-----Original Message----- From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
>That was I believe the original question. I guess I am suggesting that
>the original question was the wrong one. Both marxism _and_ science are
>(as I think the whole cluster of threads showed) contested categories,
>and the question of whether marxism is a science cannot be separated
>from the question of what constitutes a scientific discipline. And I
>think it is possible to argue that the current "narrower sense" of the
>word science is a barrier to both "scientific" (however defined) and
>marxist thought.
>
>I'm not sure where I want to go from here, so I'll stop.
That is the essence of the current mess in philosophy of science. Lacking any generally defensible methodological definition of science, we can't separate the science from the non-science. It's too easy to find useful knowledge that doesn't come from whatever methodological choices you make.
Yet, clearly not everything is equally useful. It's not all science (as Feyerabend suggested). Equating astronomy and astrology is clearly a mistake. Scientists like to claim that the essence of science is to embrace ignorance and uncertainty, but most are unwilling to embrace uncertainty about their own claims to true knowledge, while scientific charlatans are quite content with the existing uncertainty as it disarms their opponents.
There isn't an easy answer to this. The best answer I have is to look at the productive practices of a body of theory and abandon the ideas that are going nowhere, while trying to remain open-minded about the possibility that they might ultimately have some value somewhere. But even this is inadequate - in the end you have to use purely subjective criteria to evaluate new ideas.
Here's an example: there's a guy in France named Laurent Nottale who is doing some really interesting research on the problem of measurement in quantum mechanics and has a truly radical idea about how the problem might be solved without recourse to a lot of the weirdness that's been bandied about for the last 70 years. I really like what I'm seeing in his research. However, he has no experiment that can falsify his ideas, and no productive practice to point to. I'm evaluating his work, provisionally, on the basis of how cool I think it is. I have no defense to offer against someone who wants nothing to do with it.
This makes an assessment of Marxism as a failure or as a success possible. The practices it has engendered have given mixed returns, and there is a lot dishonesty in my opinion in either disregarding it or in accepting it without reservation. Marxist practices have to be held to include a broad swath of social science, as well as social democracy, and in any honest assessment, the USSR. This is a pretty mixed bag.
So, if you're leaving this thread more confused than when you started, that's how it is for most of the people who delve into this problem.
Scott martens