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Just read the account in today's Times about the incident in Russia, where an argument about the 18th century German philosopher Kant ended in a shooting, which DJP has already drawn our attention to. It says that Kant

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revolutionised Western philosophy by examining how the mind constructs our knowledge of the natural world and probing the limits of our empirical understanding of that world (…) Kant explains how reason makes experience possible by imposing structure on the data that our senses provide [emphasis added]

So this discussion does have some relevance to contemporary events after all.

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

The real  project would be to do an abridged version, Dietzgen For Dummies

This was already done by Fred Casey in his book Thinking that came out in 1922 and was used as a textbook by the National Council of Labour Colleges and so had a fairly wide circulation in radical working-class circles in the 1920s and 1930s.There are (of course) several copies in the Party library.  It can also be read online, here:http://archive.org/stream/thinkingintroduc00case#page/n5/mode/2up

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We once held the Summer School at Ruskin College, in Headington on the outskirts of Oxford. Don't know if they still do this or how much it would cost.

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Still on the question of whether or not it makes sense to say that it was "true" until 1700 that the Sun moved round the Earth, I had assumed that this was the generally held view until then, but when discussing it with other members (yes, we're discussing this offline too, and if in Russia they can discuss Kant at a hotdog stall we can discuss helio- and geocentric models of the solar system in a pub) one member said that the view that the Earth went round the Sun had been defended in Greek times by a women philosopher called Hypatia.  There seems to be uncertainty about this, but it was certainly proposed as long ago as three centuries before our era by another Greek philospher Aristarchos of Samos and also later by other Greek philosophers and by some Indian astronomers. See here.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeliocentrismThe question that now arises is: were Aristarchos, Seleucus, Hypatia, Aryabhata and others wrong or telling untruths when they argued, in their time, before 1700, that the Earth moved round the Sun? (Actually, I think DJP raised this point earlier in the discussion about, when there are two competing theories, how do you decide which is correct.)

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twc wrote:

Not according to Schaff p. 47, it was Raymond Aron.

Curioser and curioser. Another positivist, but where does Einstein come into this, if at all?

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No need for a pamphlet or at least to write a new one. It's all here in Pannekoek's 1937 article on "Society and Mind in Marxian Philosophy":http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/society-mind/index.htmAnyway, pamphlets are not needed so much these days when we've got the internet. So we could just provide a link somewhere to Pannekoek's article.

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LBird wrote:

How can a 'selection' be made from a infinite stream of potential sense-impressions, originating from the object, without a 'theory'?

I was not challenging the statement that "theory [generally] precedes observation", i.e. that the observer has to have some idea what they are looking for. What I was challenging was the insertion of the word "always" in place of "generally".As to the what the participants here agree and disagree on. As far as I can see, we agree on what science is doing (whether it recognises it or not)  — describing a part of the "infinite stream of potential sense-impressions" rather than discovering the world as it really is. We disagree over whether or not this theory implies that it was once "true" that the Sun moved round the Earth.

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jondwhite wrote:

To be a stickler, and just to point out generally – 'socialist platform' is only a part of 'left unity' party. It includes at least two other platforms, the 'left party' platform and the 'class struggle' platform.

The "Left Unity platform" is a vague, wishy-washy openly reformist and opportunist statement. It's the one that will be adopted when the new party is founded on 30 November. The so-called "Class struggle platform" is just the transitional programme of the Fifth International and will be laughed out of court. Mind you, this could be the fate of the "Socialist Platform" too, judging by the general comments on the Left Unity website. Most contributors are only interested in what reforms the new party should campaign for.

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LBird wrote:

theory' must precede 'practice', otherwise how do we account for the moment of 'selection'?

Don't ask me, ask Pannekoek. He said it when discussing the origin (as opposed to the practice and methods) of science.The same must have applied at the origin of abstract thought and speech: what you call "sense impressions" would have had to have been felt before they could be named, i.e. selected.In other words,  the concrete preceded the abstract. As Pannekoek put it in Anthropogenesis:

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Human speech differs from animal sounds in that it consists of words. Words are names for things, actions or properties. Words are sound-symbols, sounds serving as a symbol for something else, and signifying something else. Language is an organised system of conventional sounds, serving as symbols for realities.

and

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Ideas and perceptions have only a shadowy, intangible and spiritual existence. The real world consists of concrete things, which are the phenomena themselves; the abstract conception is merely the expression of what a group of phenomena has in common, and therefore is outside this world of phenomena, with no separate reality. The word, the name, gives it that separate reality, as a physical existence, (although this is only transient) and changes it into a something, which can be described, and with which one can work. The word gives substance to a conception; and only through the word the vague feeling is turned into a precise thought. This is also true for the physical things of the world themselves. The thing also is an abstraction, a summary of all the separate images and impressions of sight, feeling etc., which have been acquired from different angles at different times. The identity which the word, the name, ensures to these changing phenomenal forms makes them a figure in space, a permanent and constantly recognisable object, of which the different perspective aspects can be derived and can be known in advance.

Good stuff. Re-read it.Incidentally, in this work Pannekoek quotes favourably from John Dewey who you've dismissed as worthless because he wasn't a socialist/communist.

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Pannekoek was of course a native Dutch-speaker writing in English so might not always have expressed himself clearly (for instance, he often writes "spiritual" from the Dutch and German word whereas we would say "intellectual). But I don't think this is the case here. He is saying that science arose from social practice and is humans' reflecting on it. So, in the beginning was the practice.All human behaviour (except a kneejerk reaction) is preceded by thought. Obviously before humans in Ancient Babylonia observed the sky they must have thought about doing it. But that's a pretty trite basis on which to conclude that "theory always precedes observation".I think it is pretty clear that Pannekoek thought that science arose from, and was preceded by, observation (he's talking about the origin of science not its current methods and practices). In his history of astronomy he went on to say:

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The origin of scientific astronomy is in predicting theory, in the observing of regularities for purposes of prediction. Chaldean astronomy regarded the sky as a two-dimensional vault. Thus they had a formal mathematical representation of phenomena.

He contrasted the situation there with that in Egypt of the same period where no science of astromy developed because, he says, all that was required was the observation of one star, Sirius, for purposes of chronology and agriculture, commenting:

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Egypt can show us how little a science of the stars is fostered by an even brilliant sky unless that science finds a practical basis in human life and activity.(p. 85)

In other words, practice gives rise to theory.By the way, does anybody know whether it was Einstein or Popper who coined the saying "theory always precedes observation".

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I wonder now that he's an official Labour Party candidate whether he'd do another joint meeting with the Communist Party:www.southwestcommunists.org.uk/in-action/campaigns-and-events/party-speaking-tour-2012/175-bristol-date-announced-britain-needs-socialism

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LBird wrote:

Theory always preceeeds observation, as Einstein pointed out

I'm not sure about the "always" here. This may be current and past scientific practice but, as Goethe put it, in the beginning was the deed. YMS and that 1980 education & discussion bulletin give a number of examples of this. It must have been the case of early humans too, i.e they must have experienced the external world before naming parts of it with a view to predicting it better and so having a better chance of surviving in it. As Pannekoek pointed outin Anthropogenesis:

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Theory is the independent weaving of chains of thoughts into conclusions applicable to practical actions. The observations are the material, and the theoretical rules form the result. The observations become proof and argument, consciously advanced, of the rule- e.g. ever again after the cold of winter spring came with its growth of plants and animals. From that the rule was built up as a summary and an expectation: the seasons follow each other in regular rotation. Observation and rule together form knowledge and science. The rules express what happens normally and what, therefore, may be expected, not being concerned with secondary and momentary occurrences but with their general being. They do not speak of the concrete fact, but of the abstract concept: winter is followed by spring. In any particular practical application, a given case is identified with the abstraction: after this winter another spring will come. By applying the rule to each separate case future action is determined.

And in his A History of Astronomy:

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Science originated not from an abstract urge for truth and knowledge but as part of living, as a spontaneous practice born of social needs. (p. 19)

Incidentally, are you sure that "theory always precedes observation" was what Einstein said? I've seen it attributed to Karl Popper, the well known reformist and non-communist.

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LBird wrote:

I'm sure, given the title of the talk, that this quote came up:[quote=E.H. Carr, What is History?.

Yes, E. H. Carr did come up. His What is History? is recommended reading in the Socialist Party. See the Reading List at the end of this other education bulletin.

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DJP wrote:

Though I guess in the natural sciences the overall validity of the picture can be more easily tested. In the social sciences predictions and theories have a direct influence on future outcomes.

In this respect, history would be nearer to the natural sciences in that past outcomes can't be changed.

DJP wrote:

Would it not be "naive realism" to think that "real individuals, their activity and the material condition under which they live" can actually be a "premise"?

I think Marx and Engels meant simply that this was the "object" of historical studies (just as the passing world of phenomena is the "object" of the natural sciences), but the passage as worded (or, rather, as translated) could be seen as a bit positivistic.

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You should have come to the talk last night on "What is History?" where the point was made that it is even more evident in history-writing than in the "natural sciences" that what is happening is that people are selecting from an array of empirically-established perceptions to construct a picture of what did happen. Of course the picture so constructed has to bear some ressemblance to the evidence.One of the passages from Marx and Engels that the speaker quoted was this from the German Ideology:

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The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.

Yes, you could be right. This method is equally applicable to the "natural sciences". Not sure that Marx said so anywhere did he, but I could be wrong.

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