[PEN-L:11620] Empiricism

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think the Marx's attitude was that materialists must be empiricists, but empiricism is inadequate. That is empiricism is a necessary , but not sufficient condition for a scientific approach. Thus, in the First Thesis on Feuerbach Marx notes that the chief defect of materialisms previous to his ( and one might suspect subsequent to Marx's and Marxism as well) is that of only contemplating things and not conceiving of things in relation to the scientist's action.

"The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism  (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively..."


It is not that contemplation or observation or empiricial data gathering is not a necessary aspect of Marx's materialism or science. It is that empiricism is not sufficient; it is inadequate in itself. One must not only contemplate and gather data, but form hypotheses and theories based on the data and PRACTICE based on these. Contemplating or gathering empirical data, observing passively cannot be a final proof of theories regarding the empirical data. Only actions can prove or disprove the validity of the empirical observations.

This is true of the historical scientific observations about capitalism's origin. Capitalism must be conceived as an object, data concerning it observed, but the data thus gathered must be tested by practice. The empirical observations on the origins of capitalism cannot be the final proof of their own truth. Only by historians becoming activists with respect to capitalism, can they prove or disprove that Europeans initiated it because of such and such an "internal cultural characteristic" or because of such and such a relationship to other cultural areas.  This is especially true because counterfactual historical experiments are impossible. The historical data can only be tested by actions in the present with respect to capitalism today.

Empiricism without activism is a scholastic process. As Marx said in the Second Thesis on Feuerbach, " The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinkng that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

Your professorial dissertations are a necessary phase of the scientific process, but they are inadequate in themselves.  You must unite them with practical-critical activity to be fully scientific and test the reality of your theories and hypotheses. Contra the prevailing academic understanding of science as empirical data gathering and theory only, science is the unity of empirical data gathering, theory and practice.



Charles Brown

>>> Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx> 09/23/99 07:12PM >>>
Mathew Forstater wrote:

> Jim, D. writes:
>
> >Being empirically-oriented is not the same thing as being an empiricist.
>
> I like to think of it this way: Empiricism is not the same thing as taking
> an historical approach.  The former carries the baggage of definite
> ontological and epistemological commitments that the latter does not. mf

? Wouldn't it be better to say that they carry *different* ontological
and epistemological commitments? The assumption that history is
real (which of course I share with Mat) or, better, that history *is*
reality, seems as much an ontological commitment as the empiricist's
assumption that the world is a pile of chaotic data on which the observer
imposes an (arbitrary) order. A historical approach does demand (as
empiricism does not) that one make one's principles as explicit and
conscious as possible.

(Lou, of course, is being insufficiently empirical [as opposed to
empiricist] himself when he confidently proclaims that certain
propositions dealing with matters of fact violate "marxist principle."
That is the sort of thing that happens when one oversimplifies
the complex relationships of theory and fact.

My claim that empiricism is a greater danger (for marxists) than
"post modernism" is of course grounded in certain empirical
conclusions about the influence of various currents of contemporary
thought.

Carrol