Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> >
> >[LARGE CLIP]
>
> I don't think that's up to the philosophers. We can make whatever criteria
> for science we like, but who wil listen to us if it fails to comport with
> the actual practice of scientists? Who listens to us anyway? Actually, from
> my days as a political scientists, I cam say that unfortunately some peoplw
> in the social sciences do, mainly by way of repeating positicist platitudes.
> But the good ones forget these when they get down to work.
I have never been very sympathetic to those who run on about "bourgeois science," but the _word_ "science" seems to be an ideological battlefield (using "ideological" in a pejorative sense here). Clearly at least some participants in this debate ("this debate" not being confined to lbo) are simply looking for a respectable way of enunciating the banal old cliche about marxism as a religion.
Several years ago there was an interesting discussion on PEN-L as to what the German word for "science" meant in cultivated German of the second half of the 19th century -- that is the meaning which would be relevant in examining the claims of Marx and Engels to be practicing science. I don't remember what conclusion if any the PEN-L thread came to.
>
> >And what of Historical Materialism which by this insufficient definition
> >you exclude - we now just run in a circle of prejudice on this basis - one
> >side saying it is a science for wahetever reasons, and another saying the
> >opposite.
> >
>
> Are you saying that nothing can count as science if anyone disagrees that it
> is? Then historixal materialsim will never count as science. It's inherently
> disputable. But even "harder" sciences face skeptics.
Science is the systematic study of actuality. The test for good science is probably the same as the test of good art: the test of time (which is just another way of saying good science is determined by protracted political struggle).
Carrol
>
> jks
>
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