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>CB: Indeed, in so many ways the Engels-Lenin theory of knowledge seems
>pragmatist, and their "metaphysics" realism.
So I've always thought.
>For pragmatists, isn't the test of a theory what "works" ?
It's not real specific to put it that way.
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CB: Sorry, I was just reading an interpreter of Klee's (?) interpretation of Quine in which that slang was used.
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>For Marxists, practice is the test of theory too. Lenin defines materialism
>as belief in objective reality. I'm wondering how Quine's ideas differ from
>those in _Materialism and Empiro-Criticism_.
>
Variously: Lenin isn't expressly committed to epistemological holism, Quine rejected a "mirroring" theory of knowledge and a correspondance theory of truth, although he was a sort of scientific realist and wantws out theories to be true. Quine was also a right winger in his personal politics.
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CB: Thanks. I'll cogitate on that. Is that "wants our theories to be true " ?
I don't think the frequent interpretation of Lenin's theory of reflection as simple mirroring is accurate. I think he was more in the vein with Marx's use of "reflection" in the following:
"My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of "the Idea," he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of "the Idea." With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. " (From the Afterword of the 2nd German edition of _Capital_).
I think of this "reflection" as more complexity than a mirror reflection. It has inversions, like a camera obscura ( the image Engels and Marx use elsewhere) , translations, abstractions , of course, symbolizations even. It would be a big mistake to think that Lenin was not aware of this.
A simple reflection theory would basically be a return to positivism, theory as directly given by sensation.
Sorry to hear about Quine's politics.