Re: [Marxism] RE: Science and Society [was: Challenge...]

[brownh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Haines Brown)]

> Maybe.  After all, I'm just an ol' country boy that wants to
> nationalize the corn belt, but it seems to me that if you argue
> "back from a known outcome to reveal truths about an initial state,"
> you're starting with "observations and data."

It wasn't the "observation and data" part of the following paragraph
that I meant, but the "generalized", "tests", and "experiments" part.

> > Science starts with observations and data, attempts a generalized
> > hypothesis, then tests that hypothesis with experiments that
> > addresses the problem of variables or its offers mathematical or
> > other proofs.  There is a social and cultural context to science,
> > but the scientific method is supposed to--and largely does--cut
> > across those distinctions.

Part of bourgeois ideology from the start was the assumption that the
truth of something was inherent in it. Its truth was intrinsic,
autonomous, independent. Complexities are atomic, and to discover
truth you reduce complexity to its simple elements. The Enlightenment
was inherented in the human nature of this atom, and saw the
autonomous individual as an optimal decision-maker, where choices
called "rational" were those which led to the increase of one's own
"talents". The bourgeois revolution was fought against monarchy and
church, which were pernicious because involuntary imposed constraints
on one's free choices. The bourgeois revolution brought with it an
atomistic and contractual view of society.

Hence to know about something you must reduce its complexity to basic
simple parts and excluse outside forces. Toward the latter part of the
19th century, a scientific method was formalized to discover this
essential truth of something, which was to isolate it so that its
essential nature would not be obscucured by outside influences. This
we call the laboratory model. If truths are univeral (an assumption
deriving from the Renaissance that was fundamental to scientific
advance), they can be discovered in any particular thing we happen to
study once these outside contaminations are removed.

Therefore, the general laws that are discovered in the laboratory are,
in part an artifact of its closure. It's not that these general laws
are not true to some extent, that it is only a one-sided truth, a
partial truth. When this partial truth is taken to be the whole truth,
it becomes ideological. In fact, these truths are not a description of
most of the real world, which consists a largely of unique and
emergent complexities. Covering-law explanation (showing that the
particular is an instance of the universal), which is extended even to
history (Carl Hempel), is not really an explanation at all, but simply
a fact that if something is isolated it behaves in a particular way.

There's another side to the issue you raise. Scientists don't really
"start" with data and observation. That's an old myth, too, but I
don't know how seriously you meant it. They generally start with
axioms and with hypotheses. The exception is when you disover a truth
by accident (such as happened with x-rays), but accidental discovery
is hardly a scientific method.

Haines Brown

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