File spoon-archives/seminar-14.archive/marx-bhaskar_2001/seminar-14.0101, message 16


Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 18:51:19 +0000
Subject: Assignment 2
From: Matthew Brannan <matthew.brannan-AT-leicester.ac.uk>


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What as all this got to do with Marxism?

As I have stated before RB wants to establish a philosophy that can render
science both rational and intelligible.  Implicit in the preface is the
method of taking science and then asking what would account for this
success, or more formally the "retroductive" method.  This is the key to
understanding the link with Marx.

In Capital Marx begins his analysis with the commodity a concrete category.
The movement of analysis is then from the concrete to the abstract then back
to the concrete again. This time with more developed categories.

The rational for taking the concrete categories first is because it is by
its own nature, observable. It is the appearance, it is a representation,
and it is the surface or phenomenal form. Therefore by asking ourselves what
accounts for this phenomena? What would relations of production have to be
like in order for this to be produced? We are able to access a deeper level
of reality where causal structures reside.

Clearly RB views science as exhibiting this method and he has already used
this method to state the key characteristics of his new philosophy,
therefore we can assume he regards it as the de facto method of scientific
discovery. There is clearly within Marxist accounts a similar stress on
retroductive logic, although never in such terms, the difference between the
appearance and the essence is a good example.

We may therefore speculate that RB regards Marxist social science as
fundamentally sound in terms of its methodological commitment to reductive
theorising.  Although there is clearly room for disagreement even hostility
at a substantive level, there is clearly room for accommodation from a
methodological point of view.  Therefore we could argue that of all the
branches of social science, its is Marxism that most closely fits into
Bhaskar=B9s philosophy of science.


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HTML VERSION:

Assignment 2 What as all this got to do with Marxism?

As I have stated before RB wants to establish a philosophy that can render science both rational and intelligible.  Implicit in the preface is the method of taking science and then asking what would account for this success, or more formally the "retroductive" method.  This is the key to understanding the link with Marx.

In Capital Marx begins his analysis with the commodity a concrete category.  The movement of analysis is then from the concrete to the abstract then back to the concrete again. This time with more developed categories.

The rational for taking the concrete categories first is because it is by its own nature, observable. It is the appearance, it is a representation, and it is the surface or phenomenal form. Therefore by asking ourselves what accounts for this phenomena? What would relations of production have to be like in order for this to be produced? We are able to access a deeper level of reality where causal structures reside.

Clearly RB views science as exhibiting this method and he has already used this method to state the key characteristics of his new philosophy, therefore we can assume he regards it as the de facto method of scientific discovery. There is clearly within Marxist accounts a similar stress on retroductive logic, although never in such terms, the difference between the appearance and the essence is a good example.  

We may therefore speculate that RB regards Marxist social science as fundamentally sound in terms of its methodological commitment to reductive theorising.  Although there is clearly room for disagreement even hostility at a substantive level, there is clearly room for accommodation from a methodological point of view.  Therefore we could argue that of all the branches of social science, its is Marxism that most closely fits into Bhaskar=B9s philosophy of science.
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