesn’t that circumvent the need for clumsy exogenous democracy?Lakatos’s falsifiability criterion, if it’s any good, should circumvent the need for any democratic adjudication.  And, if Lakatos’s falsifiability isn’t any good, so also aren’t his research programs either, for they were constructed to bring post-Kuhnian falsifiability back into science.[Note.  Everyone recognizes that a closed system comprised of a manageably countable number of components is a suitable domain for naive falsifiability.That is how a car mechanic decides what’s wrong with the engine, how a software engineer can debug a program, how some birds can tell if an egg is missingBut an open system, or a closed one with an enormous number of components, is a domain that defeats naive falsifiability, simply because it can’t be examined within a humanly feasible time frame.]

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