Yours for spurious correlation, Michael McIntyre
On Jul 9, 2007, at 10:31 AM, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> There are reasons some have for saying that the social
> sciences per se are a "joke" -- not "real science."
> That is a time-honored position in philosophy of
> social science, generally associated with treating
> physics as the paradigm of what counts as a science.
> Davidson has a piece of "Psychology as Philosophy,"
> and he really means any human science that is a good
> example of the genre. But in that case the objection
> cannot be either of the two that Carl put forward:
>
> (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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