What’s so Special about Base–Superstructure Determinism?

[twc]

In the context of "appearance" delivering  to "consciousness" what it relies on in the patterns of "raw experience" as filtered by "reality"…Professional scientists must condition their "appearance" to deliver in all sorts of "reality" domains — a common enough necessity that explodes Paul Feyerabend's dramatic pontification that "incommensurable" "realities" are unbridgeable.The striking example for base–superstructure determinism is Crick and Watson recognizing in the 2D angular domain of X-ray crystallography a double-helix crystal lattice in the 3D spatial domain.[Note: I mean that DNA is a striking example of a base that raises a superstructure.]They had professionally primed their consciousnesses to conceive "appearance" in two visually distinct "realities" [where structures in one "reality" are wide, corresponding structures in the other "reality" are narrow; where they multiply numbers in one, they make running summations in the other, etc.]. But, as professionals, they had taught themselves to think in both domains and to detect signature similarities in the differences.These two domains are, of course, deterministically linked by the Fourier Analysis that is analogous to "epicycles on epicycles" [although maligned Ptolemy isn't actually guilty of this misdemeanor].Marx was far too deep a materialist thinker — ahead of us all —  to fall for grounding "consciousness" in "reality".  "Reality" can only be a utility for "consciousness". For us, "reality" is prosaically superstructual because our "consciousness" is. That's the new materialism for you!

[Hud955]

Hi TWCThis is all understood.  There are many refinements we can make philosophically to our understanding of the concept of 'reality'.  But they are just refinements.  And the justification for scientific realism is an instrumental, not a cognitive one.  If you want, you can do away with the concept of ‘reality’ altogether and the scientific project would still stand.  Even so, I don’t see how refinements of this kind support the appearance/reality case you are building.   The observation of the motion of Mars relative to the earth is a subject for intraspecific agreement but is not in itself a social product.  People from a heliocentric culture would make pretty much the same Earthly observations of Mars’s motion as people from a geocentric culture and would presumably find no contradiction if they compared records of those observations.  What is a social product is the cognitive model they would each build to explain their observation.  You seem to want to conflate 'reality' in the sense of the cognitive model (theory), with 'reality' as something which has a problematic relationship with appearance (observation) – which would put an end completely to the scientific project. I think what is muddying the waters here is your Marxian redefinition of common terms – which of course, gives them a new set of logical relationships but also rigidly limits a more detailed analysis.   I can see where you are wanting to take this (I think) and I’m not suggesting that you are necessarily wrong, but, for me, the concepts you are working with are insufficiently precise to do the job. I don’t agree that our views are necessarily incommensurable.  

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