This also has implications for our understanding of Marxism. In G.A. Cohen's *Karl Marx's Theory of History,* Cohen pointed out that evolutionary biology (in both its Lamarckian and Darwinian forms) can provide with models for understanding how historical materialist explanations ought to be analyzed. Alan Carling has gone further and argued that historical materialism can be explicitly interpreted in selectionist terms analogous to Darwinism. In other words that the principles of variation and selection are applicable to historical materialism. For Carling class struggle plays in Marxism the same role that mutations do in Darwinism. And that that the rise and fall of modes of production comes as a result of social selection.
As Rakesh points out in Peirce's analysis of Darwinism the theory is denuded of much of its predictive power from which which we are led to draw a distinction between prediction and explanation which lies at the core of contemporary realist philosophies of science. Richard W. Miller, one of the early Analytic Marxists, likewise drew such a distinction and in his book *Analyzing Marx* he argued that such a distinction is crucial in understanding historical materialism as a scientific theory. If Carling's selectionist interpretation of historical materialism is valid then Rakesh's points concerning the necessity of the prediction/explanation distinction in Darwinian biology would lend support to Miller's thesis. In any case it should be apparent that whether we look at Darwinism, or radical behaviorism or historical materialism we find a dialectic between chance and necessity.
Jim Farmelant
On Wed, 19 Aug 1998 01:05:07 -0400 (EDT) Rakesh Bhandari
<bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU> writes:
>A message to both marxism theory and lbo-talk.
>
>Vaik interestingly refers to how Darwin used the Malthusian principle
>of
>competitive exclusion to cast his theory in axiomatic form. David
>Depew and Bruce Weber put it thusly: "Darwin's task as the sturcutre
>of the Origin of Species shows, was to refute the standing
>presumption, associated iwth Paley, that no natural law could account
>for the functional organic traits. By envisioning the environment as
>a a closed Malthusian, space, defiend by intense competition, Darwin
>provoked the presures and forces that could cause this effect, with
>no need to invoke any extrasystematic causes, least of all a divine
>one. In this Darwin's theory wasunderstood as delivering up the
>biological world to the same Newtonian framework that had already
>captured up the physical and chemical worlds."
>
>But there is also the most interesting question, raised by Charles
>Peirce
>and many others afterward, about to what extent Darwin's logic of
>scientific explanation breaks with mechanism and introduces
>probabilistic
>reasoning at the core. Moreover, In breaking from the framework of
>natural theology--a break most brilliantly discussed by Dov Ospovat--
>Darwin accomodated the occurence of chance variations, unpredictable
>phenomena, uncertain in outcome, and tending to no predetermined
>goal,
>divesting his theory of evolution of strict predictive power. We find
>here
>the distinction between explanation and prediction at the core of
>modern
>realist philosophies of science--I am thinking of Peter Manicas'
>discussion in his book on the philosophy of the social sciences.
> Yours, Rakesh
>
>
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