[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

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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

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, 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?

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I intend to give an account of dialectics here. What I just inadvertently posted was a working draft that I merely wanted to test out for presentation purposes to see if it would lay out sensibly.The final content will come when the draft is complete, and no sooner.So those who treat dialectics with utter, often violent, contempt are warned.

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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.

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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!

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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.]

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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.

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LBird Disowns his own “No Brainer”

(1) LBird wrote:

This is an incorrect assertion.  I haven't 'expressed the view' that ‘social thought determines social practice’.

Nonsense.  You’ve insisted “a thousand times” that theory precedes practice.

(2) LBird wrote:

The issue of whether ‘theory precedes practice’ or 'practice precedes theory' surely has already been settled to most comrades minds, given the quotes which support the 'theory' position, and the absence of any justification for the 'practice precedes theory' argument?It's a no-brainer, comrades.  Theory precedes practice.  Even the bourgeois thinkers, catching up with Communists, have got that far.

In (1) you disown your own “no brainer” (2).  On your own estimation, you fall behind “even the bourgeois thinkers ”.If you don’t consider social thought determines social practice and theory precedes practice as equivalents, then you must holdtheory isn’t social thoughtpractice isn’t social practiceprecedes isn’t deterministic [in the sense of cause preceding effect], i.e., theory precedes practice for no apparent reason.Which is it?Pannekoek’s Aim is to Refute LBird’s “No Brainer”

(3) LBird wrote:

Selective quoting is no answer.

Selective quoting?  Pannekoek’s entire article for Science and Society was written precisely to refute your idealistic conception of history that “explains the events of history, as caused by the ideas of men” — a determined demolition of your central idealistic thesis that theory precedes practice.Pannekoek’s sole aim was to destroy the idealistic foundation of science (1) that you seek to impose upon the Socialist Party as a “no brainer” — a conception of science you share with “even the bourgeois scientists” (2).Confirmation Bias

(4) LBird wrote:

We can all find parts of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Dietzgen, Untermann or Pannekoek to support our case.

You must realize I set a trap for you.  You homed in on the gorilla you were looking for, and leapt to the conclusion that the author must be anti-Pannekoek.When you discovered that the author was in fact Pannekoek, your motivated reasoning hunted out any “supportive” quote that settled the case to the satisfaction of your confirmation bias.Disagreeing with Marx and Pannekoek

(5) LBird wrote:

I can even find parts of all of those thinkers that I disagree with.

You sure can.  Most of the time.In #236, you openly rejected the central tenet of Marx’s theory of cognition — the materialist conception of history — by quoting, as you assumed, Marx against his own central cognitive claim.Little did you realize that Pannekoek deliberately wrote his Science and Society article to assert that his own theory of cognition was not invented by him, but was the materialist conception of history — Marx’s theory of cognition.The sole question of agreement is:  Do you agree or disagree with the historical materialist case Pannekoek makes against your idealistic claim that theory precedes practice?That’s what matters. Pannekoek’s Theory of Cognition is the Materialist Conception of History

(5) LBird wrote:

What are your views of the process of cognition of science, in the light of the 20th century advances in human thinking and knowledge?

In so far as 20th century “advances” in human thinking appear to “advance” beyond the materialist conception of history, they actually retreat backwards from it.Twentieth-century critics reject the materialist conception of history as totally discredited on a variety of grounds — as grossly inadequate, as scientifically reductive, as crudely deterministic, as crassly anti-intellectual, and so rightly superseded.Since the materialist conception of history is the foundation of historical materialism, any overhauling of it in the light of 20th century “advances” is ipso facto not historical materialism, but is ipso facto an alternative conception of history that is not Marx’s.Consequently, LBird, who lacks conviction in the materialist conception of history, is not describing Marx’s and Pannekoek’s common theory of cognition.It is important to reiterate that Pannekoek’s article for the peer-reviewed journal Science and Society is the expression of his conviction in the 19th century materialist conception of history as the scientific foundation for comprehending human consciousness.And, if a theory of human consciousness isn’t a theory of human cognition, then the term “cognition” has no comprehensible meaning at all.AnswersHow Many Entities are there in the Process of Cognition?In the deepest cognitive sense, only one — society.  Society is simultaneously subject, process and object.The so-called “interaction” between subject and object is nothing other than the necessary process of social reproduction — the nature-imposed inescapable compulsion for society to continually reproduce itself.Is the Subject an Active Social Entity?In the deepest cognitive sense, the subject is society.In a derived sense, the effective subject, under capitalism, morphs into man’s alienated creation — capital — an abstract [theoretical] social construction that is just as materially real and palpable as Pannekoek’s abstract [theoretical] social construction — energy.Neither capital nor energy is a concrete being.  They are both abstractions from concrete processes, one social and the other physical.Processes and relationships are not concrete.  They are abstractions, and as such form the elements of our abstract cognition.  Abstraction is what cognition does.Our abstract cognition tells the socialist that the abstraction capital truly dominates us and not the concrete objects that temporarily store it, just as surely as it tells the physicist that the abstraction energy dominates physical processes.The possibility of such non-Schaffian comprehension follows directly from Marx’s theory of cognition — the materialist conception of history.  Stunning.Twentieth century thought, try and improve on that 19th century thought, if you can!Does the Object pre-exist the Cognitive Process?Yes, but it also co-exists with it and is created by it.From the this-sidedness of our comprehension [in young Marx’s terminology], concrete objects are mere forms of appearance of our real and palpable abstractions.  They are transitory repositories of our permanent abstractions of social and physical processes: e.g., of capital and energy.We cognize the world by universalizing the individual.  Abstract theory is universal and essential, but the concrete actuality it seeks to comprehend is individual and accidental.Hence the this-sided illusion that theory precedes action because theory has relative independence and autonomy, but is nevertheless ultimately subservient to the world it comprehends.  That is Marx turning Hegel upside down, or right side up.It is not truth that changes but theory.Does twc Agree with Lenin?No.  Like many world socialists, we never ever came under his influence.But you can see from how the materialist conception of history comprehends the world by abstraction [as does science] that naive or sophisticated comprehension of concrete objects, á la Lenin or Schaff, plays a minor role in cognition.Has twc 'Personalised' the Issue of Cognition?You personalized this thread from its inception.  You came here on a crusade to educate the Party into adopting democratic control of scientific thought.Since, for you, cognition is scientific thought, you sought the Party to endorse monitoring and controlling human cognition per se.I let you continue, without intervention, for over 100 posts through many weeks, because your target idea seemed totally inconceivable to other posters, and so remained innocuous enough.But when Party members started signing up, unconsciously, to your target scheme, I immediately stated my opposition to it by calling a spade a spade, and denouncing your target scheme as socialist thought policing.You took personal umbrage, and refused point blank to talk to me.Since then you’ve written hundreds of posts trying to lure people into endorsing your, apparently innocuous, target scheme.Thought policing is far more dangerous for socialism than Bakunin’s smash the state, Bernstein’s reformist revisionism, Lenin’s Bolshevism, Pannekoek’s council communism and Sraffa’s physicalism.  These only tell us how to achieve socialism.You tell us how to run it!It is naive not to expect resistance to a policy of determined censorship and shackling of human thought.Thought is marxian superstructure.  Thought is subversive, and will burst all censorship imposed upon it and all shackles that conflict with the marxian base.That is marxian negation of the negation.If a socialist base can only be defended by shackling human thought, it is not worth human defending.  That is, and always has been, for over a century, the Party’s unique position on achieving and maintaining socialism!

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LBird wrote:

I can't find any link within your post, twc.

http://libcom.org/library/society-mind-marxian-philosophy-anton-pannekoek

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This pre-War article, written before Schaff and Lakatos, explains the social content of cognition.  Its author takes the view that social practice determines social thought in direct opposition to the view you express here that social thought determines social practice.  This article [abridged and slightly modified] is relevant to the current thread.Do you have any comment to make on it?What determines the activity of mankind?The idealistic conception of history explains the events of history, as caused by the ideas of men.  This is wrong, in that it confuses the general abstract formula with a special concrete meaning.  It omits the real problem, the origin of these ideas.The materialist conception of history explains these ideas as caused by the social needs arising from the conditions of the existing system of production.The manner in which mankind earns its living, i.e., the economic organization of production, places each individual in determinate relations with every other, so determining his/her thinking and feeling.Mankind, like any living organism, has needs that must be satisfied as conditional to its existence, and is surrounded by nature that provides the means to satisfy those needs.Our needs and the impressions of the surrounding world are the impulses, the stimuli, to which our actions are the responses.  Needs, as directly felt, and the surrounding world, as observed through the senses, work upon the mind, produce thoughts, ideas and aims, stimulate the will and put the body in action.We demonstrate the actual historical truth of these principles by showing the chain of cause and effect of past events which proceeds from economic needs to new ideas, from new ideas to social action, from social action to new institutions, and from new institutions to new economic systems.Both original cause and final effect are economic, and so we may reduce the actual process to a short formula by omitting the intermediate terms which involve the activity of the human mind.The human mind is entirely determined by the surrounding real world, which is not restricted to physical matter only, but comprises everything that is objectively observable.New ideas thus appear to arise from two sources: present reality; and the system of ideas transmitted from the past, which also have their origin in the real world under social conditions — what may be termed the social memory, the perpetuation of collective ideas, systematized in the form of prevailing beliefs, and transferred to future generations in oral communications, in books, in literature, in art and in education.As forces in modern social development, these traditional ideas persist after their material roots have disappeared, and hamper the spread of new ideas that express new necessities — they lag behind the development of society.These necessities when too strongly in contradiction with the old institutions, lead to explosions, to revolutionary transformations, by which lagging minds are drawn along and are themselves revolutionized.

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Just looked up Burt in Wikipedia.  His defenders continue to dispute deliberate fraud, thereby disproving my claim that Burt's outing-as-a-fraud delivered a fatal blow to his ideas on the heritability of IQ — a perennial topic of perpetual fascination to the bourgeois mind, since they can rely on it to 'scientifically' legitimize their natural superiority.The wider implications of the Burt Affair appear in the Wikipedia article's conclusion:"In the broader sense, science, in general, and behavior genetics, in particular, were profoundly harmed by the Burt Affair, leading to an unjustified general rejection of genetic studies of intelligence and a drying up of funding for such studies."The whiff of scientific fraud is disastrous to the scientific enterprise that conducts it.  If only it were equally disastrous to those political enterprises that conduct it.

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Scientific FraudYes, but its fraud was detected, and exposed, by the very scientific enterprise it attempted to defraud.  Which was my point.  The scientific enterprise is self-correcting.It was unearthed as fraud by appeal to replicable experiment and, in this anti-Darwin case, not by appeal to inheritance theory, which was thereby delivered a near fatal blow of its duplicitous making — an own goal, on the grounds that it needed to be defended [could only be defended] fraudulently.[As for sociology, take the well-known case of Cyril Burt.  His fraudulent claims delivered his thesis its fatal blow, on the grounds that he was forced to resort to subterfuge in order to promulgate it.  There is no more compelling disproof than that!]Why Commit Scientific Fraud in the First Place?The only scientific question that needs to be answered here is — why did the scientific fraudsters feel compelled to resort to scientific fraud?Issues of prestige and funding aside, the main reason they were forced to resort to fraud was that they’d come horribly face-to-face with the inexorability of the scientific process — face-to-face with nature already exposing them.The scientific process had inexorably entered extreme doubts in their heads.  To prosecute their case further they attempted to bypass the scientific process.  They felt they had no choice but to delude themselves, for they can never delude nature.  Nature had turned them into fraudsters.In many ways, scientific fraud proves my case.  It is the very inexorability of the scientific process that produces its fraudulent casualties.  Those who attempt to buck nature get nature’s come-uppance.That has been my case for the integrity of the scientific process all along, and you have just proved it for me.My ResponseMy response, as I explained, has nothing to do with 19th century awesome-like respect for scientists, but has everything to do with respect for the hard won process of science that does deserve mankind’s respect in ways similar to the Party’s integrity deserves respect.I do not extend the same respect to other parties, nor to scientists who conduct scientific fraud.  But I comprehend human and social frailty, and pity it.I was merely standing up for a profession that you hold in supreme 21st century contempt — in line with the tabloid press and media.For you, the scientific enterprise is riddled with fraud, which the scientific enterprise is powerless to detect, expose and correct.

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YMS wrote:

I may have missed a meeting; but when did sociology stop being a science?

No, you didn’t, and sociology hasn’t.I read those sociologists as asserting that natural scientists lack scientific integrity.  This is I believe, for the reasons I gave, a quite undeserved charge against scientists of conscious human fraud.That is a serious accusation of duplicitous human behaviour, and is quite different in kind from a mere assertion that natural science is riddled with class prejudice.  Even if that were true, it is in human terms a case of unconscious, but understandable, human bias.Political AnalogyI took those unsupported sociological assertions as akin to accusing political parties of lacking political integrity.  In most cases, this is a justifiable accusation of conscious political fraud, masquerading behind a conscious veneer of ‘unconscious’ human bias.I know, however, that you would rush to the Party’s defence, against any sociological charge of political infamy, by citing the Party’s century-long unwavering adherence to its Declaration of Principles.That’s all I was doing for natural scientists   Defending what I believe against what I consider to be calumny.  No more than I know you always do in the Party’s justified defence of its political integrity.I know scarcely any sociologists, and those I’ve met personally don’t rank highly in my estimation — probable evidence of my socialist prejudice, for none of them was socialist.However, I know natural scientists, and they mostly work under the hammer, whether tenured or not.  Economics forces them to beg funding bodies to support their research.  All of them labour under pressure to generate publishable results.In short, most scientists are proletarians, just like the majority of mankind!Let us assume, that the funding bodies manage to warp their research outcomes.  That is primarily a critique of capitalism, and is something the socialist case holds we won’t have to contend with under socialism.I remind you, however, that LBird considers the Party’s view of socialism to be fundamentally flawed in this very regard.On LBird’s view, science and scientists are accurately and irredeemably [even under socialism] adequately characterized by their disgusting Murdoch-empire tabloid stereotypes.  They are to be perpetually feared.

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Attack of the Killer Bees

YMS wrote:

Erm, I linked to an article that demonstrated that Lbird's view was already incorporated into maintream academic discourse on the theory of science.

Actually, you didn’t.  You linked, fourth-hand, to a [lefty] sociologist, third-hand, believing unnamed and unsourced professionals in “the field of science, technology and society”, second-hand, about what scientists do first-hand.And you expect us to believe it, fifth-hand.Above all, he did not claim to be talking about something as lofty as the theory of science, as you misread him!Aunt JobiskaThe position adopted by the sociologist is none other than a common belief shared by many today.  It’s become a “fact the whole world knows” [Edward Lear], and is common currency throughout the tabloid and media outlets of the Murdoch empire.Such naked truth is best stripped of academic nicety:  “scientists are up themselves;  they fool the public all the time;  they only engage in vainglorious lust for power over society;  they should be exposed as falsifiers of truth.”And so we find Fox, unconstrained by scientific integrity, gloating over the cautious findings, constrained by subservience to the ways of nature, of today’s nuanced IPCC report.Meanwhile, the lefty intelligentsia, also concur that, well yes, really, the only socially-responsible stance an intelligent person can take these days towards science is a very large dose of anti-science skepticism, soaked in sociological cynicism.Appearance and RealityA socialist might have thought that, if everyone agrees with him on a social issue, then he’s possibly falling for the capitalist husk, and failing to recognize the socialist kernel.Quid Pro QuoI’ll answer your insane questions to the best of my ability.No.Can’t.  I know nothing about the Bee Gees apart from their name as a pop group.  [You already know my love of classical music.]Can’t.  I have no idea who John Hurt is.Now, the quid pro quo.  If CCD isn’t your prime example of the inability of natural science to rise above the ideological constraints of a “belief in private property in the means of production”, what is?For example, do you take IPCC science as ideologically flawed?If not, I’ll give you a leg up.  What about finding ideological flaws in E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, or in Richard Dawkins’s memes?But I was really seeking an example in the natural sciences, whose abstract categories of thought — like temperature and heat [totally different abstract objects that the climate skeptics conflate], or latent heat [where temperature decouples from heat] — that have no direct bearing on social class concerns.[Natural science’s divide-and-conquer division of the natural world, and its relative independence of social class, will send LBird into a tail spin, but let him prove his case by showing us a single instance of what he means, and I’ll take him seriously.]Apiarist IndustryMy point ran far deeper than your appraisal of little more than “the apiarist industry is a party to a power struggle to defend itself”.  It was the far-from-evident point that emerges from considering the scientific stressors:  “the wider apiarist industry are in this predicament right up to their necks.  The problem is of their making”.Fable of the BeesWhen I first read the sociologist’s report, I was left with the distinct impression that the beekeepers were innocent victims.  I automatically sympathized with the independent French beekeeper, who lives by spreading his hives in flowery meadows, midst rain and sunshine, and is mercilessly set upon by the global agro-chemical monopolies.

Quote:

“many French beekeepers became convinced more than a decade ago that the worsening trend of honeybee losses was linked to the introduction of Gaucho, a brand of products from the German agro-chemical company Bayer that contains Imidacloprid, a widely used neonicotinoid.”

But a glance at the scientific stressors reveals that beekeeping practice implicates the French beekeepers in typical capitalist interdependence between themselves and their agro-chemical bullies.Eden in ProvenceThe delightful insect studies conducted in 19th-century Provence by Jean-Henri Fabre — the ‘Homer of insects’ in Charles Darwin’s estimation — was a boyhood companion that constantly beat through my head as I rambled field and forest.I received as tenth birthday present Fabre’s Book of Insects, with stunning black-and-white woodblock images, to me more precious than Detmold’s tipped-in coloured paintings (protected by translucent rice paper) in the ancient 1921 edition that lay on the shelf of our school library.Fabre gave me the conviction to fight off a twelve year old, twice my size, intent on killing cicadas with his catapult.I only learnt much later that Japanese ecologists consider Fabre the father of ecology, a term I didn’t know of then, but whose content I absorbed by osmosis from the work of that great inspirer of natural science, dear old Fabre.Fabre should be patron saint of French beekeepers, but it’s distinctly possible that the modern agro-chemical generation of French beekeepers simply doesn’t know the close entomological observer their country once produced.Here, in Fabre’s own words, occasionally edited for continuity, is the world before it was invaded by modern agricultural chemistry and genetics:

Jean-Henri Fabre wrote:

“Finally, after 40 years of dreaming of it in poverty, I obtained in Provence, a tiny patch of red soil mixed with stones, with no wild thyme left, nor lavender, where I might question the Hunting Wasps and others of my insect friends in that difficult language which consists of experiments and observations.”“This curious Eden of mine is the happy hunting-ground of countless Bees and Wasps.  Never have I seen so large a population of insects at a single spot.”“Here, in my curious Eden, the Tailor-bee scrapes the cobwebby stalk of the yellow-flowered centaury plant, which she carries off proudly with her mandibles or jaws.  She will turn it, underground, into cotton satchels to hold her store of honey and the eggs.”“Here the Leaf-cutting Bees, carrying the black, white or blood-red reaping brushes under their bodies, will visit the neighbouring shrubs, and there cut from the leaves oval pieces into which to wrap their harvest.”“Here the black, velvet clad, Mason-bees work with cement and gravel.”“Here also are many varieties of Wild Bees:  One, who stacks her cells in the winding staircase of an empty snail-shell.  A second, who lodges her grubs in the pith of a dry bramble-stalk.  A third, who uses the channel of a cut reed.  A fourth, who lives rent-free in some galleries of the Mason-bee.”“Here are also Bees with horns, and Bees with brushes on their hind legs, to be used for reaping.”

Short SightedWhat I find most galling is the ready, unquestioning, acceptance of the scientific integrity of a [lefty] sociologist’s third-hand views upon scientific practice — a profession, accountable to no-one but popular prejudice and his academic, probably laborite, peers.But what is more galling is the ready, unquestioning, rejection of the scientific integrity of the ensemble of natural scientists, who are deterministically accountable to replicating their scientific results in the realm of that very nature they draw them from.That last constraint is the secret of the integrity of natural science.  It is, as nature poet Robert Frost might have said, what makes “all the difference”.

[twc]

 Colony Collapse DisorderRevenge of the BeesAn overview of the scientific and technical issues demonstrates beyond any shadow of a doubt that, rather than being innocent victims, the commercial bee keepers and the wider apiarist industry are in this predicament right up to their necks.  The problem is of their making.LBird and YMS, please demonstrate how the following scientifically-proposed stressors exemplify anything other than stark “forms of appearance” of the normal workings of capitalism.All of this is shockingly contrary to LBird’s view that nature is a passive “social construct”, an object for cognizance by the active social subject — here the bee-keeping industry.For here we chance to glimpse just how a social construct, nature, has the indecency to thwart a capitalist industry’s commercial practice.For here we watch in horror, as nature turns active and, slowly but surely, she reacts on her own terms — the Schaffian object’s terms — rather than on the Schaffian subject’s terms.Here she attacks the rapacious industry thugs who, treating her with callous indifference, fondly hoped to sate their lust by keeping on actively raping her, as submissive social construct, contemptuously forever, and ever, and ever.Salutary as it may be to see the rapist getting his come-uppance, it’s hard not to conclude that despite the dire social consequences, for raped nature’s revenge, it’s about time!Plea for SanityThe bee industry has smoked its own hive, but craves a bail out, just like the self-immolating bankers who brought us the GFC.And, LBird and YMS, dutifully succumb to its plaintive cry, and help shift the blame, as perpetrators always manage to find willing hands, onto the hateful proletarian — here in the guise of the detested scientist.LBird and YMS, for sanity’s sake, admit you’ve fallen hook, line and sinker for the belly-aching of a capitalist industry facing its self-inflicted ruin by its very own grubby hands.LBird and YMS, confess that you’ve ignorantly sided with the terrified capitalist, powerless to halt his capital’s erosion, and you’ve unconsciously turned against the preordained-guilty proletarian — the scientist.LBird and YMS, who do you propose, in this rapacious capitalist world, who has the integrity to diagnose the cause, and solve the problem, but the scientist?Irrational Hatred of ScienceLBird, for whom no profession is more detestable than that of scientist, please moderate your venom towards the one profession in capitalism that’s based on integrity.  Desist from scapegoating the scientist for the ills of capitalism.  Your fanatical idealism is eroding your common humanity.I have never encountered such hatred as yours — such bitter contempt for the natural science that is the only reliable hope of diagnosis, and perhaps solution [in this instance] of the tragic plight of the world’s bees.Scientific StressorsPesticides — Specific agrochemical compounds disrupting the apian nervous system, e.g. neonicotinoids.Cocktails — Onslaught of a baker’s dozen of agrochemical compounds disrupting the apian nervous system.Parasites — Unregulated commercial bee trade spreading foreign apian parasites, e.g. Varroa mite.Viruses — Unregulated commercial bee trade spreading foreign apian viruses [e.g. nosema infection; Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus].Breeding — Apiarists selectively destroying genetic diversity among bee populations.GMO — Genetically modified organisms [GMO] damaging apian immune systems.Pollination — Monocultural pollination inducing migratory stress on dependent bee colonies.Destruction of Native Pollinators — Monocultural exotics out-competing the multicultural endemics — destruction of the native.Global Warming — Shifting seasons disturbing sexual-reproduction cycles.Global Warming — Extreme weather disrupting foraging cycles.Global Warming — Environmental changes altering the colony’s world.Deforestation — Destruction of native wildflower meadows — the bee colony’s means of production.All of the Above — Capitalism.[Source: http://sociologicalinsect.com/2013/09/16/colony-collapse-disorder/%5DCommercial Problem — Scientific SolutionEvery single stressor is commercial in origin, and is expressly not scientific in origin.LBird and YMS, only through natural science can we hope to determine which stressors are the active ones.  Only through natural science can we determine the seat of the stressor — nectar, pollen, petals, leaves, grasses, water, air.You are left with an insoluble riddle of your own making:  natural science is made responsible for causing the mess [even though it’s clearly not the actual culprit, the capitalist class] and yet natural science is still considered our only activity capable of clearing up the mess [not the capitalist class, which is both culpable and incapable].  Chew on that riddle!What flipping use here is Schaffian cognizance of pre-theorized objects in any but a vapid destructive superficial sense?‘Philosopers’ of ScienceThe most LBird gleans from out of this is cause to gloat over confirmation in the twaddle of unnamed and unsourced professionals in “the field of science, technology and society”.What a state capitalism has come to when its professional commentators on science can, from the authority of their sociology chairs, theorizing while sitting in the academic study, deflect hatred from the capitalist class onto the scientist, working out there in the field or experimenting in the laboratory!No wonder Thomas Kuhn, as soon as he discovered philosophy-of-science’s self-important prescribers to scientists of precisely how they ought to conduct their scientific practice ‘correctly’, fled that debased pontificating profession as fast as he could, never to return to it.Is This Your Alarming Flaw in Natural Science?LBird, if this is your single example of a gross alarming flaw in natural science, socialism has nothing to fear of science, and everything to admire.

[twc]

LBird wrote:

twc didn't like my quoting of Smith when twc wanted a 'science' quote.  twc separates out so-called 'hard science', like physics, from so-called 'soft science', like sociology.  This can't be done: it is methodologically incorrect.

I didn’t dislike your quoting.  I felt pity.I saw your ploy as casuistry — something you’ve never repudiated.  You openly avow casuistry as proletarian science’s signature methodology.I saw your behaviour as adequate demonstration of your Schaffian-inspired practice of subjective selection–rejection of the object of cognition by prior theory.Recall the Context

twc, in #161 wrote:

Please explain why you assert that “in a Communist society … we assume humans can understand our society and its products.”Please explain how you propose that we put the authority of the market under our democratic control.All scientists have worked under some form of private-property social system: ancient chattel slavery, medieval feudalism or modern capitalism.Most scientists of the past were inspired by social and religious precepts that we would now despise.Given the above, please show us just one instance of any piece of substantial scientific work performed by any natural or mathematical scientist which should, in your opinion, have been rejected but instead survived scrutiny merely because the scientist and the profession “believed in private property in the means of production”.[Here I expressly exclude those scientists who are the hired prize fighters of capitalism’s economics profession or its social scientists.]One instance please, so that we gain a clear understanding of what you are driving at.

Long History of Unification of ScienceWe can discuss the unity of science later;  First, some history.The supreme trio: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx, saw unified science as the indispensable framework of their work.So did 18th century French encyclopedists Diderot and d’Alembert.So did 19th century German nature-philosopher Schelling, French utopians Fourier and Saint Simon and his disciple, and father of positivism, Comte.  So too did 19th century German materialists [not fit intellectual company for LBird] Büchner, Vogt and Langer, et tutti frutti.Theorizing DisunityOnce more LBird exposes his ‘theorizing’.  For LBird, a socialist who distinguishes between natural and social sciences must ipso facto reject their underlying unity.On the other hand, LBird [like Lassalle strutting before Marx] announces LBird will unite that which Marx failed (in LBird’s humble opinion) to unite.In this he is fortunate in the arrival on the scene of that exemplary model of scientific imprecision, the Schaffian materialist cognition of external objects, as conceived idealistically by LBird.LBird, you can only unite that which is already disunited, and thereby ipso facto you must on your own ‘theorizing’ already reject the underlying unity you crave.A marxian socialist quite easily makes the commonly agreed distinction between natural and social sciences.A marxian socialist accepts their unification in materialist conception of history terms — which your anti-materialist interpretation of Schaff opposes — and in none other!For a marxian socialist, it’s as easy as a darwinian distinguishing dogs from cats.Alarm over Scientific PracticeLBird, I was asking you to substantiate to us your doubts over scientific truth with concrete examples of scientific theory in the natural sciences surviving because its practitioners “believed in private property in the means of production”.Up till now you have given alarmist abstract examples of the — would you trust a scientist;  or atomic scientists have known evil;  or active scientific practice of truth is human and must be decided contemplatively by passive human democracy — variety.I doubt that you are equipped with “thousands” of LBirdian concrete examples, but only one will suffice, so that we may judge the extent of your concerns.If you could find just one convincing example coming from within the natural sciences then you might possibly have exposed a fatal flaw in modern scientific methodology — not just in how bourgeois scientists conceive or misconceive their social practice — but a flaw that demolishes our bourgeois-established scientific abstractions wrested from external nature.  That would be a welcome scientific discovery indeed.Where is your concrete example of bourgeois ideology preventing natural scientists from comprehending natural systems that demonstrate humanity’s natural science is methodologically flawed?Science is SubversiveI repeat from my first post to you — science is our most subversive activity.Sure, bourgeois society turns scientists into philosophical dualists, who hold a critical attitude towards their science, but also hold an accommodating attitude towards their society.But the scientist is consciously constrained to practice scientific integrity.  Nature forces him, as it does the engineer, to pursue his craft subservient to her ways, and not to his own will.  Nature is not deceived.Nature is a robust materialist, and subverts fragile human ideas.We recall that scientific integrity is something that LBird avowedly eschews in his own model of ‘proletarian science’ as being failed bourgeois scientific practice.However, the practicing scientist [even if of the bourgeois kind] is not an LBirdian.The practicing scientist is actively constrained by the piece of the universe he seeks to cognize.  In the long run, nature forces him to follow her.  His will is powerless before hers.Consequently, the practicing scientist is forced to follow his science fearlessly wherever it may lead him.  He only deludes himself if he thinks he can bend nature to his thoughts.If the practicing scientist’s ideas controlled science, he could hardly be practicing research.  He would already cognize it all.Ally or EnemyIncreasingly, as giant corporations commandeer science, the practicing scientist comes face-to-face with a commercial interest his scientific activity threatens.Increasingly, science unconsciously assists socialism in exposing anti-scientific practice in the interests of capital — particularly in environmental science, ecology, global warming — but must moderate its voice so as not to offend capital.Anti-scientific practice can only be practice that consciously opposes scientific theory.  It is scientific fraud.Nobody denies that, but no socialist believes that that is the issue you want to solve for socialism.Big corporations are currently successful at taming the scientist politically, but they can’t forever stave off the day when the evil, untrustworthy, elitist [LBird] scientists come out, and reveal themselves as our honest, trustworthy, sociable proletarian allies.So, What’s the Bourgeois Flaw in Natural Science?No-one believes the abstract theory of aerodynamics is flawed by bourgeois ideology to the extent that [its instances] jet aircraft fall out of the sky.Society relies on the abstract determinism of the inverse-square law from commuting on foot or by car, to bridge building, to firing rockets to Mars.Where is your evidence so that we may independently judge the seriousness of your concern?

[Author]

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