[LBird]

Since I've been compelled to revisit Pannekoek's book, here is another relevant quote:

Pannekoek, L A S, p. 29 wrote:

Hence Historical Materialism looks upon the works of science, the concepts, substances, natural Laws, and forces, although formed out of the stuff of nature, primarily as the creations of the mental Labour of man. Middle-class materialism, on the other hand, from the point of view of the scientific investigator, sees all this as an element of nature itself which has been discovered and brought to light by science. Natural scientists consider the immutable substances, matter, energy, electricity, gravity, the Law of entropy, etc., as the basic elements of the world, as the reality that has to be discovered. From the viewpoint of Historical Materialism they are products which creative mental activity forms out of the substance of natural phenomena.

[my bold]also at:http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1938/lenin/ch02.htm

[LBird]

I’ll open with a short summary so far. There seem to be two conceptually separate, but practically related, issues being discussed.First, does science produce ‘The Truth’ by a neutral method (and so can be done by an individual or a small group of experts), or does it produce socially-related and thus biased ‘Truths’ (and as an activity done by a society is controlled by that society)?Secondly, if it is the latter (controlled social truths), then what is the nature of that control: democratic or elite expert?I’ve argued that ‘socially-produced truths’ must be ‘democratically-controlled’. The former is a philosophical issue, whilst the latter is a political issue.

ALB wrote:

OK, so in your view, it's going to be put to a show of hands at a mass meeting? Or what exactly do you have in mind? What structure are you proposing for making in communism/socialism a popular democratic decision on whether a scientific finding is "true" or not? …. I'm not too keen on referendums myself, but wouldn't rule them out completely as part of the democratic decision-making structure of socialist society.

I think that, at present, this discussion has to be kept at the level of a philosophical debate. Just as we can’t give detailed blueprints for the workings of communism, in an economic production sense, neither can we give detailed answers as to how humanity will control science. But … given a society in which a scientific education is freely available to all humans, from infant school to post-PhD research, where participation in scientific research is open to all, where all research papers are published openly for all to read, and where, as you said earlier…

ALB wrote:

Of course scientific research will be subject to overall democratic control in a socialist society. I can see the priorities for research and the resources allocated for it being the subject of a democratic social decision. Also decisions such as whether or not to allow vivisection, etc.

…then is seems obvious that science will be under the control of all humans, not just a few, self-selected specialists. If I were compelled to speculate, then I would imagine each commune would elect a delegate committee to keep oversight upon that commune’s scientific work, but that any controversial decisions would be referred to the whole community. I can’t imagine a socialist world where most people haven’t had a pretty high level of education, plus the comrades engaged in science would have a duty to explain their work to the community. Given that scenario, I can’t see any part of science being out of the democratic control of humanity. If, on the contrary, we still presume that science will be the preserve of an intellectual elite, engaged in work that the vast majority can’t comprehend, then I wonder how communism can work. It wouldn’t be long before the ‘science’ experts, working behind closed intellectual doors, would soon become ‘production’ experts, handing out ‘advice’ to the ignorant masses…No, I have to assume that communism would include democratic control of the entire process of human science.As part of this process of an emerging self-confident, class conscious proletariat, we must argue now for this future democratic control of science, both to strengthen our confidence and to undermine exaggerated respect for the bourgeois myth of a value-free scientific method. This notion has been undermined by bourgeois philosophers already, so we should be pushing at an open door, not bolstering outdated ideas of positivist science. While we hold that science produces the Truth, we are under the control of priests.

DJP wrote:

The truth of the matter always exists independently of those that observe it.

This is a positivist statement, as I explained in earlier posts. ‘Truth’ lies in the realm of human ‘knowledge’, not the realm of the ‘object’. Please see my post #76, which briefly describes a tripartite theory of cognition. ‘Truth’ can’t exist outside of its human production. And the ‘object’ must be understood within a framework of observation, so the same independent ‘object’ can be involved in the production of several ‘truths’. Please see my post #57, where I refer to Einstein’s ‘train’ explanation.

DJP wrote:

I don't really think it makes sense to talk about a "communist" science or a "bourgeois" science any more than it makes sense to talk of a "socialist" mathematics or a "capitalist" geology. All that would change with a change in the mode of production would be the direction in which scientific research and the application of technology is applied.

[my bold]I think that this is a very serious underestimation of the changes that will be wrought by the advance to a communist mode of production. If the ‘coming to consciousness’ of humanity results in so little change, it seems hardly worthwhile the struggle. Science, surely, will become a mass activity? As will all aspects of human thought, including the philosophy of science.

DJP wrote:

Does Pannekoek write about this stuff in Lenin as Philosopher?

Anton Pannekoek, Lenin as Philosopher, p. 15, wrote:

The real world, the material, sensual world, where all ideology and consciousness have their origin, is the developing human society – with nature in the background, of course, as the basis on which society rests and of which it is a part transformed by [hu]man[ity].

[my bold]Pannekoek’s ‘Nature, the real, consciousness (transformation)’ is my explanation ‘Object, subject, knowledge (interaction)’. Tripartite, as for Marx, not bipartite, as for positivism and idealism. Please see the Theses on Feuerbach.I hope this helps a bit, comrades.

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

It's either me or you're not explaining yourself well.

No, it's not you. I'm clearly not explaining myself well, comrade.My apologies.I'll return to this tomorrow.

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

Is this from today's papers the sort of scientific finding that you think should be put to a popular vote to decide whether or not it is "true"?

That's the big question conservatives always ask.We're talking about the class conscious Communist proletariat, not the 'mob rule' notion favoured by ruling class ideas.I'm surprised you shoud think we're discussing the 'popular vote' (a conservative ideological construct), rather than workers' democracy.Well, we all live and learn.

[LBird]

My thanks to alanjjohnstone for providing the link. 

SOYMB blog wrote:

An obvious reason is that the researchers were geneticists and therefore blinkered in their understanding of society as a whole.

But these researchers are ‘scientists’. They are not failing to use an ‘objective’ scientific method. Their results are valid scientific results. This is science.‘Science’ and its ‘method’ are human activities. ‘Science’ is not a ‘value-free’ method or socially ‘neutral’. That is a 19th century bourgeois myth, which suits the bourgeoisie to continue to propagate because it allows them an unquestionable authority. For how can we question ‘science’, if we believe it is a special ‘objective’, ‘truth-producing’, eternally valid, ahistoric, method? 

SOYMB blog wrote:

Scientific magazines and their editors and reviewers are clearly complicit in publishing misleading conclusions. Funding agencies are complicit in awarding public funds to speculative gene hunting projects at the expense of pressing public social questions. Science is essentially now a top-down project. There persists a romantic notion that science is a process of free enquiry. In reality, only a tiny proportion of research in biology gets done outside of straight-jackets imposed by funding agencies. Researchers design their projects around funding programs; universities organize their hiring around them. Individual scientists have negligible power within the system. Powerful political or commercial forces can set and direct the science agenda from above. In the case of medical genetics that power has been used to deform our understanding of what it mean to be human. Money has bought not only scientific ‘progress’ but the domination of intellectual enquiry to ensure political paralysis and the consolidation of economic power.

[my bold]‘Now a top-down project’? Science always has been: one of the essential differences between Communist and bourgeois science will be the democratisation of this human activity for the first time.And it’s not merely ‘a romantic notion of free enquiry’, but the myth we are all taught at school and is constantly reiterated in the media and ‘popular’ culture. In short, it’s a ‘ruling class idea’ which dominates our lives and thinking.Science is ideological, not ‘free thinking’.And this is inescapable. For ever. It’s the human condition. The better ‘scientific’ approach is to expose our ‘position’ of observation, our ‘framework of reference’, our ideology, in the same way that Einstein insisted must be done in physics (see my earlier post #57).We can unify natural science and social science into one truly ‘scientific’ method, as Marx insisted was possible.But it will be a human method.

[LBird]

Thanks for the link, pfbcarlisle

SPGB pamphlet wrote:

5 How To Achieve Socialism – No MinoritiesSocialism can only be established when a great majority of workers understand and want it. It would be absurd for a minority of conscious socialists today to try to take over power and impose the new system on an unwilling majority. Such a strategy would certainly fail …It would not be possible to run a society in which everybody contributed co- operatively according their abilities and took freely according to their needs unless the great majority of people understood the arrangement and wanted it. It would not be possible to establish and maintain a society based upon conscious democratic control unless the great majority were prepared to exert that democratic control. If the population did not want to participate in social [and scientific] decision-making and were prepared to leave it to a particular minority, that minority would be forced to become the exclusive decision makers themselves and would eventually become a new ruling class. But in the final analysis, the very fact that a minority wanted it would show that they did not understand the full implications of socialism themselves, and so were not really socialists

[my bold and insertion]Yes, and all of these points also apply to the human activity of 'science'.No minorities, entirely democratic control. To be scientific is to be communist.

[LBird]

Unfortunately, the link you've given is returning a 'Page not found', YMS.Thanks for the attempt to help me, though.

[LBird]

One thing that I have found is:

SPGB Editorial wrote:

But what is the scientific method? It is a method of understanding the world based on first observing and recording experience…

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1295-july-2012/editorial-rational-politicsThis is untrue.The first step in the scientific method is to theorise. This theory then determines the selection parameters which are employed when we begin to 'observe and record'.The world cannot be passively 'observed'. Humans actively direct themselves to particular 'objects' based on their existing theoretical presuppositions.

[LBird]

SPGB Object wrote:

The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.

FWIW, I had assumed that 'means and instruments' would obviously include 'science'.The SPGB's emphasis on democracy and 'no leaders' is, to me, one of its most attractive elements.Perhaps someone other than ALB, who's done a sterling job so far in debating with me, could clarify any 'party line' that exists regarding the 'control of science' in a Communist world. If there isn't one yet, fair enough, we can continue to discuss the issue.

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

Now you're just being silly.

Humour, eh? Doesn't always translate well on the internet. My apologies.

ALB wrote:

…that there should be a democratic vote on whether or not to accept the findings of scientific research. Of course there'd have to be a democratic decision to act on them if required…

Aren't these the same things, in effect?You're saying that the research findings of 'science' (defined as a theoretical/practical human activity) would require 'a democratic decision to act on them'.What is the other sort of 'science' that is going to be 'outside of democratic control'?

ALB wrote:

…but I still don't understand what exactly it is you are proposing.

The same as you? What is the difference between 'accepting' and 'acting on'?Is 'accepting' outside of our controls, but 'acting on' isn't?Who then 'accepts'? Is 'acceptance' a passive non-active mode that Marx warns against? A divisions of society into two parts, the small group of theoretical scientists who define 'acceptable' research results, and a larger group of workers who only get to employ previously sifted research results, in their 'acting on' phase? Isn't this a form of elitism?'Science', in all its manifestations, must be under our human control. Including 'acceptance of research findings'.

[LBird]

LBird wrote:

The ICC/SPGB Joint Scientific Authority…

Perhaps a snappier title would be 'The Mengele Commission', in honour of that other scientist who abhorred democratic interference in his 'scientific' endeavours.

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

Was that because they [the ICC] don't like the word "democracy" at all and never use it in a positive sense?

To be fair, the suggestion seemed to cause some confusion, and some posters appeared thoughtful about the implications, but for others, the very idea of humans controlling their science seemed to be a completely mad idea!Communism? What next? Free access to our wives, daughters and science?! Good Lord!Bourgeois sensibilities were outraged!Which brings me reluctantly to… [ahem]…

ALB wrote:

I don't understand what you are getting at. Obviously scientific and research establishment will be organised and run, like any other workplace, on a democratic basis, but you seem to be saying more: that the findings of such establishments should be subject to a democratic vote as to whether they are valid or not.

[my bold]Surely 'validity' is a human construct?Or are we going to have a 'Validity Central Committee', to keep those democracy-worshipping masses from poking their ignorant noses into matters that don't concern them?

ALB wrote:

Is that another lead balloon I can see crashing to the ground?

The ICC/SPGB Joint Scientific Authority airship? I hope so!I'll be helping to staff the proletarian 'human science' ack-ack defences: I hope you'll join me, comrade!

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

And of course they'll need to be democratically self-organised.

As too will 'science'.When I argued this to the ICC, it seemed to go down like a lead balloon!In effect, I am arguing that 'scientific truth' must be a democratic decision, rather than the preserve of 'scientists', conceived as a separate social grouping from the proletariat. Marx warns about this, too, in his Theses."No omniscient 'Central Committes' in either politics or science", is my starting point. Democracy in science, as in the economy.

ALB wrote:

OK, today, when we're engaged in a battle of ideas with capitalist ideology, the minority of socialists/communists that we are do need a higher level of understanding, but I don't think that the majority that will establish socialism will have to be conscious "Critical Realists" or experts in Marxian Economics or the Materialist Conception of History or in fact even to have read a word of Marx.

You can probably guess that I'd disagree with what you've said, here!A conscious proletariat is going to have to be 'conscious' about lots of things, or we'll continue to have 'minorities' in charge. I'm not convinced that a 'three way' approach is much more difficult (than the seemingly easily understood 'two way') to understand, once explained and discussed.

[LBird]

[repost of post #65 of thread in link]http://en.internationalism.org/forum/1056/fred/6429/beliefs-science-art-and-marxismIf we accept as a starting point a tripartite schema of object, subject and knowledge, we can try to categorise the three contrasting views of science, reality and truth that I’ve argued we face a choice over, when identifying what ‘science’ is.By ‘object’, I mean a ‘reality’ that exists independently of our attempts to understand it; by ‘subject’, I mean a ‘humanity’ which tries to understand the independent reality; and by ‘knowledge’, I mean a ‘product’ created by the interaction of the subject and object.The first view of science is the outdated 19th Positivist notion that ‘science’ produces the ‘truth’. This is the view of science that is still held by most people, perhaps even most academics and scientists themselves, even though bourgeois thinkers have long since destroyed this ‘common sense’ approach. For this approach, the ‘object’ and ‘knowledge’ are identical. The subject passively observes the ‘object’, and ‘knowledge’ simply appears in the mind of the dispassionate, disinterested, non-ideological, scientist. In this case, ‘empirical reality’ and ‘human knowledge’ is the same thing. The simple ‘experience of reality’ is enough to ‘understand’ that reality. Popper (an active anti-Marxist) condemned this view as the ‘bucket theory of mind’; that objective reality simply pours itself into a waiting, inactive receptacle. This view does not accept our tripartite premise of separate ‘object, subject, knowledge’: it only recognises subject and object. ‘Knowledge’ is a mere copy of ‘object’.The second view of science is the Relativist notion that it all depends upon the active subject. This view accepts Popper’s criticism about ‘passive mind’, and places its emphasis on the ‘subject’ as actively producing ‘knowledge’. As the active, individual subject’s mind ‘creates’ knowledge, the need for an ‘object’ disappears entirely. It’s ‘all in the mind’ of the creative, artistic human. It’s the act of ‘observation’ that ‘creates’ the ‘object’: the ‘object’ has no independent reality. As Paul Feyerabend had it, in the title of his science book, ‘Anything goes!’. Any attempt to appeal to an independently existing measure of that ‘knowledge’ is seen as an outdated, Modernist, authoritarian act by someone attempting to impose their view of a ‘reality’ that can’t be known, by pretending to have a special (party/class/gender, etc.) insight, to which the individual is not privy. Marxism is seen as the main culprit, here. Relativism prevents oppression and domination, by arguing that any individual’s ‘truth’ is as good as anybody else’s ‘truth’. This view does not accept our tripartite premise of separate ‘object, subject, knowledge’: it only recognises subject and knowledge. ‘Object’ is a mere creation of ‘subject’.The third view of science is one I would call Critical Realism. This approach accepts an independently existing object, an active, inquisitive subject, and sees knowledge as a product of the interaction between subject and object. This differs from positivism in that ‘knowledge’ is not identical to ‘object’: ‘knowledge’ is also an independent variable, something actively created by humans by their interrogation of external reality. Thus, depending upon the questions posed by humans, ‘knowledge’ is based upon, but not the same as, the object. ‘Truth’ exists, but it must always be partial truth produced by humans attempting to understand reality. Realism differs from relativism in that the ‘object’ is not created by humans, ‘knowledge’ is based on (and can be compared with for confirmation) a questioning of an independent reality, and that the mind of the subject is not an individual mind, but the socially-created mind of a social individual. This view begins from our tripartite premise of separate ‘object, subject, knowledge’: it recognises object, subject and knowledge as three interacting variables.First view is broadly conservative, the second is broadly liberal, the third, I would argue, is broadly compatible with Marxism.I apologise to comrades for the length of this post, and it can certainly be improved, extended and criticised for shortcomings and mistakes, but I’ve attempted to explain a very difficult and complex cognitive issue so that anyone with a passing interest in all these issues about the nature of ‘science’ stands some chance of understanding and, hopefully, of engaging with them. It’s my opinion that we need a class that is well-educated in the debate about ‘science’. I only hope that I’ve helped, rather than hindered, this process.Last word to Charlie:

Marx wrote:

if appearance and reality coincided, there would be no need for science

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

You seem to be saying more than this: that science is subjective in that the descriptions which scientists give of the external world depend on their "values" and/or class position. Which could suggest that you think that there is no such thing as an objective external world. I don't suppose this is your position but no wonder Ed sees you as an "idealist".

This is the accusation which is always levelled against critical realists who argue against 'objectivism' or positivist notions of science. It assumes that there are only two positions: objective and subjective. So, if one isn't a positivist, one must be a subjectivist/idealist.The basis of the argument, though, is the same as Marx's, above. There are three positions: objectivist/materialist, subjectivist/idealist, and human interactionist/critical realist. He clearly regards there as being three possibilities. I've described this in more detail on the link I provided, but I suppose I need to repost one of my posts here. I will do this in a separate post.

ALB wrote:

I don't see the fact that most people are, from a philosophical point of view, "common sense realists" (i.e think that the world is as they experience it, exists when no-one is experiencing it, and existed before there were any humans) is a problem. This is enough for everyday living and no doubt will continue to be the popular perspective even in socialism. I don't see it as being a pillar of capitalist society.

I was quite shocked by this paragraph, ALB. Since when have 'common sense', 'everyday living' and 'popular perspective' been standards of judgement for Communists? They have traditionally been seen as the preserve of a conservative worldview.Of course, I'm not suggesting that you are a conservative, far from it, but it does display to me the power of bourgeois ideology around these issues. I'll dig out that post I made on the ICC thread, comrade.

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