File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9710, message 53


Date: Fri, 3 Oct 1997 10:09:49 -0400
Subject: M-TH: Re: master-slave & pomos
From: farmelantj-AT-juno.com (James Farmelant)


On one level Justin is no doubt correct that the Marxian science/ideology
distinction can be grounded in terms of almost any of the standard
theories of truth.  As Justin points out one can find a distinguished
Marxist thinker associated with almost any of these positions: thus
Engels and Lenin with an ontological materialism and a correspondence
theory of truth, Gramsci and Lukacs with coherence-consensus theories
of truth (a consensus theory also underlies Habermas' notion of
communicative rationality), Sidney Hook  with a pragmatist theory
of truth as warranted assertability, and phenominalism with Bogdanov.
However, granting all this the question of which approaches to truth
and ontology best grounds Marx's practice as a theorist still remains
unanswered.  Perhaps it is not the case that as Ralph argues there will
necessarily emerge contradictions if one tries to combine Marx's
materialist conception of history with one of the various non-materialist
or anti-realist alternatives (ie. phenomenalism, Hegelian idealism etc)
but it is not evident to me that all these different alternative can do
equal justice to Marx's practice.

Roy Bhaskar for instance has argued that Marx and Engels did embrace
a definition of truth as correspondence to reality while at the same time
accepting a practicist criterion of truth.  This allowed Marx and Engels
to embrace both a simple, common sense realism and a scientific
realism on the one hand while recognizing the socially produced and
historically relative character of knowledge.  This they elaborated an
ontological realism that could embrace the valid insights of idealism
and even pragmatism into the socially mediated nature of knowledge-
production.  (BTW the distinction that Bhaskar draws between the
definition of truth and the criterion of truth is not unique to Bhaskar. 
I remember reading an essay by Quine in which he sought to reconcile
a correspondence-disquotationist theory of truth and a coherence theory
of truth along similar lines.  For Quine the correspondence aspect has
to do with the relations of truths to what they are about while the
coherence aspect has to do with how we arrive at truth).

Anyway, for Bhaskar the distinction between the definition of truth and
the criterion of truth implies a distinction between what he calls the
transitive object of knowledge- production which is socially produced
and what he calls the intransitive object of the knowledge produced which
in Marxism is usually an independent structure or mechanism.  Bhaskar
also insists that for an adequate scientific realism to do justice to
Marx's practice it must recognize social reality to be (1) stratified,
(2) internally complex and (3) differentiated.  

The grounding of the Marxian distinction between reality and appearance
(the basis of the science/ideology distinction) requires a social
ontology
that recognizes that explanatory structures or essential relations are
ontologically distinct from, normally out of phase with and even act in
opposition to the phenomena that they generate.

One need not buy all of Bhaskar's reconstruction of Marxism to grasp the
point
that a scientific realism does seem to do better justice to Marx's
practice
as a theorist than the anti-realist alternatives.  Looking at the history
of
Western Marxism as manifest in the work of Gramsci, Korsch and Lukacs
one can discern how their historicism and anti-objectionism and 
anti-reflectionism led them to identify natural science with bourgeois
ideology
while denying Marxism's status as a science.  On the one hand they
made very important contributions to Marxism by recovering its subjective
and critical aspects (ie. the theory of alienation and the doctrine of
fetishism)
but they also vitiated Marxism's scientific aspects and its dimension of
objectivity as is clear in Gramsci's case for whom the notion of an
independently
existing external reality was a residue of Christianity.  

			James F.

On Fri, 3 Oct 1997 00:36:01 -0400 (EDT) Justin Schwartz
<jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us> writes:
>On Thu, 2 Oct 1997, James Farmelant wrote:
>> 
>> Isn't something like a realist ontology and a correspondence theory
>> of truth required for grounding the distinctions that Marx draws 
>between
>> reality and appearance and between science and ideology? 
>
>No. As to a realist ontology, as opposed to phenomenalism, say, one 
>might
>think that the material world is the permanent possibility of 
>perception
>(Mill), and still think that there is an opposition between science as
>either disinterested knowledge or interested knowledge driven by
>truth-conducive interests and ideology as systematically distorted 
>belief.
>This is in fact in part why Mill thinks we need free speech, because
>otherwise we will not have a chance at the truth; those with powerful
>interests will suppress it. Mill is a phenomenalist.
>
>As to a correspondence theory of truth, well you do some sort of 
>notion of
>truth to mark a difference between ideology and science, but it 
>doesn't
>have to be a correspondence notion. It could be a disappearance 
>notion, one
>which to say that p is true is just to say p. It could be a consensus
>notion, as long as the consensus were not the present empirical 
>consensus
>but only that of the Piercean long run. It could even be a Deweyan 
>notion
>of truth as warranted assertability, which would make the notion of
>ideology a doctrine about systematically unwarranted belief due to 
>interest.
>
> Since these
>> distictions seem crucial to Marx's materialist conception of history 
>and
>> to his critique of political economy then perhaps Engels and Lenin 
>were
>> justified in defending a general materialist ontology.  Perhaps 
>Justin
>> can
>> tell us how Bogdanov handled these issues.
>
>Can't recall. All I know of B is what Lenin says about him, actually.
>
> The logical empiricist- Otto
>> Neurath attempted to collapse the science/ideology distinction into 
>the
>> positivists' science/metaphysics distinction, that is the
>> verifisble/unverifiable
>> distinction.  But this does not seem to do justice to Marx. 
>> 
>It doesn't, but Neurath doesn't do this, any anyway N was a rather 
>poor
>positivist, although he was pretty good pragmatist malgre lui.
>
>All that said, I am myself a scientific realist and so was Marx. But 
>you
>don't need to be one to get the rest of Marxism up and running. 
>Gramsci
>was a sort of neoHegelian idealist about truth and science, but a very
>good Marxist.
>
>--Justin Schwartz
>
>
>
>
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