On Wed, 03 Dec 2003 10:13:30 -0500 kelley at pulpculture.org writes:
> At 09:38 AM 12/3/03 -0500, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> >This would throw, oh just to pick a random example, most of Marx's
> Capital
> >out the window. So all the phenomenal categories of visible
> capitalism -
> >wages, interest, profit, dividends, rent - are all you need to
> know, and
> >their sources and uses completely transparent to the uneducated
> eye. How
> >can such a smart man make such a deliberately shallow argument?
>
> Whenever I read him on this topic, I'm disappointed. I know that
> there's no
> imperative for a man in his field to understand the complexity of
> the
> arguments about science, theory, and the philosophy of science as
> they
> stand in other fields. yet, I still expect more from him.
>
> I mean, even the positivist Carl Hempel wrote a short concession
> speech (in
> what? the 50s), admitting that yes, indeed, the human sciences were
> sciences and the objections Chomsky raises have been soundly
> refuted. For
> decades.
Well in Hempel's case I don't think that what he wrote is best characterized as a "concession speech" since one of the primary theses that the logical positivists, including Hempel, defended was the thesis of the "unity of science" that is the assertion that the social sciences are, or can be genuine sciences, indeed that they can and ought to be positive or natural sciences. This thesis often took the form of reductionism in which it was held that the concepts and laws of the human sciences should in principle be reducible to the laws of physiology and hence ultimately to the laws of physics and chemistry. Some of the positivists like Neurath formulated the notion of the unity of science as the thesis that the language of physics is the only legitimate and objective language which can completely avoid the problems (eg solipsism) that are generated by a phenomenalistic language. In such a language ethical concepts would be excluded as cognitively meaningless while psychological concepts would likewise be dismissed unless it can be shown that they are reducible to or replaceable by physical concepts.
I don't think that by the 1950s Hempel would have been willing to defend the thesis of the unity of science in any of its stronger forms but I think would have defended a weaker form of it which stressed the methodological unity between the natural and human sciences. Thus, for Hempel if history is a science then it should be possible to formulate laws of history which like the laws of the natural sciences ought to follow what he described as the coverning-law model of scientific explanation.
In this regard Hempel seems to have been providing what he considered to be due regard for Otto Neurath's embrace of Marx's materialist conception of history as the basis for a positive science of history.
BTW G.A. Cohen in his *Karl Marx's Theory of History:A Defense* expanded upon Hempel's position in his own elucidation of historical materialism.
Apparently, Noam Chomsky would disagree with all this but I am not sure that he has anywhere articulated a full critique of this and other allied positions.
>
> But, no mind. He has his position, it gets repeated often enough, so
> it's
> true! Why actually argue with the arguments that have been raised
> against
> the position he's taken when you can just pretend that you don't
> know any
> better.
>
> Kelley
>
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