Re: RE: Re: RE: Premises, Circularities etc was Re: His torical Materialism

["Justin Schwartz" <jkschw@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> no, the definition of major concepts such as a "point" and a "line" are
> quite circular.

No, they're primitives, which is different. It doesn't tell you anything you
don't already to know to say that a line is infinite extension in two
dimesnions without breadth, but it's not defined in terms of something that
is defined in terms of a line, which is what circularity means.

If you drop circularities from geometry, you also drop
> circles and other geometric forms.

Huh?

> >Moreover, the fact that you can rewrite equations like F=ma with
> different
> variables on the left side of the equality does not make physics circular.<
>
> I didn't say that "physics was circular." Rather, I said that physics
> "involve[s] circularity." That's the difference between the proposition
> that
> P = C and that P includes C as a sub-set.

It also doesn't mean that physics involves viscious circularity.

> > In fact, the variables are implicitly defined in the context of the
> entire
> system of equation in which they appear.<
>
> that's exactly what I said. Obviously, you have a different definition of
> "circularity" than I do?

No it's not _exactly_ what you said, although if it's what you meant, we're
on the same page. What you _said_ was that physics involves circularity
because you could rewrite F=ma by rearranging the variables.

>

I'm not a Popperian popover either, but
> I think it's a useful thing for social scientists to try to make
> falsifiable
> predictions. In other words, it's good to take intellectual risks.

It's not intellectual risks, it's scientific research.

It's also
> good to know when one's system is such that different parts are implicitly
> defined in the context of the entire theoretical system, so that one knows
> the limits of one's thinking.

All theoretical systems are work that way, so what does that tell you about
the limits of one's thinking?

>
A >hypothesis ain't worth much if you treat it as true come
> what may, amking it absolutely immune to testing. If all of social science
> is like that, then it is worthless.<
>
> All social science that I know of involves _ceteris paribus_ clauses and
> the
> like,

Not the same thing as holding the theory true come what may.

> which doesn't make the theory worthless (in my eyes), but does make it
> non-falsifiable. (The reason why _my_ theory didn't work was because all
> else wasn't equal!)

No, not unless you stick with a really flat-headed version of
falsifiability. Moreover, if youa lways say that, you have given up
scientific inquiry.

> BTW, the Popperian falsification criterion is itself immune to
> falsification.

No duh. It isn't a scientific hypothesis. It isn't a criterion of
meaningfulness. It's (as Popper presented it) a demarcation criterion for
sorting science fom nonscience. As normally used, it's a heuristicfor
scientific research.

> >I do rather suspect that some of the  defenses of value theory one
> display
> lately have smacked of this vice, though.<
>
> which ones?

You're a smart guy, you figure it out. Not Rakesh's though. jks

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