Date: Sun, 14 Dec 1997 17:02:52 -0800 (PST)
From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-gladstone.uoregon.edu>
Subject: M-TH: Re: Pragmatism


On Sun, 14 Dec 1997, Andrew Wayne Austin wrote:

> In contrast to the popular ideal of science, pragmatists and historical
> materialists hold that the world is always changing. It is changing
> because of forces inherent in the movement of the world through time. And
> the world is changing because humans are changing it. Scientific laws are
> not "discovered" in the positivist sense; scientists construct laws. Laws
> are not eternal but hold as long as the present structure of reality
> holds, or until the scientist can find a better way to explain reality.
> Furthermore, the world is a concrete totality, and must be understood in
> these terms. A method approaching a solution to the problematic of
> historicity in scientific production, without at the same time lapsing
> into idealist relativity or objectivist idealism, and that analyzes the
> world holistically, presents an alternative to the dominant social
> scientific standpoints of positivism and neo-positivism. This method is
> found in the dialectic. The opponents of historical materialism on this
> list presuppose, along with their positivist colleagues, the unchanging
> and a priori character of the external world. Their thinking is decidely
> undialectical.

Except that dialectics, at its outer limit, is about innovating new forms
of praxis (in theory as well as science, politics as well as culture),
which are hard to assimilate into a static method. Put another
way: who actually decides which interpretation or explanation of the world
is valid? How does innovation or revolution happen, in science as well as
in politics? The problem with pragmatism is that the division of
the world into static thinkers (what we call nowadays fundamentalists) and
dynamic thinkers is too simple. Dialectics isn't something like a label or
a tag which "defines" an argument from above; rather, it lurks in the very
inconsistencies, contradictions and equivocations of the argument, or what
amounts to the non-identity of the theoretical cognition with the
marketplace of theory in question.

> Mead writes,
> 	reflection, including cognition and thought, is a phase of conduct
> 	within which conflicts between reactions are met by reorganization
> 	of the environment and of the tendencies within the organism to
> 	respond to it--the validity of the reorganization, and therefore
> 	of the object of reflection, being tested by the success of the
> 	reconstruction. (1977, p.  89). 
> The form of logic in this argument is dialectical.

I'm very wary of simply classifying arguments as "dialectical"
as a synonym for "correct" or "truthful". Mead's description has some
validity, but it begs the question of who exactly is doing this testing,
how this happens, and who judges what is valid and what is not. In all
capitalist societies, of course, the problem of judgement is a veritable
industry in its own right: think of the court system, of lawyers, of
political debates, network ratings, etc. Mead's model has a suspicious
biologism, of the sort where paeons to the Great Chain of Being or the
lone Victorian entrepreneur-inventor lighting candles amidst the tide of
ignorance and darkness of the masses get restructured into
scientific-technical descriptions of self-acting organisms responding to
environmental changes by means of feedback -- essentially, a very early
version of cybernetics. It's basically the perspective of the lone
scientist in the lab, devoid of the lab assistants, theoretical debates,
or collective processes of research and dissemination which secretly
underpin such. Of course, since basic research and Government-funded labs
were pretty new in the Thirties, you could argue that Mead is doing
something new here, by at least asking the right question, what happens to
science under the new institutions of monopoly capitalism.

-- Dennis



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