[lbo-talk] "For all we know, there may not be a safe way down"

Mike Beggs mikejbeggs at gmail.com
Tue Oct 20 16:19:49 PDT 2009



> Mike Beggs wrote:
>
>> A certain amount of rationalism is a vital part of social science,
>> including economics. Marx, at any rate, was certainly no empiricist.

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 12:00 AM, Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com> wrote:


> These claims involve implicit ontological and anthropological premises.
>  They aren't Marx's.
>
> For him, that "reason governs the world" is discoverable "empirically"
> through a phenomenological (in Husserl's sense) interrogation of experience.

That doesn't make him an empiricist, i.e. one who "regards experience as the only source of knowledge" (OED). Much of Capital is the building of ever-more-complex conceptual relationships from a simple starting point. That doesn't mean empirical verification is unimportant, just that reality is structured in ways which are only observable in their effects, i.e. you can't directly observe the structures, though if your observations don't meet with what the theory expects, its picture of the structures is either wrong or incomplete.

Cheers, Mike scandalum.wordpress.com



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