Marxism's claim to scientific status ought not to be so dogmatic as a demand that it must be accepted. After all, scientific thought is characterised by its provisional nature, religious thought by its absolute nature.
When Marx himself talked of approaching the problem scientifically, he meant something like, thinking deeply about the matter in hand, i.e. not accepting the immediate appearance of things. As he says, lacking microscopes and such, one has to use the power of abstraction to capture the underlying structure of society. In context, he often means something like 'objective' when he says scientific.
In Marx's college days the label 'scientific' did not refer just to natural science, but to any profound conceptual thought, as in the title of Hegel's work, the Science of Logic. The distinction, familiar to post-Enlightenment thinkers, is the distinction between natural thought, or opinion on the one hand, and higher thought, or science on the other.
It was a view of the time that immediate impressions were superficial, and that the real character of things was to be found 'beneath the surface'. So most Enlightenment thinkers would have understood that first impressions can be deceptive. Error is a necessary compliment to the human senses that can be overcome by the use of reason, or scientifically.
Marx adds an additional twist to this rational account of error (which can be traced back to Plato and the story of the cave) by arguing that one-sided arguments are often allied to partisan positions. Error then becomes more than the distance between natural and higher thought, but also between reactionary classes and those who, by their lack of any special interest in the present, have the capacity to see beyond its immediate claims.
In message <3C2F9EC1.FA313858 at ilstu.edu>, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
writes
>
>
>ravi wrote:
>>
>> you can bring an idea, any idea
>> arrived at by any means to the table. it will be called science if
>> your context of justification is "scientific".
>
>This would seem to have a similar force to Marx's reply to the
>reporter's question, "What is?" "Struggle."
>
>Most of what I have ever heard called "science" reveals, upon
>examination, that it has involved, at some point, a conscious effort to
>change some part or aspect of the world, if only by staining a slide or
>digging up a layer of earth. If you want to know what a pear tastes like
>you must change the world by biting into the pear.
>
>Carrol
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