[lbo-talk] Handwriting on the wall ( Re: Max HorkheimeronTheismand Atheism)

[JBrown72073 at cs.com]

An die wrote:
>(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.

Another objection to this position is its astounding presumption.  Surely 
scientists of 2107 won't sneer at us for our backward data collection and 
laughable methods.


>(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.

Right.  And without a hypothesis, how would you go about it?  Without a 
viewpoint, why would you care enough to do the work involved?  There's no such 
thing as idle curiousity.


>This stupid particle physics worship involves a really
>profound failure to grasp the simple (though not easy)
>point that the virtues of physics, though
>considerable, are not the same as the virtues of
>science. There is a lot of science that isn't remotely
>like particle physics. Evolutionary biology, for
>example, doesn't permit precise predictions. 

Historical sciences will all fail to be sciences under this test, including 
geology  : )

Jenny Brown   </HTML>