(1) that Marx or anyone in the 19th century was not a scientists because of inadequate research facilities and method, a silly objection on two grounds. It takes out everyone before, I dunno, the last twenty (or you pick) years -- including Newton! And Kepler and Copernicus, who tried to hypothesize about astronomy without telescopes, ha ha silly boys. And let me tell you as a Michigan trained quantitative number cruncher who has worked with computers and statistical programs on large data sets that there's a thing that Feynman called "cargo cult science" -- you set up all the apparatus and pray for the science to fly in. Needless to say Marx is so much better as a scientist than than all the people who trained me at the top polisci dept in the country that they're not even in the same universe.
(2) There is the quite distinct and now antiquated objection that scientists have to be value neutral and not care about anything but the truth of their claims or the accuracy of their predictions, and Marx fails to qualify as a scientist because he is not neutral. This was a popular sort of thing to say through the mid 1960s, but you'd be hard put to find ant defenders of the view in philosophy of science (and it is a thesis in philosophy of science, so who do you expect to think about such matters?) today or at any time for the last 40 years. Really, if there is a single result that philosophers of science have come to consensus on since Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, and the like, is that there is no value neutral science, nor particle physics, nor molecular biology, not political economy or its critique. Now, if Marx or any one else cheats to make the results come one in accord with his biases, he's a dishonest or bad scientist, but that's not the same thing as saying he's engaged in a different activity -- philosophy, literature, prophesy.
--- "farmelantj at juno.com" <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
>
> I quite agree with Eublides. By Carl's criteria,
> lots of medical
> researchers cannot be real scientists since they are
> passionate about
> combating disease. And in any case, most scientist
> are not neutral
> concerning their own favorite hypotheses and
> theories. I would
> recommend that he read James Watson's book, The
> Double Helix. That
> should help to dispel a few misconceptions about how
> scientists work.
>
> -- "Eubulides" <paraconsistent at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Carl Remick" <carlremick at hotmail.com>
>
>
> But what really puts Marx in the category of
> preacher not scientist is his
> incandescent outrage. Clearly, he's a guy who's
> hopping mad about the
> exploitation of the proletariat and the tyranny of
> capitalists. He
> isn't a
> a true scientist -- a detached neutral observer who
> is simply
> interested in
> how the system works, not in making normative
> judgments about it.
>
> Carl
>
> ================
>
> A ridiculous view of scientists.
>
> Quit digging.
>
> Ian
>
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