Re: Rorty on socialism (fwd)

["Harry Veeder" <veed0001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----------
>From: xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>To: POST-KEYNESIAN THOUGHT <pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: Re: Rorty on socialism (fwd)
>Date: Sun, Feb 13, 2000, 10:51 pm
>

>
>Harry, you are raising an important issue here. On my part, I was
>describing what Rorty thought the central question of scientific inquiry
>was without necessarily agreeing with his definition. The big mistake
>Rorty does, which other post-modernists or anti-foundantionalists also do,
>is to reduce enlightenment thinking and various systems of knowledge
>hitherto existing (from Aristo to Marx), to "static" idealizations and
>foundations. Other post-modernists go further by drawing similarities
>between scientific reasoning and religious reasoning, implying that
>the scientific knowledge is a return to myth or a subjective construction,
>just as a religion is. In my view, they are entirely mistaken in this
>analogy because they are mystfying and dogmatizing science here. Although,
>science and religion have their own universal truths, their structure of
>reasoning is different. The presupposition of the enligtenment thought is
>that the world is knowable, intelligible, and comprehensible, whereas
>religion's is that the world is unknowable, mysterious, and beyond
>human capacity to reason. In religion, God represents the truth
>as "given", NOT human reason and rationality. It is thus teleological and
>mystfying (Remember Marx's criticism of Hegel's metaphysics). On the
>contrary, in science, (especially in social sciences), our assumptions are
>not, and can not be, static and given. Scientific reasoning is a dynamic
>process of questioning, debating and reconstructing, given the reality
>available to us. It is, henceforth, a self-reflective and dialectical
>process of knowledge formation. Any knowledge that does not open itself to
>critical reasoning can not be a scientific knowledge; it is an embodiment
>of the Church.
>
>As critical theorist Jurgen Habermas rightly indicates in his challenge of
>the post-modernists that the merit of the social scientist lies in her
>ability to "take an hypothetical attitude towards her own validity claims"
>and being able to critique given assumptions (let's say the capitalist
>division of labor is natural, eternal and transhistorical). Of course, not
>every scientist is willing to accept this "hypothetical" questioning. So,
>they automatically revert to pseudo-science or false conciousness
>regardless of how scientific they think they are. A few brains, like Marx,
>had done it. Keynes tried too with all due respect (however bourgeois he
>was). Therefore, the problem with pomos is they are "unwilling"
>to differentiate the good from the bad, science from dogma, and sound
>theories from ideological ones... they are, in this respect, the young
>hegelians of the new age, dissolving the reality into abstract,
>abstracting the reality from the concrete..
>
>

My closing comments on this thread.

I am not trying to mystify anyone (or myself) by mentioning God
in context of economic theory. My aim is to make economic theory
less complicated but more complex.
>

>From another post:

>Harry, I tought it again. I am not saying that science is always prior to
>the world, or we, as rational individuals, are always prior to the
>external (non-human) environment. from a historico-logical point of view,
>there is no such a dichotomy, because each partially constitutes the
>other. so, we can not seperate acting and thinking; knowing and
>being from each other. I act therefore i know, not that i know out of
>eternity..as human beings, we are as one of biological species among
>others. BUT, it is "necessary" rather than "accidental" that
>humans have a certain kind of purposeful inclination to make the world
>knowable and discoverable, in order to maintain our species. for
>example, the first historical act is tool making, and later speech.. This
>is what Marx calls "praxis", and, only unique to human beings, not to
>animals.
>....
>
>Mine A.D

Nothing is really necessary. Necessities are born from
the assumption of responsibilities.

Harry Veeder