[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

LBird wrote:

This approach is very different from YMS's (and DJP's?) constant harping on about 'individuals', rather than 'classes'.

Where do I harp on about individuals, my whole thrust has been about ideology being  matter of class not individual.  When there are no more classes there is no more ideology and we will be individuals, fully realised,  in an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

Even under Communism, YMS, with every individual fully developed by our society, 'reality' will still not tell us 'what it is'.Our different views of 'reality' will no longer have a 'class' basis, but there will be different views, and we'll have to vote on these options.We should be open from the start that in Communist society all humans will collectively decide what 'reality is'.Sometimes we'll make mistakes, because humans do, and so our 'scientific method' will emphasise the need for more than one 'True Account'. Thus, the 'authority' of 'scientists' will be downgraded: we'll no longer have an elite who allegedly employ a 'special, neutral method' outside of the democratic control of all of us. Our method will produce 'Options for Choice', not 'The Truth'.Debate, dissent and criticism will be at the heart of our unified scientific method, encompassing all disciplines from physics to sociology.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

LBird wrote:

The Cheshire Cat and its smile, and 'physicalism'.

Tell me more..

What a coincidence! "'Quantum Cheshire Cat' becomes reality"http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28543990

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

Bakunin wrote:

A scientific body to which had been confided the government of society would soon end by devoting itself no longer to science at all, but to quite another affair; and that affair, as in the case of all established powers, would be its own eternal perpetuation by rendering the society confided to its care ever more stupid and consequently more in need of its government and direction.But that which is true of scientific academies is also true of all constituent and legislative assemblies, even those chosen by universal suffrage. In the latter case they may renew their composition, it is true, but this does not prevent the formation in a few years' time of a body of politicans, privileged in fact though not in law, who, devoting themselves exclusively to the direction of the public affairs of a country, finally form a sort of political aristocracy or oligarchy. Witness the United States of America and Switzerland.Consequently, no external legislation and no authority – one, for that matter, being inseparable from the other, and both tending to the servitude of society and the degradation of the legislators themsleves.Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.If I bow before the authority of the specialists and avow my readiness to follow, to a certain extent and as long as may seem to me necessary, their indications and even their directions, it is because their authority is imposed on me by no one, neither by men nor by God. ions and even their directions Otherwise I would repel them with horror, and bid the devil take their counsels, their directions, and their services, certain that they would make me pay, by the loss of my liberty and self-respect, for such scraps of truth, wrapped in a multitude of lies, as they might give me.I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed on me by my own reason. I am conscious of my own inability to grasp, in all its detail, and positive development, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole. Thence results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labour. I receive and I give – such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subbordination.https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/authrty.htm

David Adam wrote:

“Teach the people?” Bakunin once asked. “That would be stupid. . . . we must not teach the people, but incite them to revolt.”8 Marx had always rejected this approach. In an argument with Weitling, who was an advocate of individual dictatorship, Marx said that to rouse the workers without offering any scientific ideas or constructive doctrine was “equivalent to vain dishonest play at preaching which assumes an inspired prophet on the one side and on the other only the gaping asses.”9 Marx specifically criticized the Bakuninists in the First International in similar terms: “To them, the working class is so much raw material, a chaos which needs the breath of their Holy Spirit to give it form.”

http://libcom.org/library/marx-bakunin-question-authoritarianismYou stick to Bakunin for your 'individualist' ideology, DJP, and I'll stick to Marx, for my 'Communist' ideology.We all know that Bakunin hid his 'authoritarianism' behind the myth of 'individualism'. [read the link, comrades]It always goes back to 'special' individuals, at first in 'woodwork' or any other artisan activity, then 'science', then 'politics'.Elitism in science will bolster elitism in politics.

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

LBird wrote:

YMS, I'm a Communist, not a Liberal.Why you continue to engage me with individualist ideas, I'll never know.Why not start a thread named 'Science for Individualists', and leave this one to the self-professed Communists?

Ironically, it is your view that gives some standing to "individualist" ideas in that it makes any individual's "bias" (the new word here for "ideology") as good or as bad as the next while YMS's view says that it is possible for humans to share the same "bias", over non-social science today and over most things in socialism/communism, so that a common understanding/interpretation can be reached and acted on. He could claim to be more "common-ist" than thou. In the end of course It's relativism v universalism again (and again).

Unfortunately, you've forgotten our earlier discussions about the nature of the 'subject', within the epistemological triad of 'object, subject, knowledge' (our 'Schaff' threads), ALB.For a Communist, the 'subject' is a 'social individual', not a 'biological individual'. For us, 'individuals' embody social ideas (or ideologies). That's why (except on this thread, where I've specifically attempted to discuss at a simpler level without links and quotes, as I made clear at the start) on the other threads I always gave authors, books, links, quotes to where 'my' ideas come from. This is the correct scientific method, to expose one's sources and thus ideology.I'm not an individual, I'm a worker. This identification affects ones view of the world, social and natural.In this context, of course, Marx is a 'relativist', not a 'universalist', to use your terms of reference. I suspect you're following Engels here. Marx's concept of 'mode of production' should be enough to remind comrades of Marx's 'relativism' on the subject of 'knowledge'.Different societies understand the world differently. This viewpoint means that Marx was ahead of 'bourgeois science' by about 100 years.This approach is very different from YMS's (and DJP's?) constant harping on about 'individuals', rather than 'classes'.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

I'd have thought the important thing about science is that we know we don't know, but that, according to our best efforts, this is the way things stand.  It's just one of those things you have to live with, much like the inevitability of death.Likewise, all language is inherently metaphorical, and any word can only refer to what it was iterpreteted to mean the last time it was used.  This has radical implications, but not on a day to day basis: I mean, I can never fully know what you mean; but I can take a workable stab most of the time.If everyone is biased, no-one is biased.  What matters is when classes introduce systematic bias.  The bias of individuals is what we fight against through dialogue and dialectic.  We will never eradticate bias.It's like the old saw about how maybe when I see red, I'm seeing the colour you see when you say green.  I can never know.  It's impossible.  But what we can know is that when we point to something and say it's red, we both agree that it is red, and the sam boundaries apply to green.As the story goes:

Quote:

Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence.

YMS, I'm a Communist, not a Liberal.Why you continue to engage me with individualist ideas, I'll never know.Why not start a thread named 'Science for Individualists', and leave this one to the self-professed Communists?

[LBird]

SocialistPunk wrote:

I'm not here to have a go or try and derail this thread. I'm genuinely interested in your view as to how this lack of scientific "truth" could or will impact on a socialist society or even the attempt to bring it into existence?

No, I know that you are one of the few who seem to be able to recognise the problems that Rovelli discusses, and, further, realise that this has implications for human knowledge and its impact on society. So, I know your questions are genuine, and not simply bloody-minded refusal to think about the consequences of accepting YMS's 'banal' points.Put simply, if 'truth' is socially-produced, why shouldn't it be socially-controlled?And for us, discussing a 'socialist society' which by definition will be run on democratic lines, why shouldn't all scientific activity be democratically-controlled?The alternative is that 'truth' reflects 'nature' (and so is eternal 'Truth') and thus 'nature' should have the last word, not humans.But, when those who espouse the 'elitist' view of human knowledge production are asked, how do 'elite' humans 'know' what nature says, they revert to old-fashioned science, which we now know doesn't allow 'nature' to speak for itself. Elistist methods will produce elitist ideas.Humans always put words into nature's mouth. Once we recognise that, we can ensure that those doing the 'putting' are us. That is, socialist society.If this doesn't help, or is too obscure, or needs some clarification, please ask away!

[LBird]

So, Rovelli doesn't know, Einstein doesn't, we all know Newton didn't know, even Pannekoek says that the 'laws of physics' are a human construct, but to YMS this is all just 'banal'.Do you really not read anything at all being posted on here? Or understand the importance of what's being said?

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

I have never implied that atrsonomy is "The Truth", you seem to attribute views to me I don't hold.  I stated simply that today astronomy (simple measurement of stellar locations, has no social ideological aspect.  tehre are ideological debates around the big bang theory, and obviously creationism has specific local political aspects.  That everyone is biased is banal, as relevant as saying everyone has skin.So, lets debate communist skin's application to science.Apparently in court, they have given up (in England) on 'Beyond a reasonable doubt' — that confuses people.  They now ask: are you sure?  Now, I'm sure what my name is, but that isn't truth, abstract and eternal.  I'm sure India is there.  I'm sure geostationery sattelites can track my position to within ten square metres.  Reliable organised knowledge tells me this.  Knowledge produced not as arbitrary personal belief, but for others, according to agreed methods.I am not sure of the predictions of greenhouse models, but I find them convincing.  I am sure that the green house effect is true and adding carbon dioxide to an atmosphere will lead to temperature changes.I'm convinced that Elephants are long and smooth with a point at the end.

This post of yours is beneath contempt, YMS. You should be ashamed, and grow up, if you're going to discuss philosophy with the grown-ups.Reminder:  2. The forums proper are intended for public discussion. Personal messages between participants should be sent via private message or by e-mail.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

This, again, depends on what you mean by ideology. in a classless society, where there are no established rulers to threaten, then the production of knowledge cannot be used to support them (through distortion) nor be a chance to overthrow them (and thus be suppressed), any knowledge would simply, then, be produced as that which we are capable of producing.

[my bold]ALL knowledge suffers from 'distortion' and 'suppression'.ALL knowledge is thus ideological. The bourgeosie do it, the proletariat will do it, all previous classes have done it, all previous societies have done it, all future societies will do it.This is the whole point of Rovelli's quote. Humans SELECT. Selection requires theory, for its parameters. Theory, by its nature, distorts 'reality'.There can never be any humans who have access to The Truth. That would make us 'god'.Our role is to criticise existing knowledge. That can't be done if we start from the position that the knowledge we already have, and are about to criticise, can't be criticised because it is 'True'.We can accept this human limitation, but the bourgeoisie can't, because they have to 'eternalise' their rule, just like all ruling classes. Once they let go of 'The Truth', everything is open to criticism.Physics, just like sociology, becomes an ideological battleground, and their pretence of 'authority' is shattered.

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

LBird wrote:

Are you implying that the term 'ideology' should be used in the context of 'scientific knowledge'?

No. It's better to find some alternative term since, in the Marxian tradition, "ideology" is a prejorative word.

LBird wrote:

It seems to me that his whole works are opposed to the notion of a "fixed, timeless, Truth", which is required if no ideology is held to be present in scientific knowledge.

Totally agree with the first part, but not the way the second is expressed (because it uses the word "ideology"). Better to say something like "which is required if the brain/mind produces a simple photograph (or 3-D picture) of the world". Which of course it doesn't.

I'm all in favour of the pejorative word 'ideology' being used in conjunction with 'science' and the production of human knowledge.There is no 'bias-less' knowledge of the world, and it's best, not only to be open about that, but to make it crystal clear to everybody, including those still taken in by the bourgeois myth of 'science produces the Truth', that ALL KNOWLEDGE is biased, including physics.Once that is understood, then we can move to seeking a reconciliation of 'social' and 'natural' science into a single unified scientific method, which Marx seemed to think was possible, and I do, too.Anything less than this expressed, hammered-home, view will lead to comrades thinking astronomy, for example, is 'The Truth', as Young Master Smeet seems to imply.

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

I wasn't saying Marx was right or wrong, merely what I thought was Marx's use of the term. I don't think, either, that

Quote:

Marx thought that the world could be understood as it is, rather than through the prism of human ideas

but that he didn't use the term "ideology" in this context.

Are you implying that the term 'ideology' should be used in the context of 'scientific knowledge'?I certainly think that it should, as I've often argued, and I think that perhaps a case can be made for thinking that Marx would have agreed with this, if he had lived beyond Einstein revelations, given many of the things that he wrote, about human knowledge and human senses, and his emphasis on the social and historical.It seems to me that his whole works are opposed to the notion of a "fixed, timeless, Truth", which is required if no ideology is held to be present in scientific knowledge.

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

Young Master Smeet wrote:

If we look at ideology as the ways and means by which the ideas of the dominant class become the dominant ideas, this changes things dramatically.  First off, it suggests that without a dominant class there will be no ideology (this is conconant with the claim that without class there is no politics, we move from the dispute over who gets to make the decisions, to actual technical decision making based on reason).  To my mind this means a communist ideology cannot exist (saving some Stalinist notion of bthe dictatorship of the proletariat as communists rule over non-communist classes).

I agree that is how Marx used the term "ideology" and that therefore, for him, to talk of a "communist ideology" would be an oxymoron.

If Marx thought that the world could be understood as it is, rather than through the prism of human ideas, then Marx was wrong.I don't think that Marx thought this, though.But, I'm prepared to accept that my minority opinion about Marx is worthless, and let the majority keep using Marx to prove that there will be no ideology within Communism.Frankly, I think that that's nonsense. And, for what it's worth, Rovelli the physicist seems to agree with me, as does Kuhn, Lakatos, et al.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

The implication for science here is that there is a rational and non-ideological way of gathering knowledge that is distorted in class society, and the elimination of class warfare will allow a genuine reason to examine the world freed from such conflict. Further, in a society of abundance, this reason will not be limited by economic conastraints, only real ones.And there we get back to science and socialism, via a slight detour through ideology.

LBird, post #9, wrote:

Here is Rovelli's view, again, for those reading this thread anew:

Rovelli, The First Scientist: Anaximander and his Legacy, wrote:

This reading of scientific thinking as subversive, visionary, and evolutionary is quite different from the way science was understood by the positivist philosophers… (p. xii)Facile nineteenth-century certainties about science— in particular the glorification of science understood as definitive knowledge of the world—have collapsed. One of the forces responsible for their dismissal has been the twentieth-century revolution in physics, which led to the discovery that Newtonian physics, despite its immense effectiveness, is actually wrong, in a precise sense. Much of the subsequent philosophy of science can be read as an attempt to come to grips with this disillusionment. What is scientific knowledge if it can be wrong even when it is extremely effective? (p. xv)But answers given by natural science are not credible because they are definitive; they are credible because they are the best we have now, at a given moment in the history of knowledge. (p. xvi)

'Best' is not 'Truth'.

We're not going anywhere on this thread, so I might as well drop out.Whilst workers and Communists adhere to outdated notions of 'rational, non-ideological, science', they're living in the 19th century. That puts an end to any notion of a leadership of ideas within society by class conscious Communist proletarians.The bourgeoisie's thinkers are still streets ahead of us.

[LBird]

gnome wrote:

LBird wrote:

Vin Maratty wrote:

Another load bollocks from LBird. Same rubbish on every thread. 

I'll leave Paramjeet and Steve in your capable hands then, shall I, Vin?

Quite frankly I think you should, because your brand of 'obscurantism', rather than providing much needed clarity is simply muddying the waters still further.

Well, your clear-sighted thinking, along with Vin's obvious talents, will be enough to advise Paramjeet, then, won't they?Yeah, the world's 'so obvious', isn't it, gnome? There isn't really a problem for socialists, in their relation to workers. Just keep saying "it's obvious" to them, and they'll be attracted in droves, just like always.

[LBird]

Since no-one has objected to what’s been said so far, or argued that ‘science produces The Truth’ (which was the position of science prior to Einstein), I’ll quickly recap:

LBird, post #48, wrote:

This is the first step: to answer the question: 'Is there a problem with scientific knowledge, or is it true?'It seems to me there are two answers: 'Yes, there is a problem' or 'No, there isn't a problem'.As long as, for now, we proceed with some consensus that 'Yes, there is a problem', I'll try to go on and illustrate that 'problem'.

And DJP has agreed that there is a ‘problem’ within ‘science’, and the problem is one of the status of the ‘scientific knowledge’ that ‘science’ produces:

DJP wrote:

Yes nothing can give us the Truth of the capital T kind…

This retreat by science from the position that it produces ‘The Truth’, a 100%-accurate copy in our minds of what is being ‘observed’, has really troubling implications.Put simply, if one says “the knowledge produced by science is 99.999999% ‘true’ ”,one is left open to the following objection,“but how do you know that it’s only 0.000001 that is unknown?; it might be that 99.999999% is actually unknown, and science only knows 0.000001% about what is being observed’.It’s a bit like having a board with what you suspect is four squares, and saying you ‘know’ three of them, and are aware that only the fourth remains unknown. This is vulnerable to the objection that perhaps the ‘board’ is a chessboard, with 64 squares, and ‘knowing’ three of them would mean that 61 are unknown.Now that I’ve illustrated the problem, I’ll allow comrades to comment, before I take this explanation any further.

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