Re: any result, lacanians - marxistphilosophy

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

"In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor
chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both.
"  -- Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Preface

I have to leave soon for an anti-war protest, so this time I'll brief,
though I have more to say.  For me, the ontological differences among the
objects of study (i.e. of the various natural and social sciences) come
first, as they determine the methods most appropriate to them.  While the
spirit of scientific theorizing (scientific idealization, not merely
empirical generalization) is the same in all cases, the appropriate methods
vary according to the objects of study, as well as the nature of any
lawlike properties discovered.  The shallow scientism of the empiricist
sociology I had to suffer some decades back is based on statistical number
crunching and trivial hypothesis testing, but obscures the fundamental
characteristics of social structure that need to be studied.  The unity of
science does not consist in an obsession with quantification to the
exclusion of other considerations, nor in ignoring the qualitative
differences among the objects of study.  The world picture is unified with
the recognition of internal differentiation and stratification.  This is
hardly a new thought; anyone studying Marxism should know it, which
suggests how little people interested in critical theory nowadays care
about Marxism.  This view can be found in a number of places, not just in
dialectical materialism.  There is Roy Wood Sellars' critical realism, for
example (see PHILOSOPHY FOR THE FUTURE, 1949), not to mention Roy Bhaskar's
critical realism (whose followers act is if his ideas are brand new,
whereas what's new primarily are his neologisms.)

At 07:18 PM 4/11/2003 +0300, j laari wrote:
>Ralph, tell me what was the note at the end of your post where you
>wrote about the ontological difference of natural and social sciences?
>See, sciences can also be demarcated according to the characteristics
>of their methods. In other words, and according to Heinrich Rickert:
>there are two irreducible viewpoints on differences between sciences,
>'materially' we make a distinction between the objects of sciences,
>'formally' the distinction is between the methods. One can utilize
>'natural scientific' method also in cultural sciences (as Rickert them
>calls), but 'historical method' is of lesser use in natural sciences,
>though Rickert himself believed it has some relevance also for nat'l
>sci's. I don't go into details. See the nearest English translation of
>his "Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft" (1921).
>
>Sincerely, Jukka L