Historical Materialism

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Historical Materialism
by Ian Murray
05 February 2002 00:57 UTC





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Ok, but given the Quine-Duhem underdetermination problem-link
below-is not the burden of proof for the indispensability of Marx's
value theory on those who wish to retain it? Steve Fleetwood has an
essay on this in a recent issue of Capital & Class.

Ian

^^^^^^^^

CB: Before you get to that, isn't the burden on you to demonstrate
that the theory alternative to Marx's explains what Marx's theory
does ?  Justin and the AM's haven't quite proven that to everybody
yet.

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If Marx's value theory is axiomatic and purely analytic how can it
explain? If the quantitative aspects of the theory are not capable
of generating consistent derivations -whether inductive, abductive
or deductive- from the abstractions that are the 'hard core',
what's being explained?  I'm not convinced that explanation=proof
in non-quantitative social theory and it seems that too many have
argued that explanation must = proof for their opponents yet don't
apply this to their own formulations, so round and round we go,
like theists and atheists. What we see from AM's are investigation
of hypotheses that are in KM's corpus and thinking through the
consequences. If those hypotheses don't hold up let them go; if
they do, retain them. It's a matter of discussion as to whether the
hypotheses that are discarded even need to be replaced.

There's still a big Mirowskian-Klamerian project of investigating
all the metaphors, similes etc., in the 'hard core' [metaphor
alert] of Marx's work, no?

Ian

^^^^^^^

Haven't you shifted to a different issue ? You started saying that under  Quine-Duhem underdetermination problem, the burden was on the proponents of the Marxist theory to demonstrate the indispensiblity of their theory. But doesn't Quine-Duham underdetermination deal with a situation in which both theories are "valid" and the evidence doesn't help in choosing between them ? If you are saying that Marx's value theory doesn't correspond to evidence or can't be tested, that is not a Quine-Duhem underdetermination problem , is it ?



Charles