A friend of mine studied Popper in his philosophy degree and, fed up at not understanding him, got his number from international enquiries and rung him up to ask about it. (It was a while ago, he died, I think, a few years ago)
'Do they still read my book in England' said the little reedy voice on the other end, incredulous.
Anyway, sad to say, Popper is not to be taken too seriously. His arguments are pretty standard cold war fare designed to give an a priori rejection of the Marxism that Popper held in his youth (see the autobio Unending Quest).
The 'is it falsifiable?' test is pretty trivial, but as it happens, Marx's own theory, as he intended it, meets the test. He never held that he necessarily had *the* answer, nor that his investigations could not be improved upon or overthrown. Most definitely he did not think that he had the answer for all time, since his account of historical laws sees them as changing over time, so resisting all final description.
The 'is it falsifiable' test is weak because it takes the special claim of scientific objectivity and reduces it to one of formal logic. At best it only works as a secondary expression of scientific rationality. The underlying implication is that scientific reasoning draws its truth not from its own character, but from the object it describes. The reason that something is falsifiable is because its truth content is outside of itself.
As to Gordon's persistence with the over-philosophical interpretation of Heisenberg, you have to say with Einstein that H. had merely hit upon some barriers in the present, not absolute ones. The history of science is littered with such apparently insurmountable barriers. Comte thought that you could never measure the chemical content of the sun, but that was because spectography had not yet been developed.
In message <20011231182344.31083.qmail at web20004.mail.yahoo.com>, Cian
O'Connor <cian_oconnor at yahoo.co.uk> writes
> --- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote: >
>Cian says:
>>
>> >Because the statements of Marx could not be
>> >falsifiable, Marxism is not scientific.
>>
>> You have yet to prove your hypothesis that "the
>> statements of Marx
>> couldn't be falsifiable."
>
>I suggest that you read "The Poverty of Historicism".
>I am not Popper, and it's been a few years since I've
>read him, so my paraphrasing of his theories would be
>hopelessly inadequate. I don't have my copy to hand,
>or I'd quote from it.
>
>> BTW, is Popper's theory falsifiable?
>
>Popper's theory doesn't claim to be scientific. Being
>scientific is not a mark of legitimacy. However
>unscientific theories cannot take advantage of the
>scientific toolset of predictive induction etc.
>
>It's worth bearing in mind that in Marx's day, being
>scientific was a used as a mark of academic
>respectability and modernity. More a buzz word, than a
>description of philosophical rigour.
>
>__________________________________________________
>Do You Yahoo!?
>Everything you'll ever need on one web page
>from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts
>http://uk.my.yahoo.com
-- James Heartfield Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age is available at GBP19.99, plus GBP3.26 p&p from Publications, audacity.org, 8 College Close, Hackney, London, E9 6ER. Make cheques payable to 'Audacity Ltd'. www.audacity.org