On Tue, 5 Oct 1999 18:01:26 +0100 DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com writes:
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>Please respond to lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
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>To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>cc: (bcc: DANIEL DAVIES)
>bcc: DANIEL DAVIES
>Subject: Faith and science
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>> The philosopher Karl Popper embodied that attitude. We can never
>>prove that our theories are true, Popper argued; we can only disprove
>>theories, or falsify them.
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>Which is as good a cue as any for my Reduced Shakespeare Company
>summary of
>"The Open Society and its Enemies":
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>1. Marxism is wholly unscientific because it is unfalsifiable.
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>2. Not only is Marxism unfalsifiable, it has been proved wrong.
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>dd
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In fairness to Popper, his thesis was that Marxism as originally formulated by Marx & Engels was falsifiable. However, Popper contended that after Marx's time as specific Marxist predictions were falsified by subsequent events (Popper claimed that Marx had made predictions like the inevitability of proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries, that the growing concentration of capital would lead to the liquidation of small capital and the disappearance of the petite bourgeoisie, that economic depressions would keep on getting worse until capitalism was overthrown) and that Marxists had responded to these falsifications of Marx's predictions by formulating ad hoc hypotheses which saved Marx's system at the cost of making it unfalsifiable. In this sense Popper contrasted Marxism with psychoanalysis which he contended was unfalsifiable from the get go.
Whether this constitutes a fair assessment of how Marxism has evolved since Marx's time is most questionable. Marxists have certainly made use of ad hoc hypotheses in their theorizing but in this respect they hardly differ from most other scientists. In the natural sciences too, researchers make use of ad hoc hypotheses all the time, otherwise our best established theories would be falsified every time that a freshman student comes up with experimental results that contradict the predictions implied by these theories. Typically in such cases, scientists will invoke such ad hoc hypotheses as "experimental error" or even "experimenter incompetence." Now, Popper was of course cognizant of the fact that scientists use ad hoc hypotheses all the time without necessarily rendering their theories completely immune to refutation, rather it was his contention that when legitimate scientists use ad hoc hypotheses, the resulting network of theories and hypotheses is still susceptible to falsification, whereas Marxists and psychoanalysts use ad hoc hypotheses in such a way as to make the whole structure of hypotheses immune to falsification. However, at least in regards to Marxism (and undoubtedly also to psychoanalysis) this seems questionable.
Although Popper probably didn't convince many Marxists that Marxism was not scientific, it still has had an impact on Marxism. One can read the Analytical Marxists as among other things trying to answer Popper on his own terms. G.A. Cohen's *Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence* attempts to recast the materialist conception of history, using the tools of analytical philosophy, in such as way as to render it clearly falsifiable. (Probably though Cohen was more interested in answering Isaiah Berlin's criticisms of Marxism than Popper's since Cohen became personally close to Berlin while a grad student at Oxford). Jon Elster's writings on Analytic Marxism such as his *Making Sense of Marx* certainly betray a concern with Popper. Elster, indeed accepted Popper's thesis that methodological individualism (as opposed to methodological holism) provides the proper basis for a scientific sociology, and that to the extent that Marx was a methodological individualist then he was scientific (and to the extent that he was not a methodological individualist then he was not scientific).
Concerning Popper's attitudes towards Marx, one can find both positive and negative appraisals of Marx in his writings. In *The Open Society* one can find praise for Marx as a fighter for freedom and an advocate of the "open society." Marx is praised as a founding father of modern social science. Marx's critiques of psychologism are praised by Popper as providing a basis for the independent existence of sociology. On the other hand Marx is condemned for buying into Hegel's "historicism" - which Popper basically conceived of as the misguided and noxious view that history has a pattern and a meaning that if grasped can be used to predict and fashion the future. This conflation of metaphysics and history in what Popper labeled historicism was arguably present in Hegel (and not in all interpretations) but does seem representative of the main thrust of Marx's work. For Marx, history itself has no meaning beyond that which people in their varying stages of development assign to it. At the same though it has to be admitted that there have been versions of Marxism which claiming special insights into the laws of history were used to justify what Popper would denounce as totalitarianism.
Whether Marx can be usefully labeled a historicist would seem to depend on how one evaluates such features of Marx's thought such as its scientific character (which has been partially addressed here), his critique of utopianism, and the status of his predictions. Popper placed great emphasis on the logical impossibility for social science to forecast the future development of societies. Popper's main argument for this thesis was that it is logically impossible for us to predict in any sort of detail, future scientific and technological discoveries, since the making of such predictions at some point becomes the equivalent of the making of the discoveries themselves. Since the development of societies is dependent in some degree on technological development, then it follows according to Popper that the impossibility of our making predictions concerning technological discoveries makes its impossible for us to forecast future societal development as well. However, I don't find much evidence that Marx would have disagreed with the thrust of the argument concerning technology. And Marx was certainly not a reductive technological determinist. Marx in his critiques of utopianism, took utopians to task, precisely on the grounds that it is impossible for us to predict future social development in any great detail, therefore attempts to force social change into a predetermined scheme are likely to come to grief, causing great damage to the workers movement. Popper's contention that Marx was a historicist in his sense seems difficult to sustain.
Jim Farmelant
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