On Mon, 31 Dec 2001 14:44:52 -0500 Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> writes:
>
> I would add, that some of the Analytic Marxists have attempted
> to deal with this issue on Popper's own terms. Dan Little in his
> book *The Scientific Marx* argued that historical materialism
> was best thought of not as an articulated scientific theory
> as such but more as a research program in Lakatos'
> sense. And I believe that William Shaw in his *Marx's
> Theory of History* took a somewhat similar view.
>
> Jim F.
>
>
Another book people may wish to look at on this issue is the unjustly neglected book *Analyzing Marx* by Richard W. Miller. In that book he draws a distinction between the technological interpretation of historical materialism which was articulated and defended by many writers of the Second International (i.e. Kautsky, Plekhanov) and which cast into an especially rigorous form by G.A. Cohen in his *Karl Marx's Theory of History*, and what he calls the mode of production interpretation which abjures the technological determinism and the economic determinism of the latter.
Millers draws a link between these two different interpretations of historical materialism and different philosophies of science. The technological interpretation, Miller links to positivist philosophies of science with their covering law models of scientific explanation and their presuppostion of Humean notions concerning causality. Here, Miller does not draw a very sharp distinction between positivism and Popperism. While Popper clearly did not see himself as being a positivist, he nevertheless, still had many notions in common with them. In Miller's view Popper's hypothetico-deductivism placed him within the positivist camp. In any case, Miller contends that the technological interpretation of historical materialism does represent the sort of theory that can be regarded as falsifiable from a strictly Popperian standpoint. Hence, it is scientific by Popper's criteria. The only thing that is wring with it is that history has indeed (as Popper had contended) falsified it, and the other thing that is wrong with it, is that in Miller's view it represents a distorted interpretation of how Marx undertook the study of history and political economy. The mode of production interpretation in Miller's view offers us a view that is closer to the spirit of Marx's actual methodology. But it is not falsifiable in the strict Popperian sense. One might then think that Miller would propose to throw away falsifiability as a criterion of demarcation between science and non-science but surprisingly enough he does not. Instead, he attempts to reconstruct the notion of falsifiability, drawing upon the work of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. He embraces their historicist approach to the philosophy of science and he develops a reconstructed version of the notion of falsifiability. The mode of production interpretation of historical materialism while perhaps not falsifiable in Popper's sense, is nevertheless falsifaible in Miller's sense and that justifies retaining the label of science for it. Miller also BTW contends that the postivist (and Popperian) analysis of natural science is fundamentally flawed so that while the positivists were quite correct in seeking a unified science which would assimilate the social sciences into the natural sciences , they misunderstood the nature of natural science. For Miller, the antipositivists were correct in attacking positvism for trying to force social science into a narrow mold centering around the covering law model and deductive-nomological models of explanation and Humean causality, but the same flaws also applied to their analysis of natural science. In reality such an analysis, in Miller's view is not properly applicable to either natural science or social science.
Jim Farmelant ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/.