--- James Heartfield <Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk>
wrote: >
> 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).
Most of his theories have been superseeded. His comments on the scientific process were just plain wrong and motivated by ideology. His theory of what science is has problems and isn't rigorous (though the same could be said about Kuhn). There are better theories since, some of which have built on his theories and others which have built on another guy whose name escapes me. However it's still a pretty good rule of thumb for working out pragmatically whether something is scientific, or something else. Is linguistics science? Yes.
His attack on marxism, was within an attack on historicism in general. He also attacked using the same arguments sociology, psychoanalysis and a couple of other things. One could easily extend it to attack the Chicago school today, if one so wanted. It was politically motivated, but I get the impression it was more motivated by the work that marxist scholars were doing in the west, in academia. Various academics were attempting to claim respectability by defining their studies as scientific. I don't think an area of work has to be scientific to be valid, but I think if it isn't scientific then different rules apply to how one deals with it.
Also his (amongst others) criticisms did lead to certain areas of the human sciences developing more rigour, which was probably a good thing.
> 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.
I'm sorry, but how does that meet the falsifiable test? How can one test Marx's theories? Where is the experiment?
> 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.
Sure, that's fine. He sounds a lot more sensible than many of his followers. His work would seem to fit more comfortably into humanist studies like history, much of economics, sociology etc. Essentially he's making educated guesses, based upon his studies of the area. Much like Adam Smith, say.
> 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.
I would agree in a theoretical sense, but in a practical sense I would disagree. It is useful even if one doesn't share his objectivist bias (I don't). It's weak because it's hard to defend rigorously in a theoretical sense.
Pragmaticly it's useful because it recogonises a key difference about science. Science builds theories with a predictive power which are in themselves formally rigorous, built upon testable axioms. A scientific theory is to the world, as a map is to the landscape. A simplification, but a useful one because it has a predictive power. I'm not convinced that you can say any of those things about marxism. Nor do I think it's necessary to attempt to do so. Why does Marxism have to be a science?
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