>>> "rc-am" <rcollins at netlink.com.au> 11/30/99 08:39PM >>>
> Charles: "Most" ? The accumulation of knowledge may be zig zag and not in
a straightline (i.e. dialectical) but postmodern conceptions of
epistemology aren't the majority yet, are they ?<
what 'postmodern'? kuhn is not a postmodernist, right? it's not a zig-zag nor an accumulation, but a series of more or less dramatic ruptures in basic conceptions and assumptions -- in kuhn's phrase, paradigm shifts. unlike kuhn, we would look at the relationship between these paradigm shifts and the mode of production, the character and compositional effects of class struggles, etc.
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Charles: Biology still seems to be building on the paradigm of the cell. DNA is an accumulation built on the notion of a cell. We still understand the solar system as the planets going round the sun.
Anyway, the ruptures are more or less quantitative change ( accumulation) turning into qualitative change. So, even the ruptures are or related to an accumulation of knowledge. Also, accumulation of knowledge may be an accumulation of errors. Then some developments in science seem more evolutionary than revolutionary. There is both continuity and discontinuity in the body of scientific knowledge.
> Charles: Isn't this just a rehearsal of the debate between Marxist theory
of knowledge and postmodernist critiques of it ?<
quite the contrary. it was a rehearsal of a debate between theories of knowledge in which marx can more than easily be invoked on both sides of the dispute; and i would insist that any substantial account of marx's writings, taking into account esp the later works, does not grant such an easy depiction of marx on the side you're arguing. so, for instance: marx does not claim that his theories are applicable in any transhistorical way; rather they are a critique of capitalism -- an historically-specific critique of an historically-specific formation.
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Charles: Seems to me that the claim that history is a history of class struggles is an application of Marx's theories in a transhistorical way. The theory of class struggle is not confined to one historical mode of production.
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hence, the debate over whether or not marx has a physiological conceptions of labour (a debate which we had here some months ago as i recall) -- and a debate which should perhaps be recalled in the context of a debate on physiological sexual difference.
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Charles: Yes, Marx discusses "labor" as a category applicable transhistorically. He discusses human labor in general in contrast with the labor of the bee or spider.
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but more specifically, this is why i wrote "is it really necessary that we convince ourselves (or others) that our politics is something other than conjunctural?" that is to say, the claim that one's politics is a science is (esp in the absence of any rigorous account of procedures, themselves open to dispute) a rhetorical claim which seeks to place one's politics on the apparently virtuous side of the enlightenment distinction between science and ideology/theology.
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Charles: I don't have a quote at hand , but Marx doesn't seem to shy away from saying his politics are based on science. Surely, he considers historical materialism the science of history, and his politics are based on that science of history. Engels definitely says this. Marx placed history on a scientific basis.
Again, this seems like the oft rehearsed postmodern critique of Marxism as part of modernism, enlightenment thinking and all that.
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as katha has already remarked, there's no reason to take the side of theology; but i would add, there's just are just as many reasons not to take the side of science, that is to say, no reason to adopt that distinction in an uncritical way as if it's a distinction made outside a specific historical context. whether we use the terms "modernity," "instrumental reason," "Western metaphysics," etc to signify this historical-specificity is open to debate (me, i prefer to be a little clearer about the relationship between forms of knowledge and class struggles than these afford by themselves); but they have the merit of at least acknowledging that forms of knowledge -- in particular the rendition of the science v ideology demarcation -- is an historically-specific one.
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Charles: This historical-specificity project seems like a Marxist project, but then applied to Marxism, i.e. taken too far, to absurdity. Marxism considers that it already has taken account sufficiently of this aspect. It doesn't fall afoul of its own critique. It has the correct relationship between historical specificity and generality.
Of course, people can say otherwise, but those who have have not been able to sustain their claim, in my opinon.
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in any case, the things that you cited to define what science (or marxism as a science) is would not be accepted by most scientists (or at least last time i looked) nor many marxists, myself included. i'd particularly take exception to the claim about a dialectic between absolute and relative truth _unless_ this dialectical bundle was grounded as an historically-specific one, ie., an immanent one. i'd grant it, for instance, as the speculative (and often critical) side of bourgeois concepts (such as rights, humanity, freedom, and so on) but not as some kind of infinite, transhistorical knowledge which is articulable by infinite minds.
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Charles: I believe a historical element enters in very much in the notion of "relativity". But in relation to the "absolute" there is a sense in which knowledge accumulates. There is a relative truth to bourgeois knowledge. Lenin discusses specifically that the problem of the dialectic of relative and absolute truth arises out of the contradiction that the universe is infinite but our minds are finite.
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(apologies if that was garbled, i'm a little distracted by the WTO stuff)
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CB: Doesn't seem garbled to me. Yes, that WTO stuff is the front line today.
CB