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Concrete and Abstract Objects of CognitionI’ve labelled objects as “[concrete]” or “[abstract]” according to whether they inhabit the world of concrete phenomena [= appearance; immediate experience] or the world of abstract phenomena [= thought categories; mediated experience].Quotations

Dietzgen, Nature of Human Brain Work wrote:

“Every [concrete] thing has its own special [abstract] nature, and this [abstract] nature is not seen, or felt, or heard, but solely perceived by the faculty of [abstract] thought.”

Historical materialism recognizes both [concrete] things and [abstract] categories as objects of cognition.   Critical realism recognizes only [concrete] things.

Pannekoek wrote:

“Natural scientists consider the [abstract] immutable substances:  matter, energy, electricity, gravity, the Law of entropy, etc.,  as the basic elements of the world, as the [concrete] reality that has to be discovered.   From the viewpoint of Historical Materialism, they are products which creative [abstract] mental activity forms out of the substance of [concrete] natural phenomena.”

Natural scientists — in Pannekoek’s day — generally conceived the [abstract] categories and principles of physics as [concrete] reality.   Historical materialism, however, conceives them as mentally created [abstract] reality.Historical materialism recognizes the [abstract] categories and principles of theoretical physics as objects of cognition.   Critical realism does not.

Schaff, History and Truth wrote:

“Firstly the recognition of the [concrete] objective existence of the [concrete] object of [abstract] cognition, i.e. its [concrete] existence outside of any perceiving [abstract] mind and independently of it.”

Critical realism excludes [abstract] thought objects, by prior recognition, from its [concrete] objects of cognition.Challenge to LBirdI could be wrong about critical realism.Can you please show us where critical realism recognizes [abstract] thought categories as objects of cognition?Do you recognize an [abstract] thought category as an object of cognition?

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Can't you see that I'm pointing out that Schaff has got himself into a muddle. Is that really beyond your capacity?

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Why I’m Not a Critical RealistCritical realism assigns highly restrictive attributes to its object of cognition:

Schaff wrote:

“the objective existence of the object of cognition, i.e. its existence outside of any perceiving mind and independently of it.”“the objectively existing object of cognition is the external source of sensual impressions without which the process of cognition would be impossible.”

Critical realism’s perceiving mind is the universal subject — the consciousness of society at its historical stage of development.Critical realism’s object is the individual object of its starting point — naive realism.   This follows from prior recognition [1].Critical realism’s stipulation that its objects of cognition must lie outside of any perceiving mind and independently of it means that it only cognizes objects that are not theoretical and not social.By prior recognition, critical realism restricts its objects to our immediate experience of the world of appearance.Theoretical ObjectsJust like its foundation [naive realism], critical realism doesn’t cognize the objects of mediated experience — theoretical objects — since mediation is a process that is not outside of any perceiving mind and independent of it.Critical realism’s objects of cognition might be thought sufficient for natural science, whose objects are tangible and measurable.   That’s because critical realism relies on critical reflection — active science’s mediating role — to comprehend its tangible and measurable objects theoretically.However, theoretical objects introduced by the reflection process — objects such as abstract scientific categories — fall beyond critical realism’s prior-declared scope.Social ObjectsSocial objects differ in kind from the mediated theoretical objects of natural science.   Social objects are significant to socialists precisely because they mediate and express social relationships that are essential to [a given] society, e.g., money.Social objects remain purely social, no matter what tangible object performs their function, or acts as their immediate social carrier — their physical conduit. Social objects are definitely beyond the scope of critical realism.That stupidity, expressly designed to make critical realism materialist, excludes most of marxian science from being cognized by it.Materialist Monist CognitionThe critical realist object is a fossil throwback to the 18th century relative to the marxian object of materialist monist cognition.For materialist monist cognition, the object may be both immediate or mediated; concrete or abstract; theoretical or social; or just plain old 18th century mechanical   Such an object is the object of materialist monistic cognition for Marx, Engels, Dietzgen, Pannekoek, etc.The object of materialist monist cognition is important for socialists precisely because it comprises the concrete and the abstract — precisely because it comprises theoretical objects and social objects that depend critically upon perceiving social minds.Take any marxian category, e.g., value.   It is a materialist monist object that happens to be simultaneously abstract, theoretical and social. It cannot be a critical realist object of cognition.   That is a devastating socialist critique of critical realism.Take the most significant marxian category surplus value.   It does not exist outside of any perceived mind and independently of it.   Its various forms of appearance — profit, interest, rent — may at first sight appear to exist outside of any perceived mind and independently of it.Yet these various forms of appearance are of significance to us precisely because of the materialist monist way we both conceive [and mostly misconceive] them socially — not because of what they are physically.Their significance for us — their very existence for us — would vanish if society were to vanish, and they may perish when society changes to socialism.   They will do so even if the objects that bear these forms — that represent the significant social object of our materialist monist cognition — happen to persist after society abolishes the social object.Cognition of social objects of significance to socialists — capital, surplus value, exploitation, capitalism, socialism — depends precisely on the hold these objects have over our minds — the universal subject.   Cognition of their hold over us can only be materialist monist cognition.Critical Realism’s 18th Century ObjectAll social forms of appearance are entirely dependent upon the social mind — the universal subject.   So much for the futility of critical realism.What recommends a “socialist” theory of cognition that precludes the categories of thought that are significant for socialists?Critical realism makes do with the fossilized tangible objects of 18th century mechanistic materialism that are not social.Is this really the best that soviet philosophy could devise in a vain attempt to save Leninist reflection from oblivion?

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Mixed-up Schaff

LBird wrote:

Schaff … makes it very clear … the ‘subject’ is ‘social’

Schaff proclaims the universal subject but can’t free himself of the individual subject, e.g., as here:

Schaff wrote:

“Firstly, the recognition of the objective existence of the object of cognition, i.e. its existence outside of any perceiving mind and independently of it.”

Schaff’s any perceiving mind implies the individual subject — any [= individual] is not the ensemble [= universal].Here Schaff unconsciously slips out of the universal subject and into the solipsism-freed Cartesian individual subject.Where does Schaff’s individual subject come from?   I assume it comes from the individual naive realism he is trying to reconcile with universal critical realism — a task apparently beyond his ability to solve consistently.

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LBird wrote:

can you point me to the page where Schaff states the 'object of cognition' is 'individual', rather than 'universal'?

I needed a return visit to the library in order to respond with page references…Schaff states that the subject of cognition is the universal subject — sensuously-active society.Schaff makes no such statement about the object of cognition, and so his position on the object of cognition must be inferred from the attributes he assigns it.As we know, critical realism relies upon prior recognition of the object of cognition existing “outside of any perceiving mind and independently of it” [1].  [In passing, Schaff’s perceiving mind is none other than the dreaded individual subject, which we had every right to assume critical realism took no prior recognition of.   Schaff is not a consistently systematic thinker.]Prior recognition of the object’s existence outside the individual subject excludes Schaff’s object being the universal object.This is because all individual subjects are objects for each other, and are prior recognized as being dependent components of the universal subject. This is also because the universal subject is a component of the universal object — exists within it — and so is not independent of the object of cognition.That leaves us, as we arrived at previously, with the naive-realist object — refined by critical-realist reflection — as Schaff’s object of cognition.QuotesThe following indicate missed opportunities for Schaff to declare the object universal if he wanted to. He was clearly unconcerned to do so. Consequently we must assume that his object is just any old object of cognition.[p. 63] — objective cognition possesses “general and not only individual value (as opposed to the subjective)”.  Here Schaff describes objectivity, and not the object.Schaff largely ignores the general, and concentrates on the subjective, i.e. he focusses on the subject, not the object. [For Marx, who starts from the universal object, cognition is always universal and individual.][p. 71] — “the cognition of a given object … is composed of many judgements; it is a process.”Here Schaff describes cognition as a process, and not the object.[p. 72] — “The object of cognition is infinite; this assertion pertains to the object, both in the sense of total reality and of its fragments. For total reality, just like its fragments, are infinite when it comes to the quantity of their correlations and also their mutations in time. Therefore, the cognition of such an infinite object must also be infinite, must be an infinite process of accumulating partial truths.” .Here Schaff describes the object of cognition as either individual or general.I wonder if these quotes are as close as Schaff ever approached to acknowledging the centrality of the universal object.[Apologies for earlier mis-posting my library notes — now thankfully expunged — upon my being ejected from the library.]

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Critical RealismLBird identifies with critical realism as outlined in Adam Schaff’s History and Truth [Chapter 1].Schaff bases critical realism on a theory of reflection — “precisely such an interpretation of the theory of reflection can be reconstructed from the corresponding statements of Marx, Engels and Lenin [sic].”Schaff’s theory of reflection [reconstructed from Marx, Engels and Lenin] is what rescues critical from naive — or critical realism from naive realism.Critical Realist CognitionCritical realist cognition is separated from naive realist cognition by its subject, which is sensuously-active society [consciousness], and by its method, which is critical realist reflection [practice].Schaff’s critical realist theory of cognition is based on four [positive] prior recognitions:“the objective existence of the object of cognition — its existence outside of any perceiving mind and independently of it.”“the objectively existing object of cognition is the external source of sensual impressions without which the process of cognition would be impossible.”“the process of cognition is … a subjective–objective relationship.”“the object is knowable … in the process of cognition the thing in itself becomes the thing for us” — [Engels: Anti Dühring]For Schaff, 1 and 2 are critical realist materialism, 3 and 4 are critical realist reflection, and 1, 2, 3 and 4 are critical realist cognition — or critical realism itself.Critique of Critical RealismIf critical realism were merely Schaff’s theory of cognition, we could ignore it as one more abstract variant on Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach by a professional soviet philosopher.But Schaff proclaims critical realism to be the marxian theory of cognition, and so we must engage critically with it.Fetishism of the Individual ObjectSchaff explicitly makes the subject of cognition universal [social, in the sense of society] — in line with Thesis VI.Schaff implicitly makes the object of cognition individual [he does so unconsciously, falling for naive practice] — in line with naive realism.Consequently, for Schaff, the universal subject [we] must bring the individual naive realist object [it, the thing in itself] into being [i.e. into our consciousness] in part by prior recognition of the individual object’s external existence.Marx would never base cognition of the individual naive realist external object on Schaff’s prior recognition 1.For Marx, like Hegel, the only object is the universal object — the universe of experience. The universal object is basic for Marx — the individual object is superstructural.Existence Independent of Mind?Schaff, by prior recognizing the existence of individual objects independent of mind — a result rather than a starting point of a theory of cognition — has assumed the objective independent-of-mind existence of the individual object as an article of faith for each and every cognized object out there. Did he consciously intend to do that?The history of human cognition is littered with the corpses of prior recognized individual objects.Universal Subject and ObjectFor Marx [like Hegel], subject and object are identical. We are basically the universe, even if superstructurally we come to cognize ourselves as a part of it.Our consciousness is the universe’s consciousness. We are of it; our thinking is it thinking. [The implications for cognition are enormous.]With Hegel, whose thought was pregnant for Marx just like Feuerbach’s, the Hegelian social subject [consciousness] initially misconceives individual objects [man and nature] as “alien” [just like Schaff’s prior recognition 1] but after its historical journey recognizes them as itself [Phenomenology].With Hegel the historical process is mystical. With Schaff it is, like Popper, iterative reflection.ReflectionSchaff’s reflection relies on prior recognition of external individual objects that are the source of our sensual impressions [1 and 2].Consequently, his reflection process must either superimpose itself upon naive realism in order to extinguish it, or else his reflection process must embrace naive realism, and acknowledge that it perpetually reproduces naive realism anew as a product that is simultaneously the starting point for the next iteration of the reflection process proper to criticize.I imagine that Schaff implies the latter. But where does that leave the individual object’s prior recognized materiality [1 and 2] if criticism extinguishes the object’s external existence independent of mind.How can concrete dependent-on-mind reflection continually spirit away or reconstitute an external object whose existence is already prior recognized as independent-of-mind?But scientific discussion, when carried on at Schaff’s abstract philosophical level of commentary on, and objectification of, Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach spirits materialism away.I will continue discussing Schaffian reflection at the practical level, as exemplified in the mature Marx’s actual scientific practice in Capital, and the comprehension of that practice [Thesis VIII].To be continued…

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LBird’s Parallel List Feuerbach sees subject as mentally passive-receptive; Marx sees subject as mentally active;F. sees subject as individual; M. sees subject as social;F. sees subject as contemplative; M. sees subject as actively practical;F. sees knowledge as a faithful copy of object; M. sees knowledge as a process of mental reproduction of the object.Surely Schaff Isn’t ResponsiblePoints 1, 2 and 4 are slanders against Feuerbach.False.   Marx expressly criticizes Feuerbach for seeing the subject as being exclusively mentally active.   A correct formulation is: Feuerbach sees the subject as being mentally active. Marx sees the subject as being both sensuously and mentally active. Marx does not accuse Feuerbach of mental passivity. [That would be falsely accusing Feuerbach of a backwards retreat from Hegel.]False.   Feuerbach, as Young Hegelian, accepted his master’s insight that the subject was social.   Marx’s point is that Feuerbach only saw the social as species being, mere human essence [≅ human nature].Marx rips into human essence in Thesis VI: “human essence is not an abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality it is the ensemble of our social relations.”  In case you doubt Feuerbach’s social subject, here are some of his pregnant thoughts [Essence of Christianity, Ch. 1] that seeded Marx’s materialist conception of history:

Feuerbach wrote:

“Science is the consciousness of species. In life we are concerned with individuals, but in science, with species. Only a being to whom his own species, his characteristic mode of being, is an object of thought can make the essential nature of other things and beings an object of thought.”“Man is in himself both ‘I’ and ‘You’; he can put himself in the place of another precisely because his species, his essential mode of being — not only his individuality — is an object of thought to him.”“What man calls Absolute Being, his God, is his own being. The power of the object over him is therefore the power of his own being.”“Therefore, whatever the object of which we become conscious, we always become conscious of our own being; we cannot set anything in motion without setting ourselves in motion. ”

True.   Except that Marx sees the subject as contemplative as well, finding “rational solution in human practice, and the comprehension of this practice” [Thesis VIII.   comprehension of practice ≅ theoretical science.]False.   After Kant’s critical philosophy famously proclaimed the this-sidedness of the synthetic a priori, and it became an article of Kantian faith that the external object was ultimately unknowable in itself [Kant’s Ding an Sich], serious philosophers ran a mile from “knowledge as a copy of object”So initially did politician Lenin, before he plagiarized it as expedient arsenal to attack the Machist theory of knowledge.Feuerbach, as Young Hegelian, was steeped in Hegel’s critique of Kant. He knew better.

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LBird wrote:

Science is not the passive discovery of the really existing external world (reality, the object), but the production by society of knowledge, through the active interaction of the human subject with the object. Truth is not identical with, or a reflection of, the object. The ‘truth’ is a social product, based upon human praxis with reality.'Truth' is an attribute of 'knowledge', not the 'object'. If it's an attribute of 'object', then 'truth' can't have a history or be a social product (and thus, humans being fallible, 'true' can be shown to be 'false'). What's 'true scientific knowledge' can change. The history of science is littered with 'truth' changing. This can only be so if 'truth' is a human product.

These two statements by LBird are correct. They refute the positivism expressed by many participants.LBird, you are right to point out to those who consider truth to be nothing but the identity of our conception of an external object with that actual external object itself because, for us, there is no external object beyond our appearance–reality conception of it that we are able to compare our conception of it with.That’s why [Thesis II] “Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice”.That boils down to why we need science to resolve our immediate and our consciously mediated conceptions of the world. Why we need science so that we may reliably comprehend our consciousness’s [this-sided] immediate appearance in terms of our consciousness’s [this-sided] mediated reality.You see our consciousness has this dual character. The interpenetration of this-sided immediate experience and this-sided mediated reality remains a mystifying dual for a tripartite model of consciousness.That mystery is precisely why I must appear to you to be “rabbiting on” about something extraneous to your tripartite model: base–superstructure determinism. Your tripartite model leaves no room for immediate appearance, but philosophically has only room for knowledge [presumably you mean by knowledge, not facts, but abstract conceptions — our conception of reality].Base–superstructure determinism is our essential mediating mechanism for grasping immediate appearance. And, as you well know, that’s precisely why we need science.You unfortunately mistake scientific determinism for “bourgeois” nonsense. But it’s inescapable if our this-sidedness does not give us immediate reality. Our mediated reality must then have to give us our conceived reality of immediacy. The issue of what comes first — theory or practice — is not as clear cut [or as bourgeois versus proletarian] as you imagine.To now reconsider your quoted post above from the standpoint of young Marx when he still held your current position. In his Dissertation on the Greek Atomists, he famously said against Kant’s distinction between conception and actuality:

Marx wrote:

If somebody imagines that he has 100 talers, if this concept is not for him an arbitrary, subjective one, if he believes in it, then these 100 imagined talers have for him the same value as 100 real ones. For instance, he will incur debts on the strength of his imagination, his imagination will work, in the same way as all humanity has incurred debts on its gods.

I have not been attacking you, personally. But, please check the personal epithets you once flung at members of this forum from a confident bastion of assumed superiority.Now that you’ve survived your baptism of fire, I suggest you marshal your arguments in future not by authority alone, but in a clear reasoned manner. It is the process and not the principle alone that proves anything.Also please answer the objections of those who take the time to follow your own arguments, but are unwilling to be dragooned into dancing to your tune until you prove yourself worthy of the subject.I’ve now tracked your lively discussions on the web, and I do not doubt your genuineness and enthusiasm for what you conceive socialism to be. That indeed is something precious.Consequently, you must comprehend why I swiftly moved to ward off any contamination of your posts by perceived pseudo science. I would expect you to so honour and protect your intellectual heroes [Marx, Dietzgen, Pannekoek].You have chosen not to unequivocally distance yourself from such contamination, and that sadly diminishes your current scientific [or, for you, proletarian] integrity in my estimation. But we all learn.

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ParodyLBird and his UFO “scientific” mentor believe science operates as follows:“bourgeois” scientific practice — if experimental data clashes with theory, ditch the theory,“marxian” scientific practice — if experimental data clashes with theory, ditch the experiment.The key difference is: their science rejects theory before evidence; our science rejects evidence before theory.What Actually HappensIn practice, scientists operate in both ways (1) and (2) under different circumstances.When they are engaged in normal science, scientists employ (2) with utter conviction. The purpose of scientific theory is to guide human practice. Science, as social life generally, would be impossible if humans lacked a reliable guide to action.Since theory provides that guide, experience must be interpreted in its terms. We do this scientifically by determining mentally concrete instances of a scientific theory’s abstract principles by means of its abstract formal determinism [roughly (2)].Normally that works fine, just as our daily-life abstractions deliver us concrete guides to negotiating the world.However, when scientific abstract determinism fails us, and forces us to increasingly torture it into determining instances that match observation which no longer make much sense to us — i.e. when observational anomalies mount — a serious crisis starts eroding away at confidence within the scientific community.We sense that something deep down is wrong with our science’s structure. Its abstract principles and its abstract determinism are no longer working in harmony for us. We appear to have exhausted their scope [lifetime]. Our theory is ceasing, in as yet unknown ways, to be a reliable guide to practice. It must be overturned by practice, but how?Then begins an astonishing period of revolutionary science, in which scientists engage in (1). In such periods, consciousness consciously subverts itself. This is the stuff of conviction in the world.Collapse of Classical [Newtonian] PhysicsIn terms of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a band of physicists ceased engaging in normal science — for which they lived and died by the current theory (or loosely by the Current Paradigm) — and engaged in revolutionary science — a response to crisis which drove them to rethink the Current Paradigm from its very foundations in light of disturbing counter evidence, while simultaneously being held in check by every fibre in their intellectual bodies compelling them to salvage as much of the mightily successful past as they could.As superb example of a Hegelian negation-of-the-negation, the Modern physics that arose out of the crisis, and resolved it, contains Classical physics as its limiting cases. Conviction in the world is restored, but from a new standpoint — new abstract principles and new abstract formal determinism. New conviction.A negation-of-the-negation reassures us that we are entering a new phase of the same process.Logician of science Karl Popper (who purported to despise scientists who weren’t permanent revolutionaries without really making it clear how they should actually go about working productively in normal life in such a fundamentally destructive fashion) has been hailed by adherents as “revolutionary” relative to Kuhn, precisely because Popper — like you, LBird — knows no other science than (1).Of course, Marx, Kuhn, Gould [Punctuated Equilibrium Darwinism] all recognized that (2) was the norm, and that (1) was the dialectical exception [the nodal point of phase transition]. Just as stasis is most certainly the norm under capitalism today.ImagineIf your and your mentor’s (1) versus (2) scientific practice were a correct description of actual scientific practice…Your “bourgeois” science [physics, chemistry, mathematics, …] would stagnate theoretically into impractical quagmires [as their theories would be continually jettisoned in the face of counter evidence].Your “marxian” science would stagnate practically into abandoned theoretical swamps [as all counter evidence would be continually ignored].Is this the two-dimensional Ronald Reagan theory of their and our science you want to foist upon socialists?The whole point of Kuhn’s book was to point out how devastating a scientific revolution (1) is to the norm because, by challenging core principles and practice of (2) that formerly made the world meaningful, it shakes conviction in the scientific community’s collective enterprise.IncommensurabilityYour mentor harbours an unshakable belief that compels him to deny (1) because there’s considerable counter evidence to his unshakeable belief. So he also denies that Einstein and Planck made scientific leaps which remain theoretically incommensurable with Classical physics, while he daydreams that Modern physics can be harmoniously reconciled with Classical physics through dogged adherence to Classical physics by (2).Your similar adherence to “permanent revolution” (2) leaves you sitting quite comfortably alongside the evidence-dismissive apologists for creation [intelligent-design] science, tobacco-lobby [no-causal effect] science, global skepticism [it rained yesterday] science, theology, Leninism…If we are to engage in a discussion of a “socialist theory of science”, we need to know whether you still hold your earlier avowed position as being identical to your mentor’s UFO-defensive “theory of science”.

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R. J. Anderton

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WarningLBird’s scientific authority is a UFO “scientist”.Scientific Theory. UFO “science” is compelled to undermine the credibility of the authoritative scientific theory it opposes and that it finds itself opposed by. Just like LBird. [So too are intelligent-design “science”, warming-skeptic “science”, alternative-medicine “science”.]Scientific Practice. UFO “science” is compelled to descend into the alarmist paranoia of whistle-blowing against what it perceives as an “authoritarian” cover-up specifically designed to keep “the rest of us” in the dark. Just like LBird.UFO “science” believes that we are monitored and manipulated by aliens conducting experiments upon us. At least LBird’s “scientific” mentor believes so. Does LBird?I have read the web “science” postings of LBird’s “scientific” mentor. The kindest I can say is that I find nothing in them of merit for socialists.CrankI challenge LBird to disown the “science” of his scientific authority.

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Nature as FoundationRussell is cutting us moderns down to size. According to him, the ancients revered external nature [and its dire necessity] as the realm where scientific truth resides. Human arrogance set in with the Renaissance, and got out of hand when Fichte [philosophical code for Hegel and Marx] turned truth into a social construct.That is Russell’s bourgeois take on truth, and on the threat to it of growing irrationality. The titled Lord is proposing we all adopt social humility toward external nature as antidote.Like you, he warns against social corrosion. Like you he lacks an abstract deterministic theory of consciousness — for us, he lacks the materialist conception of history.You Read What You Want to ReadQuite funny that you blindly misread Russell as supporting your position on truth — recoiling from his ideologically toxic reference to ‘facts’ and fooled by his hysteria over impending disaster.What a devastating self-critique you unconsciously make of yourself, as exemplary educator of the educator, exposing your embarrassing 180° twist in adjudicating ideological truth as falsehood.If you easily dupe yourself to vote for Russell when every fibre in your body compels you to vote against him, heaven save socialism from impending catastrophes when it lets you loose to misdirect your personal vote on the truth of the whole of human science!Self-correctionRussell famously takes 300 pages to “prove” 1 + 1 = 2 [would you have sneered — “in what base ≥3?”] and then Frege had the indecency to locate a paradox in Russell’s set theoretic assumptions back on page one.Note, Russell’s immediate retraction exemplifies that science is, in its deterministic practice, self-correcting.But your non-deterministic tripartite model of cognition provides no practical method of self correction — something you demonstrably need. That’s precisely why you crave correction by ideology.Your tripartite schema is correct as far as it goes — philosophically speaking. But it is incomplete, scientifically speaking. And so it must remain forever ideological. Its determinism can only be decided by a battle of competing ideologies.You scornfully look down your nose from on high upon Engels’s simple description of self-correction, which is not intended to be “philosophical”, as you misjudge it to be.Waste of TimeYou seem blithely unaware that scientific revision has implications. It has ripple effects in unexpected places. Nature is connected. And our conception of it [including us, as we are part of it] changes all the time.[That has nothing to do with 19th century materialism.]The problem you aim to solve falls in the computational complexity class of NP-complete [nondeterministic polynomial time] problems. Mankind needs to spend its time in socialism in far more productive ways.How about trying deterministic base–superstructure science instead.

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LBird wrote:

Glad to see you’re keeping up with human thought.

Really?[Gone beyond it.]Of course I recognize your Kuhnian point. It is the central plank of your Lakatosian/Kuhnian/Feyerabendian [LKF] inspiration that, because theory dictates scientific practice, science must start with theory.Anyone who reads and rereads the remarkable “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” cheers when Kuhn murders Popper on this very point.Again, I am not alarmed as you are by the fact that the social superstructure [which includes science and class ideology, proper] is a social construct.Marx’s, apparently dismissible materialist conception of history “social being determines consciousness” presented that to the world a century before LKF, who took it off him in timid emasculated form.Sure, capitalist ideology is our target.But I suggest you look at how the Marxian economists of the world absolutely and mercilessly demolished Marx on the basis of the honest, openly transparent — all assumptions exposed — mathematical tract by Piero Sraffa [1960] on the “Production of Commodities by Commodities”.[Seek out if you want to be humiliated by friendly fire, Steedman’s [1977] apparently devastating demolition “Marx after Sraffa”. And Sraffa’s intention was to trounce the marginalists and to shore up Marx, not to destroy him in the process.]You then might realize that the problems we face here and now run deeper than your simplistic fear of that 18th century materialist dogma that “ideology rules the world”.To rejoin the actual world, where fierce battles are fought, read Andrew Kliman’s [2008] amazing rescue of Marx — “Reclaiming Marx’s Capital ”. Then you may observe a striking instance of how ideology actually operates to paralyze thought and action.Theory and PracticeSure, theory decides what observation is and how to make it. Not a difficult concept to understand, since theory was abstracted from observation expressly for this purpose. But, despite this, it is equally apparent that observation just as certainly determines how to make theory.Both statements demonstrably apply at the level of immediate experience — at the level of appearance.The explanation can never be, as you surmise, one of mere interaction, or alternation. between both. Thereby hangs the miraculous metaphysical assumption that two opposing determinisms are exactly equally balanced or are somehow harmonically coupled as swings and roundabouts — extraordinary equalities or couplings worth trumpeting to the skies.The solution to such paradoxes [man makes history but history makes man; social existence determines consciousness but consciousness determines social existence; theory determines observation, but observation determines theory] lies in precisely acknowledging that both horns are equally correct at the phenomenological level.The point is that this acknowledged complementarity, being appearance, is what must be explained by reality — by science. Hegel always saw such doubles as two sides of the same coin, and therein lies the secret to building the science.But, building a science is hard work. When we come to theorize the science, we abstract from appearance, which implies we must analyze that appearance, for it is that appearance we want to explain.And what we abstract from appearance will always be experientially false, simply because our abstractions are not the same as immediate experience. [They could hardly hold for all material instances if they actually held for any one of them.]Take the sciences that LKB study. Those sciences work for us precisely because their abstractions [categories and determinisms] also don’t apply immediately to any actuality. They only apply as abstract categories mediated by abstract determinism. [Both categories and determinism are abstracted from appearance.]That makes your Kuhnian point that it’s the abstract theory which is on trial, and not any one of its determinations [or, viewed as appearance, any one observation].The trouble is that LKF work with appearances when they theorize the science of science. Marx, who understood these issues more deeply than they, consciously works with abstractions and deterministically derives appearances from them. That is also how LKF’s sciences operate. But it is not how these philosophers operate.Consequently these philosophers [at least one, Kuhn, is a giant, while Lakatos with his minor “research programs” circles like a minor planet around his Kuhnian sun, and Feyerabend is somewhere off in the Kuiper Belt] trail a legacy, taken up by non-determinists who learn their own science by cherry-picking from LKF’s philosophical science of science.The pitiable residue is little more than “IDEOLOGY RULZ”. What a sorry fate for such remarkable work.Marx explains the appearance of scientific practice by decidedly coming out against your confident clinging to appearance — as true disciple of the ideological streak in LKF.Theoretically for Marx — and theory is the only reality for us — practice precedes theory. At the level of the theory of theory: Social being determines consciousness.PostscriptSurely you recognize the formalism of deterministic science as subsuming your static tripartite model, supplying the necessary dynamics that turns your schema into a process, and the necessary determinism that turns theory, in principle, into a self-checking and self-correcting human enterprise.I have no fears of ideology under socialism [but that’s another thread].I oppose your restrictions on human thought and human endeavour. I consider them to be utter madness.

[twc]

LBird wrote:

And how does human 'practice' happen, without human 'theory'? Induction?

Drivel. We acted before we were conscious of it. Consciousness comes after.[Social being determines consciousness. But you know no determinism,]This quote is precisely what you said ages ago — "science begins with theory", or words to that effect. And that theory is based on ideological assumption, etc.Your defense of interaction between subject and object is almost meaningless waffle. Only you could imagine that has any definite meaning.

[twc]

Whence Socialist Ideology?

Marx showed that the materialist conception of history implies that socialism lacks capitalism’s need to camouflage social relations of class dominance.

When people cooperate to run society as associated producers of wealth and culture, mystification of social reality [conscious and unconscious ideology] vanishes along with the rest of the social-superstructural conditions required to reproduce the capitalist class as dominant.

[Social Reproduction].

But LBird fears the emergence of a new ruling class of scientists who own and control scientific truth and keep the rest of us in deliberately ignorant subjection under socialism.

He asserts that all truth is irredeemably ideological, and so it had better conform to society’s ideology than to the ideology of the practicing scientists who discover and formulate it. Of course, the practice of discovery and formulation is irredeemably ideological as well. Everything is an ideological social construct.

LBIrd demands that all of society decide on the truth of science, its laws and its results.

Democratic Truth

The following suggests some of the apparent absurdity of demanding that we all vote democratically to formulate ideological truth. Recall, we are not discussing scientific accountability, or scientific practice, or scientific fraud, as such, but only scientific truth.

How do we go about assessing physical truth of this kind [expressed in a mathematical creole for viewing on this web site]?

ℒ_{SM} =

kinetic energies and self-interaction of the gauge bosons

¼ W_{μν} • W^{μν}

— ¼ B_{μν} B^{μν}

— ¼ G^a_{μν} G^{μν}_a

kinetic energies and electroweak interactions of fermions

+ bar{L} γ^μ ( i ∂_μ

        — ½ g τ • W_μ

        — ½ g′ Y B_μ ) L

+ bar{R} γ^μ ( i ∂_μ

        — ½ g τ • W_μ

        — ½ g′ Y B_μ ) R

W^{±}, Z, γ and Higgs masses and couplings

+ ½ | ( i ∂_μ — ½ g τ • W_μ

   — ½ g′ Y B_μ ) φ |² — V(φ)

interactions between quarks and gluons

+ g″ ( bar{q} γ^μ T_a q) G^a_μ

fermion masses and couplings to Higgs

+ ( G_1 bar{L} φ R
  + G_2 bar{L} φ_c R
  + h . c . )

No Conviction without Determinism

The first lesson a scientist learns is to hold conviction in abstract determinism.

Judging deterministic truth is a measurable task, and so it is meaningful. By what criteria do we judge ideological truth?

How can we judge truth if we don’t recognize the efficacy of abstract determinism to predict the outcomes of states and actions?

If we do recognize abstract determinism, why do we need to vote on truth, rather than just test its efficacy?

If testing [experiment, observation and measurement] are irredeemably ideological, can we stop the recursive ideology-on-ideology descent other than by collective ideological fiat?

If theory is irredeemably ideological, what are our grounds for conviction? Enthusiasm?

Conviction in abstract determinism worries the philosopher, but it is the only reliable source of conviction we have.

Conviction in class consciousness is ultimately conviction in scientific determinism, or it remains ideology, as it does for LBird.

Science as Determinism

Contrary to LBird’s imaginings, mankind created science neither to seek truth nor to answer interesting questions [no matter how significant they have emerged as consequences for us] but to solve practical problems.

LBird sees science springing from theory [ideological assumptions] not from practice [need, experience, measurement]. Textbooks and subject reviews often cut to the chase and start their presentation with abstract categories and abstract determinisms — as if they sprung from nowhere — and deterministically develop these abstractions to describe actual instances of material phenomena.

But it would be truly amazing if those abstract categories and abstract determinisms could yield concrete abstractions that actually describe material phenomena if the abstractions themselves had not been originally plucked from the material phenomena they’re stuffed back into.

Marx’s Science

Marx, in Capital, who thought deeply about science as process, first analyses the material practice of commodity exchange in order to abstract from it his key conceptual category value [an imaginary category like all abstractions, that doesn’t correspond to anything material, except by deterministic derivation of concrete mental instances of it].

Marx deliberately offers us the phenomenology of discovery before presenting the logic of determination. He first builds his toolkit of abstract categories [such as surplus value] before he can actually launch the investigation.

In other words, he starts with the practice he hopes to turn his abstractions back into — the material substrate that engendered them, but this time as mentally concrete instances. That’s how all deterministic science generates conviction. The only conviction we really know, and can rely on.

And what is Marx’s abstract deterministic logic? It is the materialist conception of history. Here is the sought-for “proletarian science” of society and of the “ideology” of class society.

Postscript

Note how the formalism of base–superstructure determinism transcends LBird’s tripartite model of cognition — it alone yields truth by conviction [What’s so special about Base–Superstructure Determinism?]. That is the only truth we know.

By the way LBird, there’s little new under the sun.

Marx was quite familiar with the 18th century French materialist view that “opinion [ideology] governs the world”.

[Author]

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