Pannekoek’s theory of science

[twc]

LBird Repudiates his “No Brainer”Pannekoek’s Science and Society demolition job forces you to admit that your “no brainer” theory-precedes-practice thesis is only partially true, because its antithesis is also true.DialecticsThis is a signature Hegelian problem.Are you capable of resolving thesis and antithesis into a synthesis?Reveal what sort of a dialectician you are.Unity of Theory and PracticeMy challenge to you is to make good in practice what you now posture in theory — the unity of theory and practice.That should not be too difficult for someone intent on dictating to scientists how they should “correctly ” conduct their own scientific theory and practice.Show us how good a scientist you really are.Scientific EducatorHere’s your great chance to demonstrate your scientific educational skills.Hic Rhodus.  Hic Saltus.

[LBird]

twc wrote:

DialecticsThis is a signature Hegelian problem.Are you capable of resolving thesis and antithesis into a synthesis?Reveal what sort of a dialectician you are.

Dialectics? As I predicted, Engelsian 'science', opposed to Marx's.'Dialectics', now, the last refuge of the scientific scoundrel.

[twc]

Intellectual cowardice!Resolve your dilemma in your own non-dialectical fashion.  But resolve it to save your credibility.[Your insult to Marx is ignorant and contemptible.  You are no marxist.]

[LBird]

twc wrote:

Intellectual cowardice!Resolve your dilemma in your own non-dialectical fashion.  But resolve it to save your credibility.[Your insult to Marx is ignorant and contemptible.  You are no marxist.]

I confess my sins, Father twc, I'm an undialectical, unresolved, discreditable coward!As for 'no marxist', I think that I'm in rather good company on that one!

[twc]

Unity of Theory and PracticeIn #372, you acknowledge a dilemma for your theory of cognition.In Schaffian terminology, the dilemma is:knowledge [theory] determines interaction [practice],interaction [practice] determines knowledge [theory].You now recognize your cognitive process operates both ways: (1) and (2).I addressed this cognitive issue in #244:  “both (1) and (2) hold in different phases of the same social process.” — Marx’s descent from the concrete to the abstract, and his ascent from the abstract to the concrete.Marx acknowledged his indebtedness precisely here to Hegel.That makes neither Marx nor me a Hegelian — quite the contrary.Just as your labour on behalf of a capitalist public service department — whose IT implementation you esteemed so highly as to choose it to exemplify the essentials of the topic under discussion, human cognition — makes you a supporter of capitalist public service department.Your Schaffian SolutionSo how do you plan to resolve your Schaffian unity of knowledge [theory] and interaction [practice]?Or don’t you plan to resolve it?Are you content to leave your Schaffian “unity of knowledge and interaction” unresolved — pleased for it to remain an empty phrase that mesmerizes all, because you squib explaining it, or because you are incapable of comprehending it?Hic Rhodus, hic salta!

[Brian]

LBird wrote:

ALB wrote:

Do you really think that democratic control should extend to what people should think?

What's the alternative? Leave it in the hands of a minority, as it is now?What? You actually believe the ruling class myth that 'we are all individuals'? That we all now think as 'individuals', and that future democratic control of our socialisation processes would be a retrograde step? That we shouldn't have a collective say in how we reproduce our society?

Brian wrote:

It seems to be implicit within LBird's contributions that he's fixed on one particular methodology ruling the roost in reference to the scientific method.

Yeah, the method of democratic control of science. You obviously disagree with me, and seem to be in agreement with twc. But twc hasn't explained, unlike me, what their method actually looks like in practice. In effect, twc's method comes down to placing one's trust in scientists: 'Our betters'. No thanks.I suppose this derail saves anyone from the SPGB having to discuss the method of science. Surely there must be someone reading who can discuss these fundamental issues?

I'm quietly sitting on the fence in actual fact waiting patiently for you and twc to reach some kind of agreement on what specific scientific investigative criteria is acceptable to both of you.   At the moment you are both bogged down in a chicken and egg situation with neither willing to give way.I think a good starting point for both of you would be to draw up a terms of reference which is acceptable to both parties.  The present stalemate is not good for science or socialism/communism.In regards to your suggestion of placing the socialisation process under the democratic control of society.  I would question whether or not this is warranted and even possible seeing that every culture has their own peculiar process of socialisation determined by their particular environmental circumstances.  Some would argue that this 'cultural diversity' is essential to group survival and that to try and impose a uniform process of socialisation is in conflict with our ability and willingness to be flexible and adaptable to a change in circumstances.   And lets not forget that cultural diversity is what makes us human!

[LBird]

Brian wrote:

…to try and impose a uniform process of socialisation…

I think that this thread is dying a death, Brian, and that you should look to twc's views for a lead.On my part, I'm fed up with my views being misrepresented.I've argued for 'the democratic control of the process of socialisation': whether that would be 'uniform' or not, should be a democratic decision, in my view. Personally, I would vote for 'diversity', in opposition to the current ruling class practice of 'imposing' a 'uniformity' of 'individuality'.The fact that everyone in our society claims to be an 'individual', doesn't seem to strike anyone here as a 'uniform', historical, socially-produced ideology, but is assumed to be an ahistoric, biological fact.If one identifies as an 'individual', one is wearing the ideological uniform of the bourgeoisie.If I'm in favour of society trying to 'impose' anything, comrade, it's bloody 'critical thinking'!

[ALB]

The latest issue (November/December) of the Skeptical Inquirer has just arrived from America. There's something in one article which may (or may not) be relevant to something we've discussed here:

Quote:

Plausibly, the survival advantage of vision gave rise to our reflexive bias for believing that the world is as we perceive it to be, an error that psychologists and philosophers call "naive realism". This misplaced faith in the trustworthiness of our perceptions is the wellspring of two of history's most famously misguided theories: that the world is flat and that the sun revolves around the Earth. For thousands of years, people trusted their raw impressions of the heavens. Yet, as Galiledo understood all too well, our eyes can deceive us. He wrote in his Dialogues in 1632 that the Copernican model of the heliocentric universe commits a rape upon the senses" — it violates everything our eyes tell us.

[twc]

Then practice it.You proclaim to show scientists how to conduct their science through the unity of Schaffian knowledge and Schaffian interaction.You joined this forum to demonstrate how.  You now have the opportunity.Scientists learn by studying paradigm examples [Kuhn], or problems whose solution is worthy of emulation.  This is just the exemplary process you need to fulfill your task.Scientists, like all of us, learn by emulating and contemplating the practice of a skilled craftsperson at work on a difficult task we deem important.For scientists, such training resolves into solving the discipline’s seminal scientific problems of the past, through concrete practice [e.g., by repeating key experiments] and through abstract practice [e.g., by deriving fundamental theoretical results].You have discovered the seminal problem of scientific cognition — how do we unify theory and practice or, in your Schaffian terminolgy, how do we unify knowledge and interaction?At the moment this seminal problem confronts you as a crisis of confidence in Schaffianism itself.You acknowledge that crisis to be:  Schaffian knowledge determines interaction, but Schaffian interaction determines knowledge.Suddenly  —  the genesis of dialectical thought.  Perhaps the resolution of cognitive opposition involves handling cognitive contradiction.Suddenly opposites appear no longer diametrical — they aren’t either black or white.Perhaps Spinoza spoke truly when he observed — all affirmation is [simultaneously] negation.  Maybe opposites interpenetrate [Hegel].I can appreciate this being painfully abhorrent for someone like yourself who was reared on Communist casuistry, and is now admirably determined to free himself from its clutches.But take heart.  Science, as process, grows through crisis [or as Marx and Hegel put it, develops through opposition or contradiction — technically, similar cognitive categories].For Marx, society, the simultaneous subject/process/object of cognition, develops through struggle — class struggle — also a similar cognitive category.All modern scientists — physicists most especially — know unreservedly that science grows through crisis and the resolution of crisis [Hegel’s Aufheben].  Those who work day-in day-out across the interface of theory and practice know this in their scientific bones.Relativity rose out of crisis — velocities added, except that light’s didn’t.Quantum mechanics rose out of crisis — energy [that Pannekoekian ‘human construct’ that fuels your equally one-sided idealistic emphasis] changed smoothly [continuously] except that thermal-radiant energy appeared to come in tiny packets. What is your approach to transcending your own constructed theoretical crisis?  Don’t disappoint.Resolve your “socially constructed ” crisis, or your theory of cognition remains forever incoherent.  Forever contradictory.The scientific community, you would educate, awaits.

[alanjjohnstone]

When i went to wiki to check on something on another thread, lo and behold, George Sorel had a few things to say about science….and i believe he has not yet been quoted.  Sorel's attack on science is neither general nor peacemeal. Rather, as is clear from the quotations below, the 'science' he attacks is clearly of the idealized, mathematical reductionist or 'modernist' kind.Science is not reality[edit]He dismissed science as "a system of idealised entities: atoms, electric charges, mass, energy and the like – fictions compounded out of observed uniformities… deliberately adapted to mathematical treatment that enable men to identify some of the furniture of the universe, and to predict and… control parts of it." [1; 301] He regarded science more as "an achievement of the creative imagination, not an accurate reproduction of the structure of reality, not a map, still less a picture, of what there was. Outside of this set of formulas, of imaginary entities and mathematical relationships in terms of which the system was constructed, there was ‘natural’ nature – the real thing…" [1; 302] He regarded such a view as "an odious insult to human dignity, a mockery of the proper ends of men", [1; 300] and ultimately constructed by "fanatical pedants", [1; 303] out of "abstractions into which men escape to avoid facing the chaos of reality." [1; 302]Science is not nature[edit]As far as Sorel was concerned, "nature is not a perfect machine, nor an exquisite organism, nor a rational system." [1; 302] He rejected the view that "the methods of natural science can explain and explain away ideas and values…or explain human conduct in mechanistic or biological terms, as the…blinkered adherents of la petite science believe." [1; 310] He also maintained that the categories we impose upon the world, "alter what we call reality…they do not establish timeless truths as the positivists maintained", [1; 302] and to "confuse our own constructions with eternal laws or divine decrees is one of the most fatal delusions of men." [1; 303] It is "ideological patter… bureaucracy, la petite science… the Tree of Knowledge has killed the Tree of Life… human life [has been reduced] to rules that seem to be based on objective truths." [1; 303] Such to Sorel, is the appalling arrogance of science, a vast deceit of the imagination, a view that conspires to "stifle the sense of common humanity and destroy human dignity." [1; 304]Science is not a recipe[edit]Science, he maintained, "is not a ‘mill’ into which you can drop any problem facing you, and which yields solutions", [1; 311] that are automatically true and authentic. Yet, this is precisely how too many people seem to regard it.To Sorel, that is way "too much of a conceptual, ideological construction", [1; 312] smothering our perception of truth through the "stifling oppression of remorselessly tidy rational organisation." [1; 321] For Sorel, the inevitable "consequence of the modern scientific movement and the application of scientific categories and methods to the behaviour of men", [1; 323] is an outburst of interest in irrational forces, religions, social unrest, criminality and deviance – resulting directly from an overzealous and monistic obsession with scientific rationalism.And what science confers, "a moral grandeur, bureaucratic organisation of human lives in the light of…la petite science, positivist application of quasi-scientific rules to society – all this Sorel despised and hated", [1; 328] as so much self-delusion and nonsense that generates no good and nothing of lasting value.

[twc]

System of Idealised Entities

(1) Wikipedia, on Sorel, wrote:

Sorel dismissed science as “a system of idealised entities: atoms, electric charges, mass, energy and the like — fictions compounded out of observed uniformities … deliberately adapted to mathematical treatment that enable men to identify some of the furniture of the universe, and to predict and … control parts of it.”

Correct, but incomplete.Pannekoek embraces this methodology

Quote:

of building abstract deterministic scientific theory by abstract categorization of concrete processes.For him, abstract determinism redeems scientific theory from “fiction” and turns it into the only reliable means we have of comprehending the concrete world.DeterminismMarx is the first scientist to build a base–superstructure science that consciously sets out to demonstrate the concrete reality of abstract determinism.Marx undertakes to comprehend our conceptions of conceptions.He seeks to comprehend the social world, in which both concrete reality and our conceptions of it have social origins, whereas physicists seek to comprehend the physical world, in which only our conceptions of concrete reality have social origins.For Marx, the materialist conception of history is the abstract foundation of a concrete determinism.  The Socialist Party’s Object is a consequence of that determinism.Abstract Social EntitiesTo clarify Sorel’s dismissive claim

Quote:

, let’s modify it to describe, not theoretical physics, but Marx’s Capital:Marx’s Capital is “a system of idealized entities — commodity, value, money, capital, exploitation, interest, rent, profit and the like — fictions compounded out of observed uniformities … deliberately adapted to mathematical treatment that enable men to identify some of the furniture of the universe, and to predict and … control parts of it”.Add marxian determinism of the materialist conception of history, and we can live with this Sorellian synopsis.We defer further consideration of Capital, except to reiterate that Marx sought to discover the concrete social basis of such Sorellian “idealised entities” as money and capital, that are socially born and socially conceived.Concrete DeterminismSorel knows abstract determinism, but feigns ignorance of concrete determinism.Yet, as civil engineer, Sorel must have relied on his comprehension of abstract theoretical-physics determinism for the concrete determinism of his structures.  How competent then was his civil engineering?For Sorel, abstract determinism is a “fiction”, while concrete determinism is philosophical nonsense.How does one counter that?  Not philosophically.Sorel lived through the invention of wireless, aircraft, X-radiography, automobiles, movies, phonograph, and the electric light bulb, and the social change that trailed deterministically in the wake of these astonishing socially-disruptive technologies.He must have recognized that all these inventions relied, like his civil engineering structures, on the concrete determinism of those abstract “idealised entities” of his quote (1):  atoms, electric charges, mass m and energy E.Could he have ever imagined the implications of the determinism lurking in those innocuous “idealised entities” E and m, as expressed in 1905,       E = mc² that unifies two of them?

[alanjjohnstone]

panpsychism, real naturalism, realism and materialism. http://www.countercurrents.org/riggins311013.htm

[alertnewz]

this is very post, About Related article Science and socialism

[alertnewz]

http://www.alertnewz.com/science-and-socialism/

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