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

["Brown, Martin - ARP (NCI)" <mbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Re geometry.  I think Goedel's paradox tends to refute your statement.
Trying to get out of this box, however, has resulted in a tremendous series
of advances in mathematics. I was impressed by this in reading a recent
popular account of the history of mathematics leading up to the solution of
Fermat's last theorem.
Re physics.  I made an analogy in my earlier email.  Here is another F=ma is
subsumed by law of the conservation of energy. Physics problems that can be
solved with F=ma can all be solved much more generally and elegantly with
the Hamiltonian approach to conservation of energy, which is a much more
"macro" description of the problem.  In Marx, is the analogy the macro
conditions for the equivalence of economic aggregates.

-----Original Message-----
From: Justin Schwartz [mailto:jkschw@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2002 10:49 AM
To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: [PEN-L:22518] Re: RE: Premises, Circularities etc was Re:
Historical Materialism



>Ian Murray wrote:
> > As Blaug and others have pointed out, the LTV [sic] has circularities of
> > it's own.
>
>what circularities are those? and why is circularity bad, unless there is
>nothing to the theory but circularities? Physics and geometry, for example,
>both involve circularities (e.g. force is defined by mass times
>acceleration, but mass is defined by force/acceleration and acceleration is
>defined by force/mass).

This is a fundamental confusion. Firstly, you talk only about physics and
not geometry. Geometry proceeds from independent axioms and postulates and
does not involve circularities. 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. In fact, the variables are
implicitly defined in the context of the entire system of equation in which
they appear.

Are you following Blaug to accept Popperian
>falsification, a criterion that makes _all_ social science (or almost all)
>worthless?

In defense of Popper, it does not. I am not a Popperian. And Popper was
(despite the way he is usually taught) an early discoverer of what is called

the Quine-Duhem thesis, that you can hold any proposition true by making
appropriate adjustments elsewhere. The unobjecionable point he had tomake
about falsificationsim is that a hypothesis sin;t worth much if you threat
it as true come what may, amking it absolutely immune to testing. If all of
social science is like that, then it is worthless. But that's not what I
think of as good social science. I do rather suspect that some of the
defenses of value theory one display lately have smacked of this vice,
though.

jks



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