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Theory and PracticeTheory precedes practice.Practice precedes theory.Does the human condition comprise a vicious cycle of (1) ⇆ (2), or does it comprise just (1) or (2)?(1) IdealismRealist LBird and absolute-idealist Hegel hold that “theory [spirit/mind] is prior to practice” (1).LBird and Hegel hold differing philosophical views, and yet both are united in holding idealist philosophical priority of theory over practice, even if for different reasons. [LBird has asserted “a thousand times, that theory precedes practice”.]Hegel’s proof of (1) lies in the working out of his philosophical system in the concrete world of phenomena through history.LBird’s proof of (1) is now so obvious it’s a “no-brainer” — common sense — and those who disagree “ignore the conditions that exist prior to practice” and are “fundamentally conservatives” who don’t have a plan of action for the future. AbstractionThis is where LBird exposes his theorizing. For LBird, materialists who hold the priority of practice over theory, must ipso facto deny theory itself and confront the world blindfolded.In actuality, materialists affirm that theory is the essential indispensable product of practice. They also affirm that practice is the essential subverter of theory. Practice is ultimately what keeps theory honest.LBird must surely understand that abstraction never corresponds unmediated to the concrete from which it was abstracted.That’s why we need abstract theory, so that we can mentally concretize our abstractions and deterministically plonk them back into the concrete ensemble whence we got them, in order that we may comprehend that ensemble in theoretical terms.That’s why you can find Marx’s statements that appear to contradict his avowed guiding principle, the materialist conception of history.CrisisA marxian materialist is bound to see the world as process, recognizing that both (1) and (2) hold in different phases of the same social process. The phase in which theory dictates practice (1) is the social phase that corresponds to normality — stasis. It’s what we fondly hope might happen forever, all of the time.But mankind’s theory is not robust enough to last forever. Stasis is temporary. Theory is provisional.Unexpectedly, from out of the blue, practice precipitates a crisis in theory.And, when theoretical crisis strikes, it shakes our misplaced confidence in theory to the core.Crisis is nothing other than theory failing to dictate practice [not (1)].It is then that we truly glimpse who is actually the boss — practice or theory!Theoretical crisis is that rare, but precious, moment when we actually get to glimpse the reality beneath the cracks of confident theory.Theoretical crisis forces mankind to confront the delusional side of its theory, and to comprehend crisis’s salutary lesson that mankind’s theory is, after all is said and done, only mankind’s comprehension of its own social practice.It is disruptive crisis that reveals precisely how dependent man’s mental construction—his theory—is on his robust activity—his practice.Crisis, and its resolution cries out to all the world: the demise of theory by practice! The profane assault of practice upon theory lets slip the hidden esoteric truth, beyond all doubt, that practice actually dictates theory (2)!It is through crisis that we find the explanation of exactly why we must let theory dictate practice in normal times — precisely because crisis has just disclosed its secret: that human theory is nothing other than the abstraction of human practice.That is why, in subservience to theory, our practice is, in actuality, in subservience to its very own abstraction.Practice replicating its theoretical self, fools LBird into thinking that theory dictates practice.The only way human practice can operate in the world is as reflection of its own abstraction.LBird, how can your pre-Marxian Schaffian selection of concrete objects by prior theory account for those shocking moments when subversive practice precipitates crisis in prior theory, without acknowledging the subservience of prior theory to subversive practice?(2) MaterialismMarx, in opposition to LBird and Hegel, holds that ‘social being [existence] determines consciousness’ — his materialist conception of history (2). That is materialism.LBird rejects Marx’s materialist conception of history — Marx’s guiding principle (2) for his own guiding principle (1).On the RoadLBird may very well be setting out on a road to the unification of natural and social sciences, although that seems unlikely.Whatever road LBird is on, it is a non-Marxian road. LBird has acknowledged that.
Anti-Marx
Marx (Preface to the Critique) wrote:The guiding principle of my studies:The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.Marx opposes LBird’s guiding principle that theory [consciousness] precedes practice [social existence].LBird accuses all such opponents of LBird’s own guiding principle, as clinging to the “fundamentally conservative stance of pre-Popperian induction, and of holding a positivist bucket theory of mind, in which the mind is a passive bucket into which sensual experience just pours itself”.For LBird, Marx never kicked the [pre-Popperian] bucket!Poor Marx. If only he’d been born post Popper.
Marx and Schaff
LBird wrote:'theory' must precede 'practice', otherwise how do we account for the moment of 'selection'?The answer is, of course, practice!
Hegel (Smaller Logic) wrote:Such a doctrine would find its parallel, if we had said that eating was impossible before we had acquired a knowledge of the chemical, botanical and zoological characters of our food; and that we must delay digestion until we had finished the study of anatomy and physiology.Why Schaff gets it WrongBefore society has the freedom to theorize, it is compelled to practice. It must practically reproduce its own conditions of existence.Schaff forgets that his own privileged academic freedom to ‘select’ whatever theoretical object of cognition he so desires, rests upon the social unfreedom that removes this freedom of selection from the working class.Instead, the working class, which performs the indispensable practice of reproducing society, spends its working life cognizing objects that are thrust upon it by its ruling class.Consequently the working class’s objects of cognition are not of its own freely active ‘selection’. To that extent, the working class can be said to start out as reluctant passive selector of its objects of cognition.In the course of performing society’s necessary social labour on behalf of the whole of society [including performing privileged Schaff’s social quota for him] the working class is forced to settle for cognizing objects that directly oppose its desires.Of course, the working class must eventually come to actively cognize its alien capitalist objects of cognition out of social necessity for its own survival as a working class. But those objects themselves are not there to be cognized in the working class’s direct interest but in the indirect interests of the capitalist class.To consider working-class cognition as comprising “moments of selection”, informed by ‘theory’, is to abuse the terms selection and theory. Theirs are moments of taking orders, subservient to expanding capital. ‘Prior theory’ turns out to be post-festum rationalization of class rule.Nature’s CompulsionBefore man has a chance to theorize what he’s doing, he must act to reproduce his conditions of existence.This compulsion holds for all living creatures — even those unconscious ones and those stationary ones that are rooted to the spot, like limpets. It is nature’s dominance over life, or life’s dependence upon nature.The most that man can do, as sentient creature, is for him to comprehend nature and to wield that comprehension in his own interest. As mere part of nature, he can never circumvent it.Materialist Conception of HistoryMarx has no time for this thread’s tripartite formula — the traditional philosophical trinity of cognition.For Marx, man doesn’t freely set out to seek theory — knowledge of [concrete] objects. Man’s theory is part of the social superstructure.For Marx, man’s life is practical. Man is above all compelled to reproduce his conditions of living.The social relationships, that society forms out of necessity to reproduce itself, constitute Marx’s social base, upon which arises society’s theoretical superstructure.All such social relations, that are formed and sustained in order to reproduce society, can only be the necessary “forms of appearance” of social determinism — of nature compelling society to reproduce itself.The most fundamental of these social relations are those of ownership and control of the means whereby society must reproduce its conditions of existence. They form the core of the social base, since they continually reproduce themselves as the true invariants of a social formation.So long as the relations of ownership and control of social reproduction persist, so too does their particular mode of relaying determinism, and hence so too does that form of society.As we all know, the history of society, since the advent of private property in the means of social reproduction, has consisted in long periods of stasis in class ownership and control of the means of reproduction. Or looked at actively, it has consisted in long periods of stasis in which ruling classes have robbed and ruled the rest of society in their very own characteristic way.We should never forget that history has turned out this way, not by chance, but deterministically, precisely because rule and ownership are always and everywhere aided and abetted by the social determinism for society to reproduce itself.Comprehend that, and you comprehend the necessity for socialism, and the necessity for socialism to reproduce itself.The social relations that nature imposes upon society to reproduce its conditions of existence are appropriately compulsive relations in class societies. In a society, in which the means of social reproduction are common property and democratically controlled, these indispensable relations are deterministically cooperative.In other words, common ownership and democratic control keep on reproducing social cooperation at the same time as they keep on reproducing socialist society as socialist society.Comments on SchaffThe following thoughts arose from reading Chapter 1 of Schaff. The book is hard to find, and I have only read his first chapter on cognition.Schaff knows practice, and so insistently characterizes man as relating to objects through practice as “reflecting interaction”. In other words, cognition remains for him merely cognition of the object that is external to him. In that way Schaff preserves vestiges of Lenin’s cognition of objects.I have no idea how close Schaff approaches Marx’s discovery of the social foundation in the necessity for society to act collectively [though not necessarily cooperatively] to reproduce itself, whether society comprehends what it’s doing or not, and in so doing comes to comprehend its own practice.I have no idea how close he comes to recognizing that society comprehends its own practice when it perceives the necessity of its own practice.Finally, two minor points …Marx identified human essence with “the ensemble of social relations.” [Thesis VI]. Schaff, at times, asserts that Marx identifies the human individual with the ensemble of social relations.Schaff’s [concrete] objectivity would seem to rule out his ostensible concern — history and truth — whose content does not lie “outside of any cognizing mind and independently of it”.
I must suppose that what Aron said was that you can’t do history without a theory of history. And Schaff is quite correctly agreeing with that.In this context, the “philosophy [= theory] of history” is logically prior to doing any history. In Kuhnian terms, that is the straightforward way to conduct “normal science” [well, of conducting normal history].But whether Schaff is prepared to ignore the other side of the coin that only comes with Hegel’s dusk — when we find out what we really were doing all along — that period of revolutionary transcendence — we can only speculate. However, one thing is certain, even Schaff is not giving himself whole-heartedly to Aron’s absolute claim.
See post #132.Einstein is saying something different — that it is theory that determines what may be observed. Nobody disagrees.However, the revolutionary science of designing a new theory out of the wreckage of the old is bound to be a stormy and contentious process, in which generalizations are flung around.I don’t think that the quantum mechanists were greatly impressed by this statement’s relevance to the issue at hand — for they proceeded to ignore it, I feel.
Not according to Schaff p. 47, it was Raymond Aron.
Schaff wrote:If philosophy cannot be eliminated from history, if on the contrary (as Raymond Aron maintains and, given a certain interpretation of his statement, I agree with him completely) “theory precedes history”[R. Aron, “Introduction to the Philosohy of History ”. 1948]I have no knowledge of what that certain interpretation of his statement involves. But, you see, Schaff has reservations over the absolute claim.At the most trivial level, history has already taken place before the historian arrives on the scene. But that’s another thread.
Schemas for Discussing LBird’s Theory of CognitionCognitive Trinity — Schaff
Schaff wrote:“A framework of an activistically modified theory of reflection, a model of cognitive relationship in which both the subject and object retain an objective and real existence and, simultaneously interact upon each other.”“This takes place within the framework of the subject’s social practice, as it recognizes the object in the course of activity.” [History and Truth, pp. 51 and 52].Schema 1Here is a representation of Schaff’s model of cognition.Follow the arrows of advancing time [history] → top-left to top-right; then ↓ down to bottom right; then ← reverse from bottom-right to bottom-left; then ↑ up to top-left again. knowledge → subject → object ↓ ↑ knowledge ← subject ← objectIn the Schaffian cycle of cognition, knowledge is built — not by iteration [accretion] — but by recursion [the new modifies the past as foundation by building upon it].Schema 2Here is an alternative representation — with the [abstract] phases of the Schaffian cognition process numbered and annotated with Schaffian terminology.Follow it downwards 1 to 9 in time [history] and then back to 1. knowledge [theory] → [guides] subject [society] → [practice] object [nature] ← [reflects] subject [society] ← [transforms] knowledge [theory] repeat ad infinitumConsensusAre you happy with either representation 1 or 2 for agreed discussion?Schaffian InterpretationFrom my reading of the posts, you hold the following Schaffian interpretation:Knowledge = theory.Knowledge is irreducibly subjective Schaffian objective cognition because the “active role of the subject in the process of cognition” necessarily brings with it the subject’s technology, language and social class [History and Truth, pp. 64 and 65].Schaffian objective cognition claims objectivity because it (1) reflects, by Schaffian objective-social reflection, an object which exists outside of the perceiving mind, and independently of it; (2) it possesses content that is of social and not just of individual value; (3) it is not “emotionally coloured”.Therefore Schaffian knowledge comprises our subjective internal [abstract] concepts of objective external [concrete] objects.Subject = society.
Schaff wrote:“Firstly, the Marxist concept of the human individual as an ‘ensemble of social relations’.” [History and Truth, p. 58.]The Schaffian subject is, depending on context, (1) the human individual understood as, in reality, a truly social being; (2) society as a whole — the ensemble of social relations which determines the consciousness of the human individual; or (3) a social class within society.Practice = social practice.
Schaff wrote:“The cognizing subject ‘photographs’ reality while possessing a specific socially created mechanism which guides the “lens” of this apparatus.”“In addition it ‘transforms’ the information obtained on the basis of a complicated code of social conditionings which enter his psychical make-up by means of the language with which he thinks, through his class position and group interests connected with it, through conscious and subconscious motivation and, above all, through his social activity without which cognition is speculative fiction.” [History and Truth, p. 58.]“The par excellence active character of the subject of cognition is linked with the fact … that man comes to cognition by action.” [History and Truth, p. 59.]Object = nature.For materialist Schaff, nature is the concrete realm where all external [concrete] things exist independently of us.
Schaff wrote:“For materialists … the [concrete] object of cognition, being the external stimulus of sensory impressions of the cognizing subject exists objectively, that is, outside of any cognizing mind and independently of it.” [History and Truth, p. 52.]“all theories of reflection … agree that the object of cognition is knowable” — even if they interpret it differently. [History and Truth, p. 61.]Reflect = Schaffian reflection.Unfortunately for us non-Polish speakers, Schaff’s detailed theory of reflection remains inaccessible:
Schaff wrote:“As for a more detailed interpretation of this problem [of reflection] … we must refer the reader to our earlier works on the subject — [A. Schaff, Niektóre zagadnienia marxistowskiej teorii prawdy]” [History and Truth, p. 62.]However, the content seems clear enough from:
Schaff wrote:“The objectively existing object of cognition is the external source of sensual impressions”“the object is knowable [and] in the process of cognition ‘The thing in itself’ becomes ‘The thing for us’.” [History and Truth, p. 62.]Are you happy to proceed on this basis?
LBird wrote:Humans predetermine which 'sense-impressions' count.Yes, but not in the first instance by thinking but by doing — by acting not by contemplating — by practice not by theory.Comprehension comes later. That is the nub of “social being determines consciousness”.Action First, Theory LaterThis is the fundamental position of Marxian cognition, openly taken from, and in agreement with, the supreme Idealist thinker Hegel.Marx’s critique of Hegel was simply that Hegel only knew theoretical action — action of the philosophical kind — and not practical action — action of the necessity-to-reproduce-society kind.It is worth taking the time to comprehend what Hegel is driving at in his Preface to the Philosophy of Right.
Hegel wrote:“Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom.When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of “Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.”Schaff’s model of cognition can be said to follow Hegel and Marx. It starts with society [subject] that acts [that’s your “interaction”]. But Schaff can only see the subject [society] acting on an object, whereas with Marx it is compelled to act in concert to reproduce itself.This is in diametric opposition to the stuff you’ve gleaned third-hand from Lakatos.Recall Thesis VIII
Marx wrote:All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.Comprehension, as Hegel profoundly says, only takes wing at dusk.
Classical Political Economy
LBird wrote:Weath of Nations by Adam Smith.Nonsense. Marx expressed supreme intellectual respect for the giants of classical political economy — Petty, Quesnay, Smith, Ricardo — and for the scientific foundation they laid for understanding the functioning of capitalism.His Capital pays them the greatest homage a scientist can ever extend to his scientific forebears — he takes their scientific achievement absolutely seriously, to the extent of rescuing forgotten achievements from obscurity.And he honours them by critiquing their intellectual labours from a later social time, and a vantage made possible from the theory they bequeathed him
Marx in Capital, Vol 1 wrote:By classical Political Economy, I understand that economy which, since the time of W. Petty, has investigated the real relations of production in bourgeois society in contradistinction to vulgar [political] economy, which deals with appearances only.Note, Marx’s crucial distinction between appearance and reality.But DJP is quite correct. Political economy is a social science not a natural science. We all expect social science to be consciously or unconsciously inspired by class positions. Every socialist is hourly reminded of that.But natural science is another matter. Please give us one example from the natural sciences so that we may understand your concerns.Confusing the Natural and the SocialSchaff’s “theory of cognition” expressly starts from natural objects that exist independently of cognizing society. Yet when you attempt to explain him, you deliberately start with a social object — the NHS — whose [disgusting] existence is entirely dependent on society.In the case of Adam Smith, you deliberately — against your mentor Schaff, who is a historian openly conscious of working outside the natural sciences — make the same identification of the natural and the social.And, as usual, in your treatment of scientists you look down on, you savagely malign them from a position of prejudice and, it seems to me, complete ignorance.[That’s just like Lakatos — if Ptolemy is pseudo science then so is Copernicus, because they adopt identical scientific methodology. In which case, our central Sun is Lakatosian pseudo science, something the philosopher never intended to imply.]I haven’t the reference to hand — it’s possibly in Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value — where he praises Smith as the great representative of capitalism in its developing stage, as a fearless pursuer of scientific truth, and a man endowed with [and this is the highest praise] genuine scientific naivety and wonder, willing to follow the science honestly wherever it leads him.[What changed, in the interim, was the rise of the working class and its equally fearless political economy that homed in on the class vulnerability of Smith and Ricardo.]You trivialize Marx’s Capital, which he offered to the world as his critique of political economy, if you dismissively consider for the sake of your argument that classical political economy “should have been rejected”. You unconsciously accuse Marx of wasting his time.The irony is that those — who did believe in private property in the means of production — did reject classical political economy because it failed to develop the [abstract] concept of marginal utility, which was less vulnerable to working class attack.Please make the necessay distinction — as your Schaff clearly does — between the natural and the social, and show us any natural science that has survived professional scrutiny merely because the scientist and the profession “believed in private property in the means of production”.
Commentary on HessenHessen’s well-known conference paper was intended as a brief example for western scientists of a soviet application of the materialist conception of history to science. It is a fine short piece.I consider the following aspects that are relevant to the current thread.Practice precedes theory. Newton “firmly stood at the centre of the physical and technical problems and interests of his time”. “Applied mechanics … had already been elaborated, and his task consisted in teaching about nature, the mathematical bases of physics.”Newton’s Dualistic Materialism. Hessen repeats about Newton what Engels said of Locke — that he “was a typical child of the class compromise of 1688.” Newton was ten years younger than Locke.Newton was acutely aware, as were his contemporaries, that his mechanistic science sailed dangerously close to atheistic Epicureanism which taught “that the creation of the world could be explained by purely mechanical principles”.Newton couldn’t abandon his God to atheism; but nether could he abandon his materialism to God. So finally, in a late insertion to his third edition, Newton introduced God in order to banish Him from everything except the initial act of creation [or to intervening from time to time for mechanical repairs, whenever the universal clockwork needed a rewind — Leibnitz].Most relevant to our thread is Hessen’s account of how Newton consciously defused Epicurean atheism. The “universal chain of mechanical determinism ends in the original impulse. The principle of pure mechanical causation leads to the notion of [God] … the necessity of a divine power as the organizing, moving and directing element of the universe.”“The planets could be set in motion as a consequence of the force of gravity [centripetal force], which was a natural cause, but could never achieve periodical rotation along closed orbits, which would require a [non-natural cause] tangential component” [the notorious, because apparent, centrifugal force].Newton, quite reasonably for the time, “pointed out that such a marvelously organized system, in which the speed and masses of bodies are selected in such a manner as to maintain stable equilibrium, could only be created by divine reason.”Conservation of MotionThe next most relevant account to this thread relates to Descartes and Toland, and their semi-speculative materialist conservation laws.Newton had disproved conservation of quantity of motion in his second law of motion. It wasn’t until Newtonian mechanics discovered the abstract category of energy that it could properly comprehend conservation of quantity of motion — and reinstate it as conservation of energy.But Descartes had earlier considered Nature’s “supreme law is the law of conservation of quantity of motion.” He also banished God from mechanics, only to re-admit Him for the sole purpose of proving “that the quantity of motion in the universe remains constant … since by assuming inconstancy in His creations we also assume inconstancy in Him.”Materialist Toland, in direct opposition to Spinoza, Descartes and Newton, wrote that “Motion is essential to Matter, that is to say, as inseparable from its Nature as Impenetrability or Extension, and that it ought to make a part of its Definition.”But Toland’s materialism couldn’t take the concepts of the conservation of matter and motion any further than his mentor Epicurus had taken them two millennia before him.It awaited future generations of chemists, in different social times — like Dalton and Lavoisier — to take the ancient [abstract] Epicurean category of the atom, and the new [abstract] Newtonian category of mass, as serious objects of cognition, and so further the concept of the conservation of matter, as the conservation of mass.It awaited future generations of thermodynamicists, in different social times — like Carnot and Clausius — to take the new [abstract] Newtonian concept of energy seriously as an object of cognition, and so further the concept of conservation of motion, as the conservation of energy.BolshevismThe last matter of significance to our present thread is Hessen’s compulsory nod to Lenin.Hessen, feels obliged to anachronistically, and so blatantly unfairly, oppose 19th century Engels — who knew the energy transformation laws — against 17th century Newton who suspects their presence but — in historical materialist terms — is not yet inhabiting a material world from which he can actually develop them out of the phenomena.In a subsequent post, I’ll examine these examples from the materialist conception of history of science upon scientific cognition.
LBird wrote:In a Communist society, … we assume humans can understand our society and its products.‘Is there an authority (like ‘science’ or ‘the market’) which is (or should be) outside of our democratic control?’.Scientists … who believe in private property in the means of production are suspect.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.
ALB wrote: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?The Socialist Party gains its political practice from scientific practice. That’s why it must comprehend scientific practice [Thesis VIII].Object. Is our political Object coherent [as in a Kuhnian scientific paradigm]? Or is our political Object flexibly incoherent [as in a Lakatosian research program]?Principles. Do we stick to our political principles and take a hostile stand towards violations of them [as in a Kuhnian scientific paradigm]? Or do we openly encourage fringe violations of our political principles [as in a Lakatosian research program]?Hostility. Do we reject Leninism and Social Democracy as illegitimate violations of our political principles [chucking them out]? Or do we embrace Leninism and Social Democracy as legitimate alternatives to our principles [fraternizing with them]?Sure ALB, we can, and should, drop reference to Kuhnian scientific paradigms, etc. — they are merely significant in the current context in opposition to formally legitimized political casuistry.But we can never forget that Marx bequeathed us the only science we have. We comprehend that science to gain our Object — a direct consequential outcome of that science.Our opponents thrive on an incoherent political Object and on flexible political Principles. Their behaviour, though clearly politically opportunistic, is also clearly anti-scientific — pseudo science.Coherent science for Socialism!
God Made the Sun Stand Still for JoshuaMention of Dawkins and Copernicanism in neighbouring posts brings to mind the celebrated Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ at Dayton Tennessee in 1925.Monkey TrialDarrow put Bryan [the ‘tin-pot pope of the Coca Cola belt’, according to Mencken] on the witness stand and cross-examined him.
Court recorder wrote:Q — Now Mr Bryan, have you ever pondered what would have happened to the Earth if it [the Sun] stood still?A — No.Q — You have not?A — No; the god I believe in could have taken care of that, Mr Darrow….Q — Or have you ever thought about it?A — I have been too busy on things that I thought were more important than that….[Topic changes to when the Flood occurred]…Q — What do you think?A — I do not think about the things I don’t think about.Q — Do you think about the things you do think about?A — Well sometimes.(Laughter in the courtyard.)The wonderful play, and movie, Inherit the Wind closely follows the court transcript.Joshua as Anti-Copernican WitnessThe biblical text most cited by the churchmen against the Copernicans was the clincher from the Old Testament in which God makes the Sun stand still for Joshua.Innocuous enough, perhaps. The churchmen simply preferred the noble old biblical explanation to the brash young scientific explanation.But Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, reminds his readers of the far from noble reason God acceded to Joshua’s request.It turns out that a normal day didn’t give Joshua enough time to commit total genocide and senseless destruction of all livestock — something that troubled the churchmen far less than a perceived threat to their privileges.
Dawkins wrote:Good old Joshua didn’t rest until “they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.” (Joshua 6: 21).LBird wrote:I don't think that Kuhn's ideology of 'paradigms' and their 'shifts' is the best one to employ. I prefer Lakatos' 'research programmes'. The essential difference, I think, is that 'paradigms' are in 'series', so that a later one replaces an earlier one (a 'shift'). In contrast, 'research programmes' are in 'parallel', so that more than one is usually operative at the same time.False. Kuhnian paradigms, such as general relativity and quantum mechanics have no choice but to work in parallel. Nobody convincingly yet knows how to unite them inside a common framework.Furthermore, Lakatos totally agreed that science progresses through successive paradigms. He never challenged Kuhn’s revolutionary insight. Rather it became the rock-solid foundation of his future thoughts on scientific practice.The discovery of scientific paradigms was, in its own Kuhnian terms, revolutionary science. The deliberate invention of Lakatos’s research programs was, in Kuhnian terms, normal science, conducted inside Kuhn’s new conceptual framework.Why normal science?Firstly, because participation in a Lakatosian research program demands absolute allegiance to its hard core [abstract] principles. However, that’s not even normal science, but trivial science. It is a scientific necessity that was radically discovered and established over two millennia ago, and handed down to us by Euclid. Nobody has ever seriously doubted it since.[Well, not nobody. The rabid Popperian Fuller maligns such allegiance to principles as Kuhnian dictatorship.]Secondly, Lakatos’s research program accepts that the Kuhnian paradigm has effectively demolished Popperian falsification.But Lakatos wants to resurrect falsification in a new [post-Kuhnian] form inside his constructed research programs. Popper’s disciple is not prepared to give up his master’s celebrated falsificationism without a fight.So Lakatos’s whole research program is an exercise conducted in the shadow of Kuhn’s paradigms precisely because they demolished comforting falsifiability. Lakatos can never repudiate Kuhn’s paradigms without removing the ground on which he stands.Paradigms are the very edifices he seeks to amend. Oh yes, he accepts them alright.To put it in this thread’s terminology: the Kuhnian paradigm is Lakatos’s [abstract] object of cognition.But Lakatos has a higher allegiance than to his mentor and that is to his own past, that he must now come to terms with. So Lakatos invents aberrant research programs as a mechanism for smuggling Popperian falsificationism into Kuhnian paradigms through the back door after Kuhn has gently but firmly shut the front door.So Lakatos’s research programs admit auxiliary hypotheses that are to be considered as non-binding ad hoc expendable [abstract] principles — kite flying exercises — to handle anomalous evidence.What an amazingly brilliant discovery — enough to immortalize a man! Except that this is a well-known, but often dubious, practice for handling anomaly since science began. When crisis mounts, this fringe practice ceases to be the exception, and increasingly takes centre stage, announcing itself as none other than Kuhnian revolutionary science.Lakatosian auxiliary hypotheses can’t even be dignified as normal science because they’re in part an overt endorsement of the unstoppable, but totally speculative, scientific practice which always goes on at the fringes of normal science.This Lakatosian endorsement of fringe speculative practice, of course, aligns with Popperian views of what normal scientific practice ought to be. Popper, the revolutionary, lives on in Lakatos.One can’t help being reminded of the 1950s aging revolutionaries Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac enjoying themselves in lofty isolation within their scientific dotage, ever willing on [abstract] revolution when there was none to foment.Their younger contemporaries like Feynman simply rejected the speculative Lakatosian research programs of their former heroes, accepted the Kuhnian paradigm, got on with it, and gave us modern particle physics, modern cosmology — our modern universe.And Lakatos has the intellectual hide to accuse that miraculous achievement — ancient epicyclic astronomy — of being pseudo science, precisely because it necessarily behaved like his flexible research programs, but under totally different historical circumstances.And, of course, this is the very same Lakatos whose effulgent scientific acumen shines through his agreement, with his mentor Popper, that Darwinian evolution is not scientific to the exacting standards of the normally speculative Dr Lakatos.Poor modest Kuhn fled the field he plowed, leaving it to the grand egotists Lakatos and Feyerabend to pitch their tents upon their own precious patches of the field. No sooner had Lakatos permitted formal flexibility, than Feyerabend ripped into it by pointing out that, in revolutionary science, formality be damned — “anything goes”.And the social sciences ignorantly lapped it all up, discovering in Kuhnian paradigms, as filtered through his speculative successors, ready-made support for “revolutionary” post-modernism. We are all “revolutionaries” now, just like Popper, Lakatos and Feyerabend told us to be!It was Marx, Kuhn and Gould who pointed out that stasis [a social formation, a scientific framework, a species] is the norm, and revolution is the exception [social revolution, paradigm shift, speciation].But, to return to Lakatos. Just suppose he did manage to salvage falsifiability, doesn’t that circumvent the need for clumsy exogenous democracy?Lakatos’s falsifiability criterion, if it’s any good, should circumvent the need for any democratic adjudication. And, if Lakatos’s falsifiability isn’t any good, so also aren’t his research programs either, for they were constructed to bring post-Kuhnian falsifiability back into science.[Note. Everyone recognizes that a closed system comprised of a manageably countable number of components is a suitable domain for naive falsifiability.That is how a car mechanic decides what’s wrong with the engine, how a software engineer can debug a program, how some birds can tell if an egg is missingBut an open system, or a closed one with an enormous number of components, is a domain that defeats naive falsifiability, simply because it can’t be examined within a humanly feasible time frame.]
