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

[Rod Holt <rholt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think that looking at mathematics as a language is misleading.
Mathematics is firmly derived from people's experience with the real
world and had little to do with other people needing to be communicated
with, no matter how useful such communication turned out to be. To quote
David:

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.

Pythagoreanism was numerology run amok, not the other way 'round.
Numbers were mystified, and still are with magic numbers, magic squares
and so forth. The historical materialist analysis of the rise of
mathematical thinking should be readily available.

The notion of "as many as" (i.e., the one-to-one correspondence) is a
primative notion, and from it "more than" and "fewer than." And so
forth. These notions are occasionally observed in non-human beings.

Studies of the real world which contain quantitative assertions have
mathematical thinking as an intrinist part, whether or not such studies
are termed "hard" or "soft".

--rod

David McDonald wrote:

> 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.
>
>
> ________________________________________________
> YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
> Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism
________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism