Science for Communists?
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The idea of "supervenience" is actually not that disimular from those "emergent properties" and levels of explanation that you where talking about in your description of CR.I don't see what i t has to do with individualism at all.But there is little point in engaging with you further, your only wish seems to be to hurl insults at all and sundry.
DJP wrote:The idea of "supervenience" is actually not that disimular from those "emergent properties"…It's totally different. 'Supervenience' focuses upon the 'component', whereas 'emergence' focuses on the 'real' (ie. non-physical causal powers, like Marx's 'value').
DJP wrote:…and levels of explanation that you where talking about in your description of CR.But I didn't finish that, because you didn't ask me to. So, you don't know what my 'explanation' is. Instead, you were content to post a video, which satisfied you, but didn't engage with me.
DJP wrote:I don't see what i t has to do with individualism at all.Evidently. That's because of your bourgeois assumptions, like 'physicalism' and 'supervenience'. You don't seem to realise that science is ideological, even though I keep telling you so. You have a mystical belief in 'matter'.
Quote:But there is little point in engaging with you further, your only wish seems to be to hurl insults at all and sundry.Oh, goody! Don't 'engage with' me – whatever you've been doing up to now, it's not 'engaging', if by that one means critical discussion and debate. You just uncritically provide links and videos, which you yourself don't understand. I've pointed this out to you, before.You stick to 'physical individualism', which means you can sense yourself all by yourself, and ignore 'value', which is neither physical nor individually to be touched. 'Value' requires social theory to understand, and thus is unavoidably 'ideological', rather than 'material' and 'the same for all observers'.'Value' is a class-based concept, and depends upon the observer's frame of reference.
LBird wrote:'Supervenience' focuses upon the 'component', whereas 'emergence' focuses on the 'real' (ie. non-physical causal powers, like Marx's 'value').Is this a clue to what the "reality" in the term "critical realism" means, i.e that "reality" is made up of non-physical "causal powers"? Marx's value is certainly non-physical, but what exactly is a "causal power"?
Quote:[..]The real causal powers of an entity endow it with a dispositional set of tendencies or propensities to generate actual events in the world; these actual events may or may not be empirically observable. The causal powers of an entity are real in the sense that these powers and propensities exist even if they are never actualized or observed by anyone. To use the standard trite example, the causal power to break a window is a dispositional property of a rock; this property is real in these that it is there whether it is ever actualized (an actual window breaking with a rock event happens in the world), and whether anybody ever observes this event.Reality then, is just such a collection of entities endowed with causal powers that come from their inherent nature.http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2013/09/14/more-words-on-critical-realism-getting-clear-on-the-basics/It's some kind of neo-Aristotelianism
I must confess that at one point I thought that the term "critical realism" might be a useful alternative to "dialectical materialism" to describe the theory of understanding/knowledge/science held by Marx, Dietzgen and Pannekoek and said so in one of the numerous threads we've had on this. It suggests that there is a "real" world that exists outside our minds, with the word "critical" bringing out that the mind places an active role in understanding this outside reality. But now I see it comes associated with a baggage which none of these would accept. So we'll have to stick to "dialectical materialism".
ALB wrote:I must confess that at one point I thought that the term "critical realism" might be a useful alternative to "dialectical materialism" to describe the theory of understanding/knowledge/science held by Marx, Dietzgen and Pannekoek and said so in one of the numerous threads we've had on this. It suggests that there is a "real" world that exists outside our minds, with the word "critical" bringing out that the mind places an active role in understanding this outside reality. But now I see it comes associated with a baggage which none of these would accept. So we'll have to stick to "dialectical materialism".In the spirit of keeping this discussion in line with the scientific method it would be helpful if you could describe what this baggage actually consists of.
I was responding to DJP's post immediately before and also to the clip he posted by the guru. It seems that "critical realism" is the name adopted by some philosophy lecturers to mean something different to what its name suggests. In fact, worrying, as they seem to, about whether the table behind you exists when you're not looking at it is the typical pre-occupation of the isolated individual(ist) armchair philosopher.
As this thread was started by LBird , am I the only on who feels uncomfortable about discussing it when he is unable to respond.Perhaps it is only my own personal experience but I can feel his frustration.
Vin Maratty wrote:As this thread was started by LBird , am I the only on who feels uncomfortable about discussing it when he is unable to respond.Perhaps it is only my own personal experience but I can feel his frustration.LBird is on moderation, not suspended, which means he can if he so wishes post here but all his posts are filtered by the moderator.
Brian wrote:LBird is on moderation, not suspended, which means he can if he so wishes post here but all his posts are filtered by the moderator.Just watched the video on post #445 and at the end the dude mentions a conference with the snappy theme."From the anatomy of the global crisis, the global crisis that besets us and all four planes of social being, to the ontology of human flourishing, that is, to the possibility of an existence which is far far better than the one we currently have."It certainly puts "How we live and how we could live", in its place.Just wasted six minutes and forty eight seconds of my life.
I think the guy must have swallowed the index of a book on advanced philosophy and videoed himself spewing it all right back up
Brian wrote:Vin Maratty wrote:As this thread was started by LBird , am I the only on who feels uncomfortable about discussing it when he is unable to respond.Perhaps it is only my own personal experience but I can feel his frustration.LBird is on moderation, not suspended, which means he can if he so wishes post here but all his posts are filtered by the moderator.
[my bold]This was untrue.I was banned for a period, and when I tried a dozen times to login and respond, I was confronted with a message that my name was blocked.A special thanks to Vin, for his comradely and openly expressed concern.
The real issue thrown up by this thread is not my banning (which is indeed a cause for concern, but I don’t wish my personal disagreements to become the focus), but the complete failure of anyone, either SPGB party member or fellow traveller, to actually engage in a discussion, about ‘Communism and science’.DJP’s constantly used diversionary tactic of posting ‘links and videos’ without comment, either of the political content of the ‘links and videos’ themselves or of my original posts to which the ‘links and videos’ are an obfuscating response, is well known. This particular diversionary tactic is in addition to those that I listed at post #442.There have been some perfunctory comments about the Bhaskar video, but no attempts whatsoever to discuss my outline of CR, given in post #398. Not least, because I have serious disagreements with Bhaskar, but DJP seems to think an uncommented link is sufficient response to my extended attempt to explain some aspects of CR.There are merely constant attempts to ask the same questions, again and again, no matter what my responses to those questions (object, subject, knowledge, matter, idealism, materialism, etc., etc.). It’s like a merry-go-round, where twenty questions are asked, and answered, and at the end, question 1 is asked again, as if everything has been forgotten, and off we go again. No progress, just Groundhog Day.And then we have from ALB:
ALB, post #455, wrote:I must confess that at one point I thought that the term "critical realism" might be a useful alternative to "dialectical materialism" to describe the theory of understanding/knowledge/science held by Marx, Dietzgen and Pannekoek and said so in one of the numerous threads we've had on this. It suggests that there is a "real" world that exists outside our minds, with the word "critical" bringing out that the mind places an active role in understanding this outside reality. But now I see it comes associated with a baggage which none of these would accept. So we'll have to stick to "dialectical materialism".ALB, post #457, wrote:I was responding to DJP's post immediately before and also to the clip he posted by the guru. It seems that "critical realism" is the name adopted by some philosophy lecturers to mean something different to what its name suggests. In fact, worrying, as they seem to, about whether the table behind you exists when you're not looking at it is the typical pre-occupation of the isolated individual(ist) armchair philosopher.[my bolds]So, ALB ‘sees’ DJP’s ‘guru clip’ and, miraculously, suddenly ‘comes to consciousness’ on this issue of ‘Communism and Science’, ditches a year’s worth of discussion by me, completely ignores my post about CR, and simply takes DJP’s uncommented video at face value, and responds to that, not me.Now, he’s a self-declared ‘dialectical materialist’, again, who seems to think that I’m arguing for ‘tables disappear when not looked at’ and ‘individualist armchair philosophy’.No matter that I’ve answered his (and others) constant questions about ‘realism’, ‘theory and practice’ and ‘social subject’. That is, I’ve constantly said that ‘the world pre-exists human consciousness’ (so I’m not arguing that it disappears ‘when you’re not looking at it’), that ‘practice’ is an essential part of Marx’s method (so I’m not arguing for ‘armchair philosophy’) and that the social, historical and ideological dimensions of science are vitally important (so I’m not arguing for ‘isolated individuals’).Finally, the closest that anyone has come to ‘exposing’ their ideology, is Vin, for which he is to be admired. But unfortunately, it’s as bad as I feared. Vin has admitted that he thinks that ‘physics and sociology’ are of a different methodological order (no matter Marx’s thinking about ‘unity of science’), and that ‘physics’ provides a model for ‘sociology’ to follow. He also thinks that ‘physics’ leads to ‘Truth’ and that there is a method for getting at this ‘Truth’ of nature, if not of sociology. Vin also follows the ideology of Kuhn, who is a conservative for ‘one paradigm’, as I’ve already explained, as compared with Lakatos, who is a radical for ‘multiple research programmes’. These views have political implications for democracy, which must have multiple choices by its very nature.The reason I say ‘unfortunate’, rather than ‘conscious’, is that I don’t think that Vin (or the others who agree with him, but won’t openly say so, and hide their views) realise the tremendous, fundamental, political implications which flow from holding to this view of ‘science’. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again, for anyone reading who hasn’t read this before.To believe the bourgeois myth of a ‘neutral method in physics which gives humans The Eternal Truth’ (and since Einstein we’ve know that it’s a myth, hence the disturbances within 20th century philosophy of science, Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, the most prominent critical thinkers), is to sow the seeds of Leninism within proletarian thought. If there is a ‘neutral method’ in physics, which can be learned by an educated elite, to the omission of the mass, and that this ‘neutral method’ can lay the basis of a ‘neutral method’ in all science (and if it can’t, and social issues are not open to ‘scientific’ approaches, where does that leave us Communists and our analysis of society?), then a small part of our class can claim to be able to employ this ‘neutral method’ which gives The Truth in politics, too.Here we have the ideological basis of ‘special cadre consciousness’, a consciousness not open to the mass of the proletariat. The Party will tell the class the fixed Truth, rather than the other way around, where the class decides its own changeable truths.Both Newton and Lenin are dead, comrades, and resurrecting either is a bad idea.The name of this quack science to fool the proletariat is Dialectical Materialism, and its progenitor was Engels’ mistaken take on positivist 19th century science.Marx’s views were different to Engels’, and, in my opinion, some form of Critical Realism can form the basis of realising Marx’s ideas about the ‘unity of science’ and ‘humanising nature’.If no-one is interested in discussing these issues, and merely wants to hold on to their outdated bourgeois ideology, why participate in a thread with this title? Why not just say ‘science has nothing to do with Communism’, and have done with it?
LBird wrote:DJP’s constantly used diversionary tactic of posting ‘links and videos’ without comment, either of the political content of the ‘links and videos’ themselves or of my original posts to which the ‘links and videos’ are an obfuscating response, is well known. This particular diversionary tactic is in addition to those that I listed at post #442.There have been some perfunctory comments about the Bhaskar video, but no attempts whatsoever to discuss my outline of CR, given in post #398. Not least, because I have serious disagreements with Bhaskar, but DJP seems to think an uncommented link is sufficient response to my extended attempt to explain some aspects of CR.And there lies the problem of confusion with you and Bhaskar using the same term to describe opposite theories. What is the point of competing over a description/name when you have the opportunity here to come up with a brand new description/name which is not contaminated by obselete philosphy? Surely you have enough on your plate already without causing further conflict over what is a true description and meaning of a term?One would have thought that if you were aware of Bhaskar you would have made every attempt to distance yourself from any possibility of obfuscation cropping up?
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