Date: Sat, 9 Aug 1997 15:34:20 -0400 (EDT)
From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
Subject: Public Self-Criticism and Correction. (was Re: M-I: Marxist History and counterfactuals)


Comrades,

I am cleaning out my mailbox and read through the last post (32K) I sent
to list. Both that post and the previous post confirm that I have just
about purged my thought of the subjectivist crap that I picked up from my
social constructionist mentors. I have escaped the epistemic fallacy and
the linguistic turn trap (at least I am close--at least I am aware).

Many students of society make these errors, so my confession will be
useful, I think. As Al Szymanski pointed out back in 1973 (when
subjectivist social science was in full-steam), it is often the case that
critical students of society tend to go too far in their rejection of
positivism by rejecting altogether the possibility that objectivist
science can be applied to the study of social phenomena (but generally for
more sophisticated reasons than Dave has made in his argument). The
rejection of science was then (and still is to a degree) permitted by the
anti-scientific currents of phenomenology. Now it is in the form of
postmodernism. 

Szymanski argues that the "hard sciences" model should be the goal of
sociology (and I would extend that to other social sciences, as well). 
Szymanski notes that the development of such a science (he means here a
paradigm of social science in the way that physics is paradigmatic) is
actively thwarted by the ruling class. Because

	The danger for monopoly capitalist society is that the application
	of the method of physics and biology to contemporary society would
	result in the exposure of the system for what it is--a class
	based, racist, sexist, and imperialist system run by and for the
	interest of a small ruling class. To prevent people with the
	legitimacy of science from teaching and writing materials which
	outlines the real nature of the system, science has been
	discredited. Those sociologists not content with doing simple
	research for the corporations or the government on social control
	are thus channeled into mathematics of philosophical pursuits.
	What is discouraged by the dominant institutions is the scientific
	analysis of social relations with its potential for creating
	popular consciousness. But formalistic and subjectivistic
	speculations, being essentially harmless, are left alone. 

But, let me add that even though one must eventually shake themselves from
the errors I am describing, it is still worse to have never approached a
critical stance on science, so that one reifies natural science method and
then bashes other applications of science to non-natural phenomena. The
uncritical critic does not understand the scientific basis upon which this
very attack is negated. In many ways, then, I reached my present
understanding through a process that brought me to very threshold of
denying objective reality (about two years ago), and while I was wrong (as
I often am, and quite publically so), it was very helpful. Still, I
suppose it could have all been avoided, because, and I can see this now,
Marx already makes these matters clear. Well, maybe it was that tangent
that helped me see this in Marx? In any event, the past two years of
training in critical sociology and radical political economy has helped me
immensely in understanding what science is and for whom and for what it
should be used. 

Finally, it is the case that I type fast (particular the past two posts,
which were little more than single passes) and I have a tendency to
continually make an embarrassing grammatical error in my writing. Part of
trying to prevent this error in the future is publically acknowledging it
today (step one in the 12 step grammatical recovery process). This error
is my tendency to write the following: "...that social phenomena IS not
objective" or "So why IS social phenomena not objective...?" These
sentences should read, "...that social phenomena ARE not objective" and
"So why ARE social phenomena not objective...?" I got it right a couple of
times in the last post, but I got it wrong, too. I apologize for this
carelessness.

Peace,
Andy




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