Pannekoek’s theory of science

[twc]

Attack of the Killer Bees

YMS wrote:

Erm, I linked to an article that demonstrated that Lbird's view was already incorporated into maintream academic discourse on the theory of science.

Actually, you didn’t.  You linked, fourth-hand, to a [lefty] sociologist, third-hand, believing unnamed and unsourced professionals in “the field of science, technology and society”, second-hand, about what scientists do first-hand.And you expect us to believe it, fifth-hand.Above all, he did not claim to be talking about something as lofty as the theory of science, as you misread him!Aunt JobiskaThe position adopted by the sociologist is none other than a common belief shared by many today.  It’s become a “fact the whole world knows” [Edward Lear], and is common currency throughout the tabloid and media outlets of the Murdoch empire.Such naked truth is best stripped of academic nicety:  “scientists are up themselves;  they fool the public all the time;  they only engage in vainglorious lust for power over society;  they should be exposed as falsifiers of truth.”And so we find Fox, unconstrained by scientific integrity, gloating over the cautious findings, constrained by subservience to the ways of nature, of today’s nuanced IPCC report.Meanwhile, the lefty intelligentsia, also concur that, well yes, really, the only socially-responsible stance an intelligent person can take these days towards science is a very large dose of anti-science skepticism, soaked in sociological cynicism.Appearance and RealityA socialist might have thought that, if everyone agrees with him on a social issue, then he’s possibly falling for the capitalist husk, and failing to recognize the socialist kernel.Quid Pro QuoI’ll answer your insane questions to the best of my ability.No.Can’t.  I know nothing about the Bee Gees apart from their name as a pop group.  [You already know my love of classical music.]Can’t.  I have no idea who John Hurt is.Now, the quid pro quo.  If CCD isn’t your prime example of the inability of natural science to rise above the ideological constraints of a “belief in private property in the means of production”, what is?For example, do you take IPCC science as ideologically flawed?If not, I’ll give you a leg up.  What about finding ideological flaws in E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, or in Richard Dawkins’s memes?But I was really seeking an example in the natural sciences, whose abstract categories of thought — like temperature and heat [totally different abstract objects that the climate skeptics conflate], or latent heat [where temperature decouples from heat] — that have no direct bearing on social class concerns.[Natural science’s divide-and-conquer division of the natural world, and its relative independence of social class, will send LBird into a tail spin, but let him prove his case by showing us a single instance of what he means, and I’ll take him seriously.]Apiarist IndustryMy point ran far deeper than your appraisal of little more than “the apiarist industry is a party to a power struggle to defend itself”.  It was the far-from-evident point that emerges from considering the scientific stressors:  “the wider apiarist industry are in this predicament right up to their necks.  The problem is of their making”.Fable of the BeesWhen I first read the sociologist’s report, I was left with the distinct impression that the beekeepers were innocent victims.  I automatically sympathized with the independent French beekeeper, who lives by spreading his hives in flowery meadows, midst rain and sunshine, and is mercilessly set upon by the global agro-chemical monopolies.

Quote:

“many French beekeepers became convinced more than a decade ago that the worsening trend of honeybee losses was linked to the introduction of Gaucho, a brand of products from the German agro-chemical company Bayer that contains Imidacloprid, a widely used neonicotinoid.”

But a glance at the scientific stressors reveals that beekeeping practice implicates the French beekeepers in typical capitalist interdependence between themselves and their agro-chemical bullies.Eden in ProvenceThe delightful insect studies conducted in 19th-century Provence by Jean-Henri Fabre — the ‘Homer of insects’ in Charles Darwin’s estimation — was a boyhood companion that constantly beat through my head as I rambled field and forest.I received as tenth birthday present Fabre’s Book of Insects, with stunning black-and-white woodblock images, to me more precious than Detmold’s tipped-in coloured paintings (protected by translucent rice paper) in the ancient 1921 edition that lay on the shelf of our school library.Fabre gave me the conviction to fight off a twelve year old, twice my size, intent on killing cicadas with his catapult.I only learnt much later that Japanese ecologists consider Fabre the father of ecology, a term I didn’t know of then, but whose content I absorbed by osmosis from the work of that great inspirer of natural science, dear old Fabre.Fabre should be patron saint of French beekeepers, but it’s distinctly possible that the modern agro-chemical generation of French beekeepers simply doesn’t know the close entomological observer their country once produced.Here, in Fabre’s own words, occasionally edited for continuity, is the world before it was invaded by modern agricultural chemistry and genetics:

Jean-Henri Fabre wrote:

“Finally, after 40 years of dreaming of it in poverty, I obtained in Provence, a tiny patch of red soil mixed with stones, with no wild thyme left, nor lavender, where I might question the Hunting Wasps and others of my insect friends in that difficult language which consists of experiments and observations.”“This curious Eden of mine is the happy hunting-ground of countless Bees and Wasps.  Never have I seen so large a population of insects at a single spot.”“Here, in my curious Eden, the Tailor-bee scrapes the cobwebby stalk of the yellow-flowered centaury plant, which she carries off proudly with her mandibles or jaws.  She will turn it, underground, into cotton satchels to hold her store of honey and the eggs.”“Here the Leaf-cutting Bees, carrying the black, white or blood-red reaping brushes under their bodies, will visit the neighbouring shrubs, and there cut from the leaves oval pieces into which to wrap their harvest.”“Here the black, velvet clad, Mason-bees work with cement and gravel.”“Here also are many varieties of Wild Bees:  One, who stacks her cells in the winding staircase of an empty snail-shell.  A second, who lodges her grubs in the pith of a dry bramble-stalk.  A third, who uses the channel of a cut reed.  A fourth, who lives rent-free in some galleries of the Mason-bee.”“Here are also Bees with horns, and Bees with brushes on their hind legs, to be used for reaping.”

Short SightedWhat I find most galling is the ready, unquestioning, acceptance of the scientific integrity of a [lefty] sociologist’s third-hand views upon scientific practice — a profession, accountable to no-one but popular prejudice and his academic, probably laborite, peers.But what is more galling is the ready, unquestioning, rejection of the scientific integrity of the ensemble of natural scientists, who are deterministically accountable to replicating their scientific results in the realm of that very nature they draw them from.That last constraint is the secret of the integrity of natural science.  It is, as nature poet Robert Frost might have said, what makes “all the difference”.

[LBird]

For ALB, info regarding our discussion of Bogdanov:

Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900-68), pp. 229-30, wrote:

Within the RSDLP, and especially in the bolshevik fraction, there was a whole tendency, represented principally by Bazarov, Lunacharsky and Bogdanov, which defended, within the party and even externally, the empiriocritical conceptions of Mach and Avenarius, with the aim of ‘going beyond’ Marx’s limitations. With Bogdanov, the social process was reduced to the biological process of the organism adapting to the environment, and the relations of production were reduced to the purely technical aspects of the organisation of labour – a thesis which in some ways prefigured the stalinist view. At the same time, by affirming that social life is in all its manifestations a conscious psychic life”, that “social existence and social consciousness are identical in the exact sense of the word”, Bogdanov denied the marxist thesis that consciousness only reflects social life more or less, that it lags behind it, and that material social existence develops independently of the social consciousness of humanity. The implications of Bogdanov’s view were that social classes were always conscious of the social relations presiding over their activity in production, and thus that the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat – which in Marxist theory is alone capable of seeing social reality clearly – was no different from the consciousness of other, non-proletarian social strata. In this sense, Bogdanov was simply reflecting his old populist conceptions, which Bolshevism had always fought against. Under the cover of ‘empirio-criticism’, Bogdanov’s theories opened the door to a mechanistic, fatalistic conception of the revolutionary process as well as to idealist voluntarism on the political level.

[my bold]What do you think, ALB? Is it a fair reflection of Bogdanov’s views, in your opinion?

[ALB]

LBird wrote:

What do you think, ALB? Is it a fair reflection of Bogdanov’s views, in your opinion?

Not really. It's from an ICC pamphlet written by someone who was one of their members at the time and reflects their ambiguous position towards Lenin, seemingly endorsing his criticism of Bogdanov. Although Bourrinet is a socialist/communist in our sense and Kolakowski a declared anti-socialist, I think we can have more confidence in Kolakowski's summary of Bogdanov's views as he would have read Bogdanov in the original Russian while Bourrinet would probably not have done.It is true that Bogdanov wanted to incorporate some of the ideas of Mach and Avenarius into socialist theory (as did Pannekoek) but I don't think he saw this as "going beyond Marx's limitations" (any more than Pannekoek did). More like filling a gap both perceived in socialist theory by adding a theory of the nature of knowledge (epistemology) to it.Anyway, (for what it's worth) here is Kolakowski's summary of some of Bogdanov's views (he devotes 11 pages of his Main Currents of Marxism to discussing them). Referring to a book Bogdanov wrote in 1899 Kolalowski writes:

Quote:

In this work he displays the relativist tendency which he regarded as a cornerstone of Marxism: all truths are historical in the sense that they express man's biological and social situation; truth is a matter of practical applicability, not objective validity.

And on what Bogdanov got from Mach:

Quote:

According to Bogdanov, Mach's philosophy supports Marxism inasmuch as they both treat cognitive processes as instruments of man's fight for existence and reject the possibility of ideas not derived from experience. The 'objectivity' of acts of cognition lies in the fact that they are valid for human societies and not only for the individual. This collective aspect distinguishes physical phenomena from "subjective" ones. "The objective character of the physical world consists in the fact that it exists not for me personally but for all, and has for everyone a definite meaning, the same, I believe, as it has for me" (Empiriomonism, i, 25). Nature is "collectively organised experience". Space, time, and causality are forms in which men co-ordinate their respective perceptions; but this co-ordination is not as yet complete. There are experiences, socially significant and with a social origin, which nevertheless conflict with other experiences. This is due to social antagonism and the class division, which have the effect that human beings only understand one another within certain limits, while their discordant interests inevitably produce conflicting ideologies. In an individualistic society like ours each person's experience centres on himself, whereas in primitive communist societies the "self" was merged in the community. In the society of the future it will be different again, when work is collectively organized and there is no possibility of conflict between my own self and another's.

By which I take Bogdanov to mean that in socialist/communist society all humans will share a common "ideology".He does seem to have been a bit of a technological determinist but to accuse him of prefiguring "the stalinist view" is grossly unfair. After all, while he regarded the Russian Revolution as "progressive" he did not regard it as socialist and realised that what the Bolsheviks (Lenin and Trotsky as well as Stalin) were building in Russia was state capitalism not socialism.

[LBird]

Thanks for your opinion, ALB.

ALB wrote:

Anyway, (for what it's worth) here is Kolakowski's summary of some of Bogdanov's views (he devotes 11 pages of his Main Currents of Marxism to discussing them).

I'll have to get hold of Kolakowski's first volume, and dig a bit deeper.

[LBird]

ALB, have you read:Bogdanov and Lenin: Epistemology and RevolutionDavid G. RowleyStudies in East European Thought, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Mar., 1996), pp. 1-19

Quote:

ABSTRACT. This paper explains how A. Bogdanov changed from a left Bolshevik impatient for armed insurrection into a moderate proponent of revolution through cultural transformation by placing him in the context of a debate over epistemology among Russian Social Democrats in the early twentieth century. By relying on neo Kantian epistemology to justify socialist revolution, N. Berdyaev actually began to turn away from Marxism. Lenin espoused a naive realism that was consistent with scientific socialism, but which did not satisfy Bogdanov. Empiriomonism, Bogdanov's neo-Positivist epistemology, led him away from violent revolution and toward a proletarian cultural revolution.

I haven't read it, yet, myself, but will do so soon.

[LBird]

Prefatory comment:Rowley doesn’t define what he means by ‘scientific’, but he seems to share ‘common sense’ opinions that ‘science’ produces ‘objective knowledge’, in the positivist sense.

Rowley, pp.2-3, wrote:

Marxism, however, [regarding]…working class revolution …predicted what must happen in the world as the result of the operation of objective laws of history… Marxism, precisely because it was a scientific statement about the world …How ever, the authority of its science depended upon a valid epistemology. Scientific socialists could act without moral blame only if they had confidence in their ability to know objectively the laws of history.

As ever, no mention of the proletariat democratically determining ‘objective knowledge’, a ‘scientific knowledge’ which must always be ‘socially-objective’, rather than ‘objective’ in the positivist sense of ‘knowledge being a reflection of reality’. This is not possible. 

Rowley, p.5, wrote:

Bogdanov sought a form of empiricism that could provide certainty without relying upon Kantian categories. He realized the centrality of epistemology to the debate, but (in light of contemporary trends in philosophy) he declined to rely on Plekhanov's unsophisticated "reflection" theory of knowledge. Following the empiriocriticism of Ernst Mach, Bogdanov espoused a strict empiricism and denied the possibility of a priori knowledge of any sort at all.

We can reject Plekhanov’s (and Lenin’s) ‘reflection theory of knowledge’ (naïve realism) without needing to fall into empiricism. Theory precedes observation.

Rowley, p.5, wrote:

Following the empiriocriticism of Ernst Mach, Bogdanov espoused a strict empiricism and denied the possibility of a priori knowledge of any sort at all…. Bogdanov defined reality in terms of experience: The real world is identical with human perception of it. Bogdanov's universe was a monist system, but the monism was "a type of organization according to which experience is systematized." It is a monism of "knowing method." In Empiriomonism, the first major collection of his positivist writings, Bogdanov illustrated how this was possible. "The basis of 'objectivity,' must lie in the sphere of collective experience … The objective character of the physical world consists in the fact that it exists not for me individually but for everyone, and for everyone has a definite meaning, exactly, I am convinced, as it does for me." In this way the sense of a real external world, the knowledge, and the values of any particular social group are not the mere subjective whims of individuals. "Reality" is made up of the shared perceptions of the collective consciousness of a society. "The physical world is collectively organized experience."

Bogdanov seems to equate ‘reality’ (ie. object) with ‘knowledge’. We have already seen that this can’t be done. Object, subject and knowledge are separate cognitive categories, and ‘knowledge’ is an on-going process, not a ‘once-for-all-time’ discovery, which some authority then ‘knows’ with finality.Given the rest of the article’s quotes from Bogdanov, I’m inclined to view Bourrinet’s opinion’s of Bogdanov in a more favourable light than you do, ALB.Rowley also mentions Lenin.

Rowley, p.12, wrote:

Lenin attempted to achieve an objective justification of his social ideals. He required objective proof of proletarian revolution without which his program would have been mere subjective idealism. In order to preserve scientific inevitability, Lenin had to insist on materialist monism and the possibility of objective knowledge.

As we now know from the events after 1917, those who argue for ‘the possibility of objective knowledge’ and ‘scientific inevitability’ are defending ‘authority’ in science, which inexorably leads to defending ‘authority’ in politics.Communism must involve the democratic control of all social authority, including ‘science’.

Rowley, p.12, wrote:

Why did Lenin insist on Plekhanov's and Engels' scientism, determinism, and materialism?

Yes, Engels will come into our discussions, eventually, but it needs to be on another thread.

Rowley, p.15, wrote:

Bogdanov's Empiriomonism may have been originally conceived in order to justify violent revolution, but his intellectually honest philosophical development toward moderation and cultural transformation has left him with a deservedly high reputation as both a philosopher and a revolutionary.

Needless to say, I don’t share Rowley’s opinion of Bogdanov’s ‘deservedly high reputation’. I think Bogdanov was a bourgeois intellectual, as was Lenin and is Rowley.None of the three mention workers’ democratic control of all aspects of social life. That, to me, is the peak of ‘intellectual honesty’.All in all, ALB, I think that I have great differences, epistemological and political, with Bogdanov. I’ve ordered Kolakowski’s book, and will read his opinions of Bogdanov, but I think that your advice to me to look to Bogdanov, in some way, is seriously misplaced.

[ALB]

I'm afraid I've been unable to read Rowley's article beyond page 2 as I'm not an academic with access to this journal and am not prepared to pay to read it.We're in an odd position here. Neither of us can read Bogdanov in the original so we have to rely on others who have, but these have their own opinions in the light of which they summarise and interpret his views. For instance, in the abstract Rowley states that "naive realism" is consistent with scientific socialism, a position all of us here have rejected:

LBird wrote:

David G. Rowley Studies in East European Thought, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Mar., 1996), pp. 1-19

Quote:

ABSTRACT. Lenin espoused a naive realism that was consistent with scientific socialism, but which did not satisfy Bogdanov.

It doesn't satisfy us or Pannekoek either.I think you may be being put off by the terms "positivism" and "empiricism" being applied to Bogdanov's views because you associate them will "naive realism" and the "discovery" theory of science. But Bogdanov rejected both of these.

LBird wrote:

Rowley, p.5, wrote:

Bogdanov sought a form of empiricism that could provide certainty without relying upon Kantian categories. He realized the centrality of epistemology to the debate, but (in light of contemporary trends in philosophy) he declined to rely on Plekhanov's unsophisticated "reflection" theory of knowledge. Following the empiriocriticism of Ernst Mach, Bogdanov espoused a strict empiricism and denied the possibility of a priori knowledge of any sort at all.

We can reject Plekhanov’s (and Lenin’s) ‘reflection theory of knowledge’ (naïve realism) without needing to fall into empiricism. Theory precedes observation.

Yes we can, but I don't think that the sort of "empiricism" espoused by Mach and Bogdanov does necessarily reject the view that "theory precedes [scientific] practice". They would merely be saying that "sense-impressions" precede thinking about them (a not unreasonable position that we have been trying to convince you of).

LBird wrote:

Rowley, p.5, wrote:

Bogdanov defined reality in terms of experience: The real world is identical with human perception of it. Bogdanov's universe was a monist system, but the monism was "a type of organization according to which experience is systematized." It is a monism of "knowing method." In Empiriomonism, the first major collection of his positivist writings, Bogdanov illustrated how this was possible. "The basis of 'objectivity,' must lie in the sphere of collective experience … The objective character of the physical world consists in the fact that it exists not for me individually but for everyone, and for everyone has a definite meaning, exactly, I am convinced, as it does for me." In this way the sense of a real external world, the knowledge, and the values of any particular social group are not the mere subjective whims of individuals. "Reality" is made up of the shared perceptions of the collective consciousness of a society. "The physical world is collectively organized experience."[my emphasis–ALB]

Bogdanov seems to equate ‘reality’ (ie. object) with ‘knowledge’. We have already seen that this can’t be done. Object, subject and knowledge are separate cognitive categories, and ‘knowledge’ is an on-going process, not a ‘once-for-all-time’ discovery, which some authority then ‘knows’ with finality.

I think the view attributed to Bogdanov here is open to criticism, but from the opposite point of view. He seems to be operating within a two-category framework: subject and knowledge. Which makes the external world an inter-subjective one rather than an objective one. Joseph's son, Eugene, made the same mistake in that article I drew your attention to, a mistake which does lay those making it open to the charge of "idealism". Dietzgen and Pannekoek, starting from the same premises as Mach and Bogdanov (that all knowledge is derived from our sense-impressions), did not make this mistake. But whatever criticism can be made of Bogdanov I can't see how he can be accused of a accepting the discovery theory of science.Incidentally, what does the Rowley article say about Bogdanov's conception of socialism and why he regarded Bolshevik Russia as building state capitalism?

[LBird]

If we can leave the intricacies of Bogdanov side for the moment, ALB, you’ve said something that I don’t agree with.

ALB wrote:

They would merely be saying that "sense-impressions" precede thinking about them (a not unreasonable position that we have been trying to convince you of).

But ‘sense-impressions’ don’t precede thinking about them. Of course, the external world exists before we think about it, but science is the application of our minds (and their social theories) to the external world, through our sense-impressions. But what we consider ‘sense-impressions’ is determined by our theory. If we started from ‘sense-impressions’, we’d be overwhelmed by infinite sensation, and have to accept the ‘bucket theory of mind’. So, I think it is an entirely ‘unreasonable position’ to take! The notion of the ‘primacy’ of ‘sense-impressions’ is empiricism and inductivism. And the belief that these ‘sense-impressions’ tell us the ‘whole truth’ is positivism.

ALB wrote:

Dietzgen and Pannekoek, starting from the same premises as Mach and Bogdanov (that all knowledge is derived from our sense-impressions), did not make this mistake.

I’m not sure about this, ALB. We have ‘scientific knowledge’ of many things that we have never had a ‘sense-impression’ of, otherwise how could we account for the ‘scientific knowledge’ of ‘the ether’?The whole point of my argument is that science, being a human fallible method, can be wrong. But if ‘all knowledge is derived from our sense-impressions’, how do we account for false ‘scientific knowledge’, if it can be ‘sensed’?It’s better to regard scientific knowledge as built up from theory and sense-impressions, which leaves us the option of realising that the ‘theory’ was wrong (when confronted by a better theory tested against later sense-impressions). Surely ‘sense-impressionism’ is naïve realism?I’m still basing my ideas on Schaff’s tripartite schema of object and subject interacting, to produce knowledge. I’ll have to have a further look at Pannekoek, on your claim that he thought ‘all knowledge is derived from our sense-impressions’.

[LBird]

Pannekoek wrote:

When, however, in consequence of the development of the productive forces, the world is changing, new and different impressions enter the mind which do not fit in with the old image. There then begins a process of rebuilding, out of parts of old ideas and new experiences. Old concepts are replaced by new ones, former roles and judgments are upset, new ideas emerge.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/society-mind/ch03.htmobject (new experiences) interacts (process of rebuilding) with subject (old ideas) to produce knowledge (new ideas).

[ALB]

LBird wrote:

If we can leave the intricacies of Bogdanov side for the moment, ALB, you’ve said something that I don’t agree with.

ALB wrote:

They would merely be saying that "sense-impressions" precede thinking about them (a not unreasonable position that we have been trying to convince you of).

But ‘sense-impressions’ don’t precede thinking about them. Of course, the external world exists before we think about it, but science is the application of our minds (and their social theories) to the external world, through our sense-impressions. But what we consider ‘sense-impressions’ is determined by our theory. If we started from ‘sense-impressions’, we’d be overwhelmed by infinite sensation, and have to accept the ‘bucket theory of mind’. So, I think it is an entirely ‘unreasonable position’ to take! The notion of the ‘primacy’ of ‘sense-impressions’ is empiricism and inductivism. And the belief that these ‘sense-impressions’ tell us the ‘whole truth’ is positivism.

OK, let's leave Bogdanov aside. Actually, this gives me a chance to raise something I've been wanting to but have avoided till now so as not to get into an argument over semantics, i.e your view of what "positivism" is.Positivism is the view that the only source of ideas and knowledge is experience. It is a rejection of all "metaphysics", i.e. of the view that there is anything outside or beyond the world of experience. In this sense both Dietzgen and Pannekoek were "positivists". In fact, Dietzgen called one of his articles precisely "The Positive Outcome of Philosophy".But there are positivists and positivists. Bourgeois positivists (of which Betrand Russell would be an example) start from the isolated individual sitting in their study and trying to build up a picture of the external world from reflecting on their own individual experiences. Socialist positivists such as Dietzgen and Pannekoek, on the other hand, accept that the world of experience is a never-ending, ever-changing stream which the mind, again on the basis of experience, breaks down into parts (by naming them) in order to understand them.Positivism is not committed to the view that "'sense impressions' tell us the 'whole truth'", only that knowledge is constructed by the mind by organising sense impressions. I can't see how anyone (other than an idealist) can argue that sense-impressions are not primary, but that before they can be experienced the person experiencing them has to have a theory. This is not how a child acquires knowledge (nor how the pre-human mind would have evolved into the human mind). For the new-born child, the world is indeed a mass of mere sensations which it eventually learns to make some sense of by learning the names of parts of it. As someone once put it if not in so many words, sensations (or, rather, the outside world that gives rise to them in humans) have to precede thinking about them.

[Brian]

LBird wrote:

If we can leave the intricacies of Bogdanov side for the moment, ALB, you’ve said something that I don’t agree with.

ALB wrote:

They would merely be saying that "sense-impressions" precede thinking about them (a not unreasonable position that we have been trying to convince you of).

Positivism is not committed to the view that "'sense impressions' tell us the 'whole truth'", only that knowledge is constructed by the mind by organising sense impressions. I can't see how anyone (other than an idealist) can argue that sense-impressions are not primary, but that before they can be experienced the person experiencing them has to have a theory. This is not how a child acquires knowledge (nor how the pre-human mind would have evolved into the human mind). For the new-born child, the world is indeed a mass of mere sensations which it eventually learns to make some sense of by learning the names of parts of it. As someone once put it if not in so many words, sensations have to precede thinking about them.

And we organise "sense impressions" by filtering those which have no immediate effect on our circumstances.  This filtering also avoids overwhelming our mind with too much information.

[Young Master Smeet]

TWC,I may have missed a meeting; but when did sociology stop being a science?

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

Actually, this gives me a chance to raise something I've been wanting to but have avoided till now so as not to get into an argument over semantics, i.e your view of what "positivism" is.Positivism is the view that the only source of ideas and knowledge is experience.

I disagree with your definition of ‘positivism’, here, ALB. I think positivism goes further than ‘experience’, and claims that ‘experience’ provides ‘positive’ proof of ‘objective reality’. This claim can’t be true, because we know that science both makes mistakes and can only give a ‘partial truth’ of the ‘object’, at best.In its simplest form, it claims that the scientific method can’t be wrong. The twentieth century has put paid to that ideological claim!

ALB wrote:

It is a rejection of all "metaphysics", i.e. of the view that there is anything outside or beyond the world of experience. In this sense both Dietzgen and Pannekoek were "positivists".

I think most would now call this ‘realism’, rather than ‘positivism’ for the historic reasons given above. I think that perhaps Pannekoek and Dietzgen would now disclaim being called ‘positivists’, given its authoritarian and conservative overtones.

ALB wrote:

Positivism is not committed to the view that "'sense impressions' tell us the 'whole truth'", only that knowledge is constructed by the mind by organising sense impressions.

Not just ‘organising’ but determining what actually constitutes a ‘sense-impression’ and selecting from the overwhelming number by using a pre-existing theory.Positivism is the antithesis of Critical Realism, which I would argue is the best method for Marxists to employ.

ALB wrote:

I can't see how anyone (other than an idealist) can argue that sense-impressions are not primary, but that before they can be experienced the person experiencing them has to have a theory.

This is to argue that ‘sense-impressions’ are transmitted purely to the brain/mind. Young Master Smeet has already given an example which seems to contradict this belief, and DJP’s video shows that ‘sense-impressions’ are selected by an active mind, and that the ‘sense-impression’ of the gorilla was ignored.

ALB wrote:

This is not how a child acquires knowledge (nor how the pre-human mind would have evolved into the human mind). For the new-born child, the world is indeed a mass of mere sensations which it eventually learns to make some sense of by learning the names of parts of it.

We are discussing the method of science, rather than infants, but even so the child must be taught by society before it can ‘name names’.You show me a new-born child removed from all social influence, and 2 years later, I’ll show you, not a cognising human making sense of the world through their ‘sense-impresssions’ alone, but a corpse. The child is primed with ‘theory’.

ALB wrote:

As someone once put it if not in so many words, sensations (or, rather, the outside world that gives rise to them in humans) have to precede thinking about them.

No, the ‘outside world’, or object, precedes ‘thinking’, but ‘sensations’ don’t necessarily. Have your ever ‘sensed’ Tasmania (or somewhere you haven’t been, if my example falls down by you actually having been to Tasmania!), or is just a theoretical construct in our minds, but which we can scientifically prove, if we wanted, by flying there? Theory precedes practice.

Brian wrote:

And we organise "sense impressions" by filtering those which have no immediate effect on our circumstances. This filtering also avoids overwhelming our mind with too much information.

Yes, the ‘filter’ is a ‘theory’, as I have been arguing. Logically, the filter must precede the sense-impression. This is the mistake that ‘positivism’ was making, by arguing that ‘sense-impressions’ are primary (as opposed to arguing that the object pre-exists sensation), and that there is no filter, if the mind remains ‘passive’, just takes in sensations, and ignores ideologies. This can’t be done. The human mind is active, as Marx argued, and we all have ‘social-filters’ to all of our ‘sense-impressions’. The human mind searches through innumerable sense-impressions. This applies to physics, as much as sociology. Hence, we have the makings of a ‘unified method’, which Marx thought possible for humans to construct.Time to stop. I’ll try to come up with an example, later.

[twc]

YMS wrote:

I may have missed a meeting; but when did sociology stop being a science?

No, you didn’t, and sociology hasn’t.I read those sociologists as asserting that natural scientists lack scientific integrity.  This is I believe, for the reasons I gave, a quite undeserved charge against scientists of conscious human fraud.That is a serious accusation of duplicitous human behaviour, and is quite different in kind from a mere assertion that natural science is riddled with class prejudice.  Even if that were true, it is in human terms a case of unconscious, but understandable, human bias.Political AnalogyI took those unsupported sociological assertions as akin to accusing political parties of lacking political integrity.  In most cases, this is a justifiable accusation of conscious political fraud, masquerading behind a conscious veneer of ‘unconscious’ human bias.I know, however, that you would rush to the Party’s defence, against any sociological charge of political infamy, by citing the Party’s century-long unwavering adherence to its Declaration of Principles.That’s all I was doing for natural scientists   Defending what I believe against what I consider to be calumny.  No more than I know you always do in the Party’s justified defence of its political integrity.I know scarcely any sociologists, and those I’ve met personally don’t rank highly in my estimation — probable evidence of my socialist prejudice, for none of them was socialist.However, I know natural scientists, and they mostly work under the hammer, whether tenured or not.  Economics forces them to beg funding bodies to support their research.  All of them labour under pressure to generate publishable results.In short, most scientists are proletarians, just like the majority of mankind!Let us assume, that the funding bodies manage to warp their research outcomes.  That is primarily a critique of capitalism, and is something the socialist case holds we won’t have to contend with under socialism.I remind you, however, that LBird considers the Party’s view of socialism to be fundamentally flawed in this very regard.On LBird’s view, science and scientists are accurately and irredeemably [even under socialism] adequately characterized by their disgusting Murdoch-empire tabloid stereotypes.  They are to be perpetually feared.

[LBird]

lets guess who wrote:

I read those sociologists as asserting that natural scientists lack scientific integrity. This is I believe, for the reasons I gave, a quite undeserved charge against scientists of conscious human fraud.

Perhaps those still afflicted with 19th century-like awesome respect for, gosh, scientists!, should have a read of, for example, Chapter 7 Scientific Misconduct, in Jonathan Marks’ Why I Am Not a Scientist.[to forestall a certain poster’s apoplexy, Marks does regard himself as a scientist, it’s just rhetoric for a book title, to help sales in our wonderful market-driven society]The ‘midwife toad’ fraud (pp. 171-7) is simply hilarious. The biologist Paul Kammerer experimented on the Alytes obstetricans, the common midwife toad, and produced ‘nuptial pads’ (a feature of water-dwelling species) on the land-dwelling midwife toad and got them to transmit through the generations. He said.

Marks wrote:

Then Nature published the results of G. Kingsley Noble’s analysis of the nuptial pads of Kammerer’s midwife toad: there were no nuptial pads; the darkened patches were the result of injections of India ink.

There are other examples. Some ‘natural scientists’, being human, are fallible, for any number of reasons, and lie about their experiments, results and ideas.Natural scientists commit ‘conscious human fraud’.

[Author]

Posts