Pannekoek’s theory of science

[ALB]

Just read the account in today's Times about the incident in Russia, where an argument about the 18th century German philosopher Kant ended in a shooting, which DJP has already drawn our attention to. It says that Kant

Quote:

revolutionised Western philosophy by examining how the mind constructs our knowledge of the natural world and probing the limits of our empirical understanding of that world (…) Kant explains how reason makes experience possible by imposing structure on the data that our senses provide [emphasis added]

So this discussion does have some relevance to contemporary events after all.

[alanjjohnstone]

As i said in previous post i seek out the practical implications of this debate on truth and facts and knowledge. I came across this report that when it comes to politics, facts and truth and knowledge are of little concern. “People who said the economy was the most important issue to them, and who disapproved of Obama’s economic record, were shown a graph of nonfarm employment over the prior year – a rising line, adding about a million jobs.  They were asked whether the number of people with jobs had gone up, down or stayed about the same.  Many, looking straight at the graph, said down. Some people were asked to interpret a table of numbers about whether a skin cream reduced rashes, and some people were asked to interpret a different table – containing the same numbers – about whether a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns reduced crime.  Kahan found that when the numbers in the table conflicted with people’s positions on gun control, they couldn’t do the math right, though they could when the subject was skin cream.  The bleakest finding was that the more advanced that people’s math skills were, the more likely it was that their political views, whether liberal or conservative, made them less able to solve the math problem.” Perception trumps reality!! If it indeed “truth” coalesces with your politics, the Sun does goes around the Earth – the maths will prove it!   http://www.alternet.org/media/most-depressing-discovery-about-brain-ever Now the issue is how we combat such ideas  “If you spend a few minutes affirming your self-worth, you’re more likely to say that the number of jobs increased.” Therefore Brian is right that our activity must be postive and less negative.We don’t need to know how bad the world is, Left or Right we know it from direct experience. What we need to do is raise consciousness by raising confidence. Which always brings me back to the Solidarity statement . “Meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases the confidence, the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self-activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, their cynicism, their differentiation through hierarchy, their alienation, their reliance on others to do things for them and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others – even by those allegedly acting on their behalf.” Just bringing this debate back down to Earth 

[ALB]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

Just bringing this debate back down to Earth

Interesting, but it won't work.

[DJP]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

Perception trumps reality!!If it indeed “truth” coalesces with your politics, the Sun does goes around the Earth – the maths will prove it!   http://www.alternet.org/media/most-depressing-discovery-about-brain-ever Now the issue is how we combat such ideas

 What you are talking about are cognitive biases, this area of research has only really taken off in the last 20 or 30 years. It seems evolution has equipped us with brains that primed for jumping to conclusions and liking to be proved right.There’s been quite a few bestselling popular science books on this topic in the last few years, my favourites are “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman and “The Invisible Gorilla” by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons.People who are discussing ideas should be as aware of these as they are logical fallacies.

[twc]

Marx and Schaff

LBird wrote:

'theory' must precede 'practice', otherwise how do we account for the moment of 'selection'?

The answer is, of course, practice!

Hegel (Smaller Logic) wrote:

Such a doctrine would find its parallel, if we had said that eating was impossible before we had acquired a knowledge of the chemical, botanical and zoological characters of our food; and that we must delay digestion until we had finished the study of anatomy and physiology.

Why Schaff gets it WrongBefore society has the freedom to theorize, it is compelled to practice.  It must practically reproduce its own conditions of existence.Schaff forgets that his own privileged academic freedom to ‘select’ whatever theoretical object of cognition he so desires, rests upon the social unfreedom that removes this freedom of selection from the working class.Instead, the working class, which performs the indispensable practice of reproducing society, spends its working life cognizing objects that are thrust upon it by its ruling class.Consequently the working class’s objects of cognition are not of its own freely active ‘selection’.  To that extent, the working class can be said to start out as reluctant passive selector of its objects of cognition.In the course of performing society’s necessary social labour on behalf of the whole of society [including performing privileged Schaff’s social quota for him] the working class is forced to settle for cognizing objects that directly oppose its desires.Of course, the working class must eventually come to actively cognize its alien capitalist objects of cognition out of social necessity for its own survival as a working class.  But those objects themselves are not there to be cognized in the working class’s direct interest but in the indirect interests of the capitalist class.To consider working-class cognition as comprising “moments of selection”, informed by ‘theory’, is to abuse the terms selection and theory.  Theirs are moments of taking orders, subservient to expanding capital.  ‘Prior theory’ turns out to be post-festum rationalization of class rule.Nature’s CompulsionBefore man has a chance to theorize what he’s doing, he must act to reproduce his conditions of existence.This compulsion holds for all living creatures — even those unconscious ones and those stationary ones that are rooted to the spot, like limpets.  It is nature’s dominance over life, or life’s dependence upon nature.The most that man can do, as sentient creature, is for him to comprehend nature and to wield that comprehension in his own interest.  As mere part of nature, he can never circumvent it.Materialist Conception of HistoryMarx has no time for this thread’s tripartite formula — the traditional philosophical trinity of cognition.For Marx, man doesn’t freely set out to seek theory — knowledge of [concrete] objects.  Man’s theory is part of the social superstructure.For Marx, man’s life is practical.  Man is above all compelled to reproduce his conditions of living.The social relationships, that society forms out of necessity to reproduce itself, constitute Marx’s social base, upon which arises society’s theoretical superstructure.All such social relations, that are formed and sustained in order to reproduce society, can only be the necessary “forms of appearance” of social determinism — of nature compelling society to reproduce itself.The most fundamental of these social relations are those of ownership and control of the means whereby society must reproduce its conditions of existence. They form the core of the social base, since they continually reproduce themselves as the true invariants of a social formation.So long as the relations of ownership and control of social reproduction persist, so too does their particular mode of relaying determinism, and hence so too does that form of society.As we all know, the history of society, since the advent of private property in the means of social reproduction, has consisted in long periods of stasis in class ownership and control of the means of reproduction. Or looked at actively, it has consisted in long periods of stasis in which ruling classes have robbed and ruled the rest of society in their very own characteristic way.We should never forget that history has turned out this way, not by chance, but deterministically, precisely because rule and ownership are always and everywhere aided and abetted by the social determinism for society to reproduce itself.Comprehend that, and you comprehend the necessity for socialism, and the necessity for socialism to reproduce itself.The social relations that nature imposes upon society to reproduce its conditions of existence are appropriately compulsive relations in class societies.  In a society, in which the means of social reproduction are common property and democratically controlled, these indispensable relations are deterministically cooperative.In other words, common ownership and democratic control keep on reproducing social cooperation at the same time as they keep on reproducing socialist society as socialist society.Comments on SchaffThe following thoughts arose from reading Chapter 1 of Schaff.  The book is hard to find, and I have only read his first chapter on cognition.Schaff knows practice, and so insistently characterizes man as relating to objects through practice as “reflecting interaction”.  In other words, cognition remains for him merely cognition of the object that is external to him.  In that way Schaff preserves vestiges of Lenin’s cognition of objects.I have no idea how close Schaff approaches Marx’s discovery of the social foundation in the necessity for society to act collectively [though not necessarily cooperatively] to reproduce itself, whether society comprehends what it’s doing or not, and in so doing comes to comprehend its own practice.I have no idea how close he comes to recognizing that society comprehends its own practice when it perceives the necessity of its own practice.Finally, two minor points …Marx identified human essence with “the ensemble of social relations.” [Thesis VI].  Schaff, at times, asserts that Marx identifies the human individual with the ensemble of social relations.Schaff’s [concrete] objectivity would seem to rule out his ostensible concern — history and truth — whose content does not lie “outside of any cognizing mind and independently of it”.

[Brian]

Big hug to the author(s) for the previous post for summarising so succinctly the basic agreements and diasagreements so far in this thread.   What an improvement on past posts by twc – please keep it up!

[LBird]

The issue of whether 'theory precedes practice' or 'practice precedes theory' surely has already been settled to most comrades minds, given the quotes which support the 'theory' position, and the absence of any justification for the 'practice precedes theory' argument?It's a no-brainer, comrades. Theory precedes practice. Even the bourgeois thinkers, catching up with Communists, have got that far!To argue otherwise, is to return to the pre-Popperian position of 'induction'.Remember Popper's 'searchlight theory of mind', which he counterposed to the earlier inductive and positivist 'bucket theory of mind'? The 'mind as a passive bucket' into which 'sensual experience' just pours itself?And what was Carr arguing, in his 'What is History?', which the SPGB actually used as a title for a meeting, if not the necessity of recognising our preconceptions which determine selection?And we Communists always say 'theory and practice'.The 'practice first' position is a fundamentally conservative stance, because it ignores the conditions that exist prior to practice, and takes the line that 'we must deal with reality, as things exists'. On the contrary, revolutionaries critically question 'what exists' and have a plan for action, to change reality. Don't we?We really should have a vote on this issue, before we proceed any further.I vote for 'theory precedes practice'.

[twc]

Anti-Marx

Marx (Preface to the Critique) wrote:

The guiding principle of my studies:The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

Marx opposes LBird’s guiding principle that theory [consciousness] precedes practice [social existence].LBird accuses all such opponents of LBird’s own guiding principle, as clinging to the “fundamentally conservative stance of pre-Popperian induction, and of holding a positivist bucket theory of mind, in which the mind is a passive bucket into which sensual experience just pours itself”.For LBird, Marx never kicked the [pre-Popperian] bucket!Poor Marx.  If only he’d been born post Popper.

[LBird]

Well, I'll take that as one vote for 'ignorance and stupidity'.Or should that be 'stupidity and ignorance'?

[twc]

Please explain how Marx doesn't oppose you.

[LBird]

Since we’re trading ‘Marx quotes’:

Karl Marx, The German Ideology, wrote:

This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm

Karl Marx, EPM, wrote:

But also when I am active scientifically, etc… then my activity is social, because I perform it as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.My general consciousness is only the theoretical shape of that of which the living shape is the real community, the social fabric, although at the present day general consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such confronts it with hostility. The activity of my general consciousness, as an activity, is therefore also my theoretical existence as a social being.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm'Not devoid of premises'.'the material of my activity [is] given to me as a social product', 'as is even language'.For Marx, something precedes practice. 'Premises' are 'given'.But, really, trading quotes is no substitute for comrades thinking for themselves, now, in this century, using the advances of the last 150 years since Marx wrote, made by both Communists and bourgeois philosophers

[Brian]

LBird wrote:

Since we’re trading ‘Marx quotes’:

Karl Marx, The German Ideology, wrote:

This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm

Karl Marx, EPM, wrote:

But also when I am active scientifically, etc… then my activity is social, because I perform it as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.My general consciousness is only the theoretical shape of that of which the living shape is the real community, the social fabric, although at the present day general consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such confronts it with hostility. The activity of my general consciousness, as an activity, is therefore also my theoretical existence as a social being.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm'Not devoid of premises'.'the material of my activity [is] given to me as a social product', 'as is even language'.For Marx, something precedes practice. 'Premises' are 'given'.But, really, trading quotes is no substitute for comrades thinking for themselves, now, in this century, using the advances of the last 150 years since Marx wrote, made by both Communists and bourgeois philosophers

It appears there's a division over "I think therefore I am" and "I am therefore I think".  So it appears that LBird has dug himself into a corner where conciousness has no material base.  Which from whatever angle means its a logical fallacy.That's me thinking for myself. And means that logically our brain is not set in a vacuum for it requires something to think about which ultimately comes from our experience and practice of reproducing the species in a given environment.  This interaction between stimilus and response provokes thoughts and theories on what action and reaction is possible and also probable. And when a scientific mindset of a historical period develops the knowledge and understanding that a theory is found to be tainted by the political ideology of the ruling class they decide its time to put our collective thinking caps on.

[LBird]

Brian wrote:

So it appears that LBird has dug himself into a corner where conciousness has no material base. Which from whatever angle means its a logical fallacy.

I can't believe that this nonsense still has legs!If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times! The object exists outside of, and prior to, the subject. How many more times can I say this?The question we're trying to discuss, is 'how does the subject understand the object?'.

Brian wrote:

That's me thinking for myself.

No, it isn't! You're just repeating what society has told you, all your life! It's the myth of modern science, that the object presents itself unbidden to the subject.

Brian wrote:

And means that logically our brain is not set in a vacuum for it requires something to think about which ultimately comes from our experience and practice of reproducing the species in a given environment.

Yes, the 'object' for us comes from our experience and practice! You are right!

Brian wrote:

This interaction between stimilus and response provokes thoughts and theories on what action and reaction is possible and also probable.

No, no, no!We choose what 'stimuli' (from an infinite stream) to 'respond' to, by 'selection'.The notion that 'practice' produces 'theories' is induction. If you are an inductivist, say so, and we can progress the discussion.

Brian wrote:

And when a scientific mindset of a historical period develops the knowledge and understanding that a theory is found to be tainted by the political ideology of the ruling class they decide its time to put our collective thinking caps on.

All 'science' is 'tainted' by humans. It's a human activity. There is no 'passive' route to the 'object'. Science means thinking. Thinking is human.We won't get to the root of this, comrades, until those who disagree with Schaff,OUTLINE THE THEORY OF COGNITION WHICH THEY THEMSELVES ARE EMPLOYING.Brian, which theory of cognition do you use? If you are not selecting, how do you cope with innumerable sense impressions? Why are you not overwhelmed by sensation?

[LBird]

We initiate the conversation with external reality.Reality exists, before we ask questions.But reality doesn't initiate the conversation.The conversation begins with a question.The question is a human construct.

[Brian]

LBird wrote:

Brian wrote:

So it appears that LBird has dug himself into a corner where conciousness has no material base. Which from whatever angle means its a logical fallacy.

I can't believe that this nonsense still has legs!If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times! The object exists outside of, and prior to, the subject. How many more times can I say this?The question we're trying to discuss, is 'how does the subject understand the object?'.

Brian wrote:

That's me thinking for myself.

No, it isn't! You're just repeating what society has told you, all your life! It's the myth of modern science, that the object presents itself unbidden to the subject.

Brian wrote:

And means that logically our brain is not set in a vacuum for it requires something to think about which ultimately comes from our experience and practice of reproducing the species in a given environment.

Yes, the 'object' for us comes from our experience aand practice! You are right!

Brian wrote:

This interaction between stimilus and response provokes thoughts and theories on what action and reaction is possible and also probable.

No, no, no!We choose what 'stimuli' (from an infinite stream) to 'respond' to, by 'selection'.The notion that 'practice' produces 'theories' is induction. If you are an inductivist, say so, and we can progress the discussion.

Brian wrote:

And when a scientific mindset of a historical period develops the knowledge and understanding that a theory is found to be tainted by the political ideology of the ruling class they decide its time to put our collective thinking caps on.

All 'science' is 'tainted' by humans. It's a human activity. There is no 'passive' route to the 'object'. Science means thinking. Thinking is human.We won't get to the root of this, comrades, until those who disagree with Schaff,OUTLINE THE THEORY OF COGNITION WHICH THEY THEMSELVES ARE EMPLOYING.Brian, which theory of cognition do you use? If you are not selecting, how do you cope with innumerable sense impressions? Why are you not overwhelmed by sensation?

According to LBird I'm both right and wrong.  On the question of what theory of cognition do I use is for my way of thinking or particular mindset, its a hard one to grasp but also a very difficult one to answer in a definitive sense.  Because firstly, with all due (self)respect my actual method of cognition in use at a particular moment in time depends on a whole host of factors like: mood; interest; enjoyment; awareness; knowledge; understanding; skills; experience; etc, etc.  Obviously, these factors filter or if you prefer select which food of thought tickles my fancy at a given moment in time.  Otherwise I would be so submerged in usless and useful information my mind would just automatically switch off by not listening to those countless messages of maybe's, if and buts.  Thank fuck for filters I say!Secondly, I prefer this situation because it allows me not to participate in the silly business of self-labelling.  Last but not least it provides a certain amount of autonomy and flexibiity through induction and deduction what particular sensation fits in with my experience of being a member of the working class.However, you have my permission to apply a label to whatever particular method of cognition you may think is appropriate to the responses above.  After all is said and done it appears your own particular method of cognition is in a better position to answer that question than I am?Having said that and in all honesty, I'm very comfortable with the present situation, so I don't expect any changes in the forseeable future.  Unless of course the revolutionary process goes up a gear sometime tomorrow.

[Author]

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