Young Master Smeet
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
It's alleged it takes 10,000 hours of work to become an exprt in any field (this also applies to music, sport and art). Now, 10,000 hours is a lot of life, and we all have finite lives. At some point, we have to surrender to expertise.Now, obviously, there are spaces for democratci control. Will we build a sucessor to CERN? That's a democratic question. All scholarly communications should be available freely, everyone should have access to acadmic libraries. Publishing houses should have juries or elected boards to decide what to put into mass runs (and there needs to be a variety of publishers).Obviously, only one eye can go to a telescope at a time (or put another way, time with a massive radio telescope will need to be booked), and a demonstrated capacity to use it should be at least one critirion. Any (shudder) individual should be free to follow whatever object of study they choose, but when serious resources are required, and collaborative effort is needed, then that is a matter for democratic control.Is someone who has spent 10,000 hours studying physics an elite? no, because they haven't spent 10,000 hours studying biology, or working a lathe, or farming. People will do different work, and each specialism is equally useful to society; and that is what social production of knowledge looks like.
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.
Partly because you aren't saying anything that a professed empircist couldn't sign up to; partly because I too am saying that knowledge is socially produced, another way of saying that is that science is organised reliable knowledged produced with an other in mind.Or, as the story goes:
Quote:Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal does not enter into “relations” with anything, it does not enter into any relation at all. For the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.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.LBird wrote:ALL knowledge suffers from 'distortion' and 'suppression'.Yes, as I have been saying, and thus that is a banal observation. Absent a social impact of class struggle, such distortion/suppression loses its ideological edge, and just becomes background radiation that we try through various methods to correct. It is the removal of power from science.I really have no idea why you think my other post beneath contempt?
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.
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.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.For instance, what is the ideology of astronomy? is there any? It no longer threatens the established regimes and their god, whether M1223 is a nebula or a galaxy is of no social import: it is knowledge without ideology: that does not mean that the knowledge is free of pressupositions, premises and ideas filtered through the limits of the human mind, but it is not ideological.That knowledge cannot 100% capture the real world (I have a working model of the universe, unfortunately, it's life size) is an idea as old as the five monkies and the elephant.As I say, if by ideology you simply mean our mental maps of the world, then that is a banal and pointless observation, if you mean the struggle for class power, then that can be ended.Anyway, a crossed out section of the German ideology to end.
Charlie & Fred wrote:We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist. The history of nature, called natural science, does not concern us here; but we will have to examine the history of men, since almost the whole ideology amounts either to a distorted conception of this history or to a complete abstraction from it. Ideology is itself only one of the aspects of this history.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
Much of it rests on the question of deliberateness of ideology. I remember seeing an OU programme on it, many years ago. norman Tebbit blithely used the 'everyone has a point of bias' argument, and that it is natural and unconscious. Tony Benn was on alleging a degree of deliberateness. One of my old lecturers, a self confessed empiricist, took the view of ideology as view-point. This, though, I'd suggest, raises it to the point of banal redundnancy, and robs the examination of ideology of political force.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).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.
Actually, I don't think I can completely abandon discussion of ideology: since ideology and science (or science reformulated as pragmatism, realism, reason, logic, etc.) are often posited as antonyms. Tony Blair made a career out of contrasting realism to ideology (and thus, ideologically, distorting the meaning of ideology, hence one reason we can't use the common sense definition). I'll leave it there for now.
Young Master Smeet Post #19 wrote:(OED definitions of science)So, there are more OED definitions, but the broad thrust is of reliable systematic knowledge, which we could roughly formulate as knowledge derived for and with an Other (in) mind: that does not exist just for me but for an Other. That differs from language, the shaping of my thoughts into a form I can transmit them to an Other in as much as the idea was created with the other in mind. The language games of science are highly structured with definite registers.Back when I was first trying to grapp[le with some basic terms. I'll leave ideology alone for now, but we will have to come back to it, because the common sense value doesn't hold. Indeed, as has been argued elsewhere before, ideology is common sense…
Well, there is plenty of point in doing so, because that definition you give is merely a synopnym for creed, so why not use creed?The OED list four meaningas, two obsolete or rare so:
OED wrote:1. a. (a) The study of ideas; that branch of philosophy or psychology which deals with the origin and nature of ideas. (b) spec. The system introduced by the French philosopher Étienne Condillac (1715–80), according to which all ideas are derived from sensations.4. A systematic scheme of ideas, usually relating to politics, economics, or society and forming the basis of action or policy; a set of beliefs governing conduct. Also: the forming or holding of such a scheme of ideas.But the term also has specific meanings used in marxist terminology, which may require furtehr explication above and beyond the everyday uses.
There's no reason why any socialist should know all about ideology. To be a socialist is to want a system of society based on common ownership and democratic control.I have read hundreds of pages on the question of ideology, and it isn't as clear cut as you seem to suggest.1) A near synonym for creed. ;2)A weltungshaung
) False consciousness. ;4) Unconscious assumptions. ;5) The study of the origin of ideas. ;6) A mind set, or consciousness itself. ;7) Consciously political ;that's seven very different meanings it can hold, from a rough call off the top of my head — compare with the closeness of the varierty of meanings for science, and it's clear that the term ideology is subject to some heavy ideological dispute.And here's why we need to understand Piketty:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-28459473
BBC wrote:A wealth tax on people with assets of more than £3m should be imposed, the Green Party says.Setting the tax at 1% to 2% would raise between £21.5bn and £43bn annually from the wealthiest 1% people in the UK, the party, which has one MP, says.Expect Piketty's name to be used in support. Mind, a wealth tax was what Adam Smith advocated, so it's not the most radical thing under the sun. Still, an interesting shift.
LBird,but I have being trying to discuss communism and science. What have you got to say on the matter? What propositions are you putting forward?
