RE: [Marxism] absolute truth and marxisms: a few points

["David McDonald" <dbmcdonald@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louise:

What about the idea that there is a really-existing distinction, though,
between 'social' sciences and 'natural'
sciences?

David:

I guess the question is whether the "hard" sciences, physics, chemistry,
produce knowledge that is different in principle in some way from, say,
biological sciences. This is another way of asking whether science that is
not numbers is science at all. That, in turn, is a way of saying that
science has only one language, and that language is mathematics. When
phrased that way, it is obvious that the statement is false. There is not a
single equation in The Origin of Species, for instance. Does that make
natural selection less true than the law of gravity? I ask these questions
because in my earlier post I was trying to get at the idea that language is
extremely important when you wade in these waters, so I grilled you on what
you meant by absolute knowledge and how that might differ from everyday
knowledge, I guess in the spirit that the Puritans objected to oaths because
they implied that their ordinary discourse was full of lies and deception.

The best treatment of the question, one that denies a principled difference
in the "trueness" of biological sciences over and against the hard sciences,
is in the early pages of Ernst Mayr's "The Growth of Biological Thought," a
true romp and a great book. It was Mayr's defining species dialectically as
populations, not normatively, as deviations from a theoretical ideal, that
led to the modern synthesis on evolution that emerged in the fifties and
guided evolutionary thinking, research, controversies, etc., for decades.

I think the numbers fetish is just Pythagoreanism run wild. Mathematics is a
language. It is no more or less truly connected to reality, truth, than is
any human  language in principle, in my opinion.


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