Ideology vs. Science vs. Sciencism vs. Superman vs. ...

[Charles Brown]

Also, the trouble with this is that lack of holism (dialectics) at the "molecular scale" tends to result in scientists merrily making nuclear and other monstrous weapons for the bourgeoisie because the scientists's have tunnel vision and don't consider the social and political consequences of their molecular discoveries. They discover things-in-themselves and not things-for-us; and the things-in-themselves get used as things-against-us.

I agree with Jim F. and Yoshie et al. on this thread regarding ideology/science because the historical connotation of "ideology" in Marxism is as they are using it. But there is another and different connotation of "ideology" in the above sense in which there shouldn't be any "pure" scientific work that isn't done from a perspective of the interests of the working class and the whole human race ( The words of the "Internationale" are that the working class shall be the human race).  Rather than refer to this as "ideology", I might say it is an expression of the necessary unity of theory and practice, including in natural sciences.

In his chapter "Ideology" in _Marxism and Literature_ Raymond Williams discusses the several meanings of "ideology" in its history. Its original meaning was actually as a branch of zoology, but that has changed, and as Jim and Yoshie argue , it is contrasted with science. 

At another level of comment on the below, Maurice Cornforth, in _In Defense of Philosophy_ says that Hegel's dialectics are a philosophical expression of the developments in chemistry.  So, it is not clear that dialectics is not the appropriate method at the molecular level. At no level is the part prior to the whole, or the whole merely the sum of its parts i.e.reductionism. Well , I guess Boyle ( or Charles ?) was able to reduce certain principles of thermodynamics to mechanics by introducing certain assumptions.

CB


>>> Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> 11/03/99 08:08PM >>>

Lisa & Ian Murray wrote:


> Which makes an excellent case for an irreducible methodological pluralism.
> The dialectical approach works best at the organism/environment interface;
> reductionism works best at the molecular scale and anarchic pluralism works
> on the ecosystem scale.

I think we have either a non-sequitur or a triviality here. Using one
method to saw firewood, another to cut bread, and a third to
paint doors does not create a methodological pluralism. Different
tasks, different methods.

The quarrel over reductionism is often a quarrel over what is the
*appropriate* reduction for a given purpose or object of study.

Is the opening sentence of *Capital* a reduction?

Carrol