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LBird wrote:

This is the cognitive method of science: scientists (subject) actively interrogate the universe (object) and employ the product (knowledge) to prove itself.Perhaps one could say that ‘knowledge’ is a representation accurate enough for the purposes of the producer. Thus, knowledge is formed by humans from the entity it represents for a reason, and the ability of the knowledge to be used for those reasons proves its accuracy.But… knowledge is not the object; knowledge is not an identical copy of object; knowledge is a selection made by an interested subject.

This looks like at last a description of the criteria you have in mind to judge whether some statement about the world of reality can be regarded as "knowledge". I don't suppose you mean literally "for the purposes of the [individual] producer". You must mean something more like "the purposes of the society in which the scientists are operating".I think this makes you some sort of an "instrumentalist" as described here and here (like you described Bogdanov as being). This is not meant as a criticism as I think Pannekoek could be placed in this broad tradition.To tell the truth, though this discussion is interesting (at least to those taking part), I'm beginning to wonder whether a socialist party needs to take sides in the debates on "the philosophy of science" beyond defending a general  "realism" or "materialism".  In other words, do we really need to take sides in the more detailed debates that go on between various schools of realist/materialist philosophies of science? After all, most scientific research carries on without feeling the need for a philosophy of science and would be the same irrespective of which particular philosophy is adopted.Obviously, in a socialist society "science policy" will be decided democratically and scientific research institutes run democratically.

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We still don't know whether or not this is a public meeting. It's unclear from this exchange of emails I've had with them.On 29 August I emailed them:

Quote:

I see from today's Weekly Worker that there's a meeting on Saturday 14 September. Is this a meeting open to the public to attend, even if only as observers?

On 31 August they replied:

Quote:

Yes you are free to attend as an observer. Will you be representing a particular organisation?

I replied on 2 September:

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Thanks. I'll be there. I won't be representing a particular organisation. I am a member of the SPGB struck by the similarity of the Socialist Platform.

They replied later the same day:

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There is some discussion on whether we want non-Left Unity members at the meeting so I will get back to you about this.

I haven't heard from them since.I intend to go to the meeting anyway (with copies of our Questions and Answers leaflet which is written in the same language as the Socialist Platform) and see what happens. Hopefully other members will turn up too (it's not very far from Vauxhall mainline and tube stations).It will be interesting to see whether any ban will apply just to us or also to members of other groups which don't really support the Left Unity project. 

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LBird's straw man has identified himself. It's Richard Dawkins. According to today's Times, he said:

Quote:

He would like his legacy to consist of being known as a "lover of truth", and as "a believer in the possibility of discovering objective truth by scientific research".

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ralfy wrote:

The catch is that such cooperation hasn't happened for the past six decades or so. Instead, we see a financial elite trying to profit as much as they can, businesses doing the same, governments allowing such in exchange for more tax revenues, and military forced used to control resources, etc. There has been no cooperation or coordination at all, let alone preparation for peak oil or global warming.

That seems an accurate description of how the capitalist states into which the world is divided are unable to deal with problems that affect the whole world, but what would you suggest should be done about it?

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jondwhite wrote:

Another podcast from CPGB, this time specifically about the Socialist Platformhttp://cpgb.org.uk/home/podcasts/september-8-2013-left-unity

Interesting but oh dear. It shows that the so-called CPGB (they've no right to the name which they usurped when the old CP gave up) has no interest in the Socialist Platform let alone the proposed new Left Party. Their signing it is clearly part of a smash and grab raid to win over some of its other signatories. Conrad says at one point that if his group's amendments (to turn it into an explicitly Leninist statement) are not accepted the Platform will be useless, which presumably means they will stage a walk-out hoping to take some others with them..This sort of thing is why the Left Party is not going to succeed. It's going to get bogged down in dealing with other groups who'll have the same aim and tactics with regard to it as the "CPGB" does with regard to the Socialist Platform. In this podcast Conrad threatens a procedural row and even calls for the expulsion from the Platform of supporters of the Trotskyoid AWL for its position on the Middle East.  In other words, student politics and cats fighting in a bag yet again.Conrad also gets the wording of the Platform wrong on a couple of points. It does not say that capitalism is based on production for "private gain" and it does not call for a European "confederation". Admittedly what it does call for — "a voluntary European Federation of socialist socities" — is one of its weakest points, but Conrad's proposed alternative of a centralised Europe State with its own army is even worse. In a revealing echo of his group's origins (Stalinist rather than Trotskyist) he says that such an army would be needed to stand up to the US.

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I suppose he thought he could suggest that somebody was a "common toad" without being challenged just as he was when he laughed at people who he said were going to have "mixed race" grandchildren. He was wrong.

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Hrothgar wrote:

In fact, to call this 'reasoning' is an insult to the common toad.

If the cap fits …

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CH: In conjunction with this, there has been a renewed interest in the Jacobin legacy. There are new writings on reevaluating, defending and justifying the Terror in addition to justifying Robespierre and his vision of a revolutionary France. This is something that is promulgated by some on the left who still have connections with Twentieth Century Communist ideas like Leninist Vanguardism. What is the legacy of Jacobinism and Leninism on the left?NC: They are quite different first of all. In the case of Jacobinism, we could discuss it but now we are back in a philosophy seminar, an interesting one. There is an interesting question as to what should have been done, what were the proper actions to have been taken in revolutionary France. I don’t happen to agree with Robespierre’s methods at all.Now let’s move to Leninism. They are totally unrelated, no relation whatsoever. Leninism was in my view counterrevolutionary. It wasn’t instituting communism. There was a popular revolution, in fact there had been for years, through 1917 it grew very substantially from February on. Lenin basically tried to take control of it. If you take a look at his writings in 1917 they went way to the left. April Thesis, State and Revolution the most radical things he ever wrote, almost anarchist. My view is that it was basically opportunism. I don’t think he believes a word of it. It seems to me that he was trying to associate himself, become the leader of the revolutionary popular forces. When he became the leader, he didn’t waste much time, and Trotsky helped him, in instituting a pretty repressive regime with the basic elements of Stalinism. They moved pretty quickly to dismantle most of the organs of popular power. Not over night, but over a short time they were able to basically dismantle the soviets, the factory councils, to convert the labor force into a labor army. The peasant revolutionary forces were very much opposed to this incidentally. As distinct from Marx who saw revolutionary potential in the Russian peasantry, the urban communists, like Lenin were strongly opposed to that. In fact, a lot of Marx’s later work was even suppressed, because they didn’t like what he was saying. It wasn’t Marx but their contempt for the backward peasants. Their conception was that Russia is a backward peasant society, it has to be driven towards industrialization and then out of that the iron laws of history will lead to socialism and so on but sometime in the future. In fact, they regarded Russia as a backwater. They were essentially waiting for a revolution in Germany, the most advanced capitalist country, that’s where there should be a revolution. When the revolution was crushed in Germany in 1919, by that time Russia had been pretty much turned into the kind of labor army that Lenin and Trotsky were advocating, not totally but mostly, Kronstadt kind of finished it all. When the German revolution was crushed they realized that’s not going to work, so we have to do something else to drive Russia towards industrialization. Shortly after that comes the New Economic Policy which is essentially lets introduce state capitalism but with an iron fist, because we are going to drive them forward. This is Lenin’s vanguardism.It was sharply criticized back in the early years of the twentieth century by Marxists, in fact by some of his later associates. Although some of the critics, like Rosa Luxemburg, pointed out that Lenin’s program, which they regarded as pretty right wing, and I do too, was, the image was, that there would be a proletarian revolution, the party will take over from the proletariat, the central committee would take over from the party and the maximal leader will take over from the central committee. Pretty much what happened, not precisely but roughly what happened. After that the use of terror to defend the repressive violent state has nothing to do with communism. In fact, I think that one of the great blows to socialism in the Twentieth Century was the Bolshevik revolution. It then called itself socialist, and the west called it socialist. In fact that’s one thing on which the world’s two major propaganda systems agreed; the huge propaganda system in the west and the minor propaganda system in the east. One of the few things on which they agreed was that this was socialism. The west propaganda system liked that because it was a way of defaming socialism, relating it to what is going on in Russia. The east, the Russian propaganda system liked it because they are trying to profit from the moral aura of socialism which was quite real, so they kind of both agreed on that. You know that when the world’s major propaganda systems agree on something it’s kind of hard for people to extricate themselves from it, so by now its routine that that was socialism, all of it very anti-socialist. I remember when in about the late 80’s when it was pretty clear that the system was tottering I was asked by a left journal, I won’t mention it, to write an article on what I thought was going to happen when the system collapses. I wrote an article in which I said I think it will be a small victory for socialism if the system collapses. They refused to publish it. Finally, it was published in an anarchist magazine, so it appeared. They couldn’t understand it. In fact I wrote some of the same things in journals here like The Nation and they published it, but I don’t think anyone understood it because this was socialism. How could you say that this was anti-socialist? My view is not unique. The left Marxists had the same view, people like Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, others who got marginalized, because that’s what happens to people who don’t have the guns. I think they were right. The people who Lenin condemned as the ultra left, the infantile ultra leftists, I think they were basically right, not in everything, as were a lot of the anarchist critics. Early on, Bertrand Russell saw it pretty well.  By 1920 it was unmistakable, I think even earlier. I mean I wasn’t alive then but when I was 12 years old it seemed pretty obvious to me.CH: Do you think that within the coordinates of the entire Marxist tradition there will always be this danger of going towards that edge?NC: You know, I don’t regard Lenin as part of the Marxist tradition, frankly. What the Marxist tradition is, who knows, but it wasn’t Marx’s position. I mentioned his belief in the revolutionary potential of the Russian peasantry. There is hardly a hint of that in Lenin.  Marx had a lot of different views. For example, he thought it might be possible to reach socialism by parliamentary means in the more bourgeois democratic societies.  England was his model, of course, he didn’t rule it out. In fact, Marx didn’t have very much to say about socialism or communism. Take a look at Marx’s work. Very deep, analytic critique of a variety of capitalism, capitalist markets, properties, imperialism and so on, but about the future society a couple of scattered sentences, and I think, my guess is for good reasons. His picture was, as I understand it, that when working people liberate themselves, and can make their own decisions, they will determine what kind of society it will be. He is not going to dictate it to them. I think that’s a pretty wise stand frankly.

Chomsky has just gone up in my estimation.

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LBird wrote:

I expose my position: that of Marx, Pannekoek, Dietzgen and, now, Untermann.

While you're drumming up support what do you think of this article by Eugene Dietzgen, Joseph's son?http://i-studies.com/library/reviews/dietzgen.shtml

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LBird wrote:

ALB wrote:

Leszek Kolakowski wrote:

Thus Marx's theory of revolution and socialism can be based only on a global understanding of society that cannot be achieved by any detailed, factual analysis.

[my bold]No, No, NO!Kolakowski must tell us which theory he's employing which determines the 'facts' to be selected for this 'detailed, factual analysis' which prove that 'Marx's theory of revolution' 'cannot achieve'.

I think you've got the wrong end of the stick. Kolakowski is not giving his own views here, but is trying to summarise Lukacs's, from what I've read of Lukacs accurately enough. So who you are criticising here is not Kolalowski but Lukacs.I thought you might have agreed with Lukacs's criticism here of naive "empiricism" (what you've been calling "positivism"). Read again the passage I quoted from Kolakowski summarising Lukacs and see if you don't agree with Lukacs's view that isolated facts in themselves cannot be understood except as parts of a larger whole.

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It was NOT Albert Einstein who wrote:

The German idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte circa 1800 did say “If theory conflicts with the facts, so much the worse for the facts.”   The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs in his “Tactics and Ethics” (1923) echoed the same quotation.

Apparently Lukacs did say something like this, but not the whole phrase, only the last part "so much the worse for the facts". At least this is how Leszek Kolalowski in his Main Currents of Marxism (not regarded, I know, as reliable as some here because he is an anti-communist) summarises Lukacs's view:

Quote:

Thus Marx's theory of revolution and socialism can be based only on a global understanding of society that cannot be achieved by any detailed, factual analysis. This is why opportunists and revisionists always appeal to facts, knowing that there is no logical transition from facts to the revolutionary transformation of society. Empiricism is the ideologjcal foundation of revisionism and reformism in the workers' movement. 'And every orthodox Marxist who realizes that the moment has come when capital is only an obstacle to production and that it is time to expropriate the exploiters, will reply in the words of Fichte, one of the greatest of the classical German philosophers, when vulgar Marxists adduce "facts" that appear to contradict the process: "So much the worse for the facts!'" (Tactics and Ethics, p. 30).Lukacs does not appear to have used this phrase elsewhere in his attacks on empiricism, but his attitude on the point remained unchanged. In History and Class-Consciousness he emphasizes that a theory which simply takes account of facts as they are directly given is, by the same token, locating itself within capitalist society. But to understand the meaning of facts is to situate them in a ‘conrete whole' and to discover the 'mediation' between them and the whole, which of course is not directly given. The truth of the part resides in the whole, and if each part is properly examined the whole can be discerned in it. (p.999) 

Personally i'm not too keen on Lukacs (too much of a Hegelian for my liking and also a super-Leninist with his theory that the party can encapsulate the consciousness of the whole working class), but the wikipedia entry seems unfair and would seem to be an attempt to discredit all Marxists as dogmatists whereas, as far as I can see, Lukacs was making the (valid) point (that we've been discussing here) that you can't understand isolated facts outside the context of the whole of which they are just a part.I don't know if Fichte was trying to make a similar point but I'm afraid German Classical philosophy is not my cup of tea.

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Whatever the final outcome (which hopefully won't be more bombing, i.e more destruction, more deaths, more refugees), it's good to see the warmongers being outmanoeuvred at every turn for once.

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LBird wrote:

'Science' claims to produce, by a socially-neutral method, the 'truth', by 'discovery'. This 'discovery method' is claimed to produce 'scientific knowledge' which is 'true', once and for all.Pannekoek (and Dietzgen) claim that this can't be done, and I agree with them.

So do I, though I'd prefer to say that this is not what "science" does even if some think that it is. To tell the truth, I don't think that this is what science these days claims to be doing either.

LBird wrote:

One's choice of 'cognitive method' makes clear which 'method' one is using in science.

This is a play on the word "method".  We are all agreed (I think) on the theory of what knowledge is (a description of a part of the passing world of phenomena) but what we don't seem to be agreed on is the method by which to decide if a description is adequate, maybe because you won't be drawn on what you think this is.

LBird wrote:

The issue of 'relativism' (as I've already said) can only be addressed, I think, once we have some 'agreement', because the form of that agreement will be used to build an answer to the concerns of those (like me!) who don't agree with 'relativism'.

Ok, assume that you've got agreement and set out your refutation of "relativism".

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LBird wrote:

So, logically flowing from this statement, ALB, you accept that:17th century conceptions/scientific knowledge/truth of 'sun/earth' dynamics were 'true', then;but that 'truth' is not 'true', now, from 21st century conceptions/scientific knowledge/truth of 'sun/earth' dynamics;and that, in the,say, 24th century, our conceptions/scientific knowledge/truth now will potentially be 'untrue' from their conceptions/scientific knowledge/truth?Thus, 'truth' is dynamic, social and has a history.'Truth' is not a fixed, one-off, reflection of 'reality', which science produces by a neutral method.If you can agree with this clarification, ALB, I think that we've come to some point of agreement.

Not so fast !Your statement above about 17th century "scientific knowledge", eg of 'sun/earth' dynamics, origin of 'humans', etc being true would only be valid if the "scientific method" is also variable and relative. Is this what you are claiming too? If you are, this would be a recipe for rampant relativism.As you know, I've suggested not using the word "true" (which does, as you say, refer to knowledge and not the world of phenomena) and using something like "valid", "adequate"or "able to predict more accurately". But sticking to your language, you are right: "'Truth' is not a fixed, one-off, reflection of 'reality'". But why add "which science produces by a neutral method"?Surely, the sort of "truth" Dietzgen, Pannekoek and we here are talking about is also produced by some agreed method? Which is what DJP is trying to get you to say what it is. Me too.

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We have already had a thread discussing EP Thompson, including his theory of class consciousness, that will be relevant here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/e-p-thompson

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