> 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
^^^^^^^^ CB: I understand this use of "empiricist". It probably should be expanded to something like "regards _individual_ experience as the only source of knowledge." Concepts or ideas are based on experience ,too. When the theoretician uses concepts she gets from others, the origin of these concepts are in the experience of others.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make is that Marx's work is based on evidence gathered from experience, empirical evidence, but not just his own experience. Marx was not an "anti-empiricist".