I am not sure that you will succeed in persuading Justin concerning the merits of Marx's LTV but an interesting move, nonetheless, since Carl Hempel was one of Justin's teachers at Princeton. It is also noteworthy that G.A. Cohen in his _Karl Marx's Theory of History_ drew heavily upon Hempel's exposition of covering law models of scientific explanations in developing his own analysis of historical materialism. Cohen, BTW, like most AMs that I know of is a skeptic concerning the LTV.
I also wonder how well a defense of Marx's theory of value will go over with supporters of the theory since it seems to me that many of the strongest defenders of the theory tend also to be quite hostile to the type of logical empiricism that Hempel adhered to.
Jim Farmelant
On Tue, 8 Dec 1998 23:23:26 -0500 (EST) bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
(Rakesh Bhandari) writes:
>Justin wrote me a private note expressing his rejection of Marx's
>value
>theory. I try to appeal to him as a philosopher of science.
>
>Justin, I am surprised you reject Marx's value theory. Tell me if any
>Marxist philosopher of science has made the point below.
>
> First take Hempel's distinction between empirical generalization and
>theory formation. Now in the case of political economy, in the first
>stage
>we would collect data as it appears--the periodicity of the business
>cycle,
>the relation between the peak of the real wage and the onset of a
>downturn,
>evidence of concentration and centralization and their relation to
>growing
>minimum investments.
>
>All this was know before Marx began; indeed it can be traced to
>William
>Playfair, in 1805 or so, according to Grossmann. What Marx did was
>move to
>the level of theory formation--that is he aimed at comprehensive laws,
>in
>terms of hypothetic entities--value, surplus value, rate of surplus
>value,
>organic composition of capital--that account for the uniformities
>established on the first level.
>
>Hempel argues that generalisations expressing regular connections
>among
>directly observable phenomena are of the first order. Exs include even
>precise quantitative laws such as Galileo's or Kepler's or Hooke's.
>
>But on the second level, we encounter in the most famous scientific
>theories general statements that refer to electric, magentic, and
>gravitational fields, to molecules, atoms, and and a variety of
>subatomic
>principles; or to ego, id, superego, libido, sublimation, fixation,
>and
>transference, or to varous not direclty observable entities invoked in
>recent learning theory.
>
>Thus any empirical science has a vocabulary in two
>registers--observational
>terms and theoretical terms.
>
>It suggests anti theoreticism on your part therefore that you want to
>rule
>out of court VALUE THEORETIC terms. It is by them that Max developed
>an
>actual scientific theory to explain the empirical generalisations (the
>crisis cycle, concentration and centralisation, the appropriation of
>the
>middle classes, etc) which had been noted long before him.
>
>This is the point Grossmann wants to make in his Playfair essay.
>Hempel's
>analysis helps us to do that. At any rate, by rejecting value
>theoretical
>terms, you are denying Marxism its status as a scientific theory at
>Hempel's second level.
>
>Yours, Rakesh
>
>
>
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