/edu/ - Education

tehres nothing scientific about it. marxoids made that up. its a mistranslation anyway. in german "science" means any art form or field which is professionally studied with rational logical rules ok e.g. so piano music is a science or painting is a science. this nuance is lost on marxoids who saw the word "science" and legit saw marx as like newton or something (he isnt) and everything he said is 1100000% correct and ur uyghur for saying otherwise. even marx would be ashamed of these ppl.

As long as i can remember, it is "Scientific" because it follows the 19 century definition of scientific, basically empirical studies.

Found the post

>shitty rant OP addressing nothing in particular and ironically enough not even giving any examples of what it's complaining about
420chan redirect was a mistake

>>21849
For Engels, the claim that Marxism is scientific is a claim that it has understood the laws of motion of society. This understanding is based on two key elements: ‘These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these two discoveries Socialism becomes a science. The next thing was to work out all its details and relations.’ (1968, p. 50)

Science, in the Engelsian tradition which became known as ‘Marxism’, is understood as the exclusion of subjectivity: ‘scientific’ is identified with ‘objective’. The claim that Marxism is scientific is taken to mean that subjective struggle (the struggle of socialists today) finds support in the objective movement of history. The analogy with natural science is important not because of the conception of nature that underlies it but because of what it says about the movement of human history. Both nature and history are seen as being governed by forces ‘independent of men’s will’, forces that can therefore be studied objectively.

The notion of Marxism as scientific socialism has two aspects. In Engels’ account there is a double objectivity. Marxism is objective, certain, ‘scientific’ knowledge of an objective, inevitable process. Marxism is understood as scientific in the sense that it has understood correctly the laws of motion of a historical process taking place independently of men’s will. All that is left for Marxists to do is to fill in the details, to apply the scientific understanding of history.

The attraction of the conception of Marxism as a scientifically objective theory of revolution for those who were dedicating their lives to struggle against capitalism is obvious. It provided not just a coherent conception of historical movement, but also enormous moral support: whatever reverses might be suffered, history was on our side. The enormous force of the Engelsian conception and the importance of its role in the struggles of that time should not be overlooked. At the same time, however, both aspects of the concept of scientific socialism (objective knowledge, objective process) pose enormous problems for the development of Marxism as a theory of struggle.

https://www.marxists.org/subject/marxmyths/john-holloway/article.htm#:~:text=Marxism%20is%20understood%20as%20scientific,the%20scientific%20understanding%20of%20history.

>>21851
>in german "science" means any art form or field
In German the word „Wissenschaft“ (science) was used this way in the past but it‘s very much conform with the Anglo conception of science nowadays.

>>21852
Marxism is not empirical. Plausible sounding conjecture pertaining to highly complex events that are not replicable and not controlled for is not empiricism. It‘s merely speculation. Marxism is by and large an ideology (which I don‘t mean derogatorily) and Marxists are essentially just preaching to the choir by making sense of world events based on a Marxist framework that they have already agreed to. That‘s not to say any Marxist claim is entirely detached from reality, but is it empirical? No. Subsequently it‘s not scientific. The first Anon is correct that Marx‘s use of the word science is rather specific to Germany at that time and much looser than we understand the word nowadays.

>>21861
I think this is a good example of how calling something scientific doesn‘t make it scientific. All of that was contrived reasoning. Acknowledging that the world is material and determined by natural law doesn‘t make whatever you are doing a science. Marxism never grew out of the cradle of philosophy.

>>21864
>In German the word „Wissenschaft“ (science) was used this way in the past but it‘s very much conform with the Anglo conception of science nowadays.
thats cool but marx is from the 1800s

>The first thing to note is that Hegel makes little attempt to prove this. A few lines later he says:

“With regard to the assertion that contradiction does not exist, that it is non-existent, we may disregard this statement.”

We here meet one of the most important principles of the dialectical logic, and one that has been consistently misunderstood, vilified or lied about. Dialectic for Hegel was a strictly scientific method. He might speak of inevitable laws, but he insists from the beginning that the proof of dialectic as scientific method is that the laws prove their correspondence with reality. Marx’s dialectic is of the same character. Thus he excluded what later became The Critique of Political Economy from Capital because it took for granted what only the detailed argument and logical development of Capital could prove. Still more specifically, in his famous letter to Kugelmann on the theory of value, he ridiculed the idea of having to “prove” the labour theory of value. If the labour theory of value proved to be the means whereby the real relations of bourgeois society could be demonstrated in their movement, where they came from, what they were, and where they were going, that was the proof of the theory. Neither Hegel nor Marx understood any other scientific proof.

Says CLR James, whom is a Marxist-Humanist. While i am not a Marxist-Humanist, i must agree with him about this topic. Both Marx' and Hegel's era of Academia, especially philosophical academia, relied more on Logic&Dialectics thus what is compatible with Logic&Dialectics is the truth.

>>21849
Because thousands of proofs are in the news every day. You're reading them, presumably.

>>21864
Name a single humanities area with empirical experiments and mathematical proofs, you dimwit. It's impossible. Historical materialism is considered by marxists the best framework for analysis of social tendencies over time because it has the best track record among other methodologies, and it's either that or subscribing to bourgeois pseudoscience that has no correlation to observable reality. If you've found a better methodology of analysis, then do feel free to share it, otherwise you have no say in this matter.

>>21883
Very ass hurt I can see.

>Name a single humanities area with empirical experiments and mathematical proofs, you dimwit.
Hence why they aren‘t considered real science either.

>Historical materialism is considered by marxists the best framework for analysis of social tendencies over time because it has the best track record among other methodologies, and it's either that or subscribing to bourgeois pseudoscience that has no correlation to observable reality.
For one, that doesn‘t make it a science. Secondly, Marxism encompasses much more than historical materialism that are merely philosophical and ideological, which further diminishes its right to call itself scientific. Additionally, Marxists do not have a sole claim on historical materialism. Academics who aren‘t Marxists subscribe to historical materialism as well.

>>21884
NTA but you seem to have a very narrow conception of scientistic validity and truth (which you presumably treat as coterminous). Have you read Two Dogmas of Empiricism?

>>21886
Formulate in your own words what other form of scientific validity is better and how it relates to this essay.

>>21884
They are literally considered sciences however, at least where I live they're called as such.

>>21849
marx analyzed thousands of statistics at the time (centuries before excel came to be) to write what he wrote lmao

>>21890
yep, and there are people in here saying marxism isn't empirical

>>21890
>>21891
So race realism is real science because proponents looked at countless statistics and articulated theories? You think that‘s how it works?

>>21893
They didn't tho. They got think tanks to make up statistics that actual statistics refute.

>>21894
Race realists get their statistics from either the government or organizations who themselves don‘t advocate for race realism but record data on races, and they also get them from actual scientists who share their beliefs. The latter’s statistics can be fake, but aren‘t necessarily so. That is not the crux of why their theories are still wrong and working with „thousands of statistics“ doesn‘t in itself make your work based on proper empiricism. You speak of statistics and simply assume they meet the standards of the scientific method.

>>21893
wow you mean statistics have to be interpreted first?????????

>>21864
> It‘s merely speculation.
Its not "merely" speculation its a type of speculative realism, you could even call it a speculative materialism.

>>21866
>Marxism never grew out of the cradle of philosophy.
The other way around. Marxism is scientific in a larger sense then what is narrowly called scientific today. The default physicalist empiricist positivism that came out of the rejection of Hegel is what never grew out of the cradle.

>>21897
No, dipshit. The overall problem is that you formulate hypotheses from observations in regard to highly complex historical and societal events of which you don‘t know all relevant variables, even of the known ones you only have data of a subsection of them, you don’t necessarily have enough data, and you can‘t replicate what you have observed. Of course, you know next to nothing about this and just assume because he looked at countless statistics that in itself qualifies it as empiricism that lives up to scientific standards.

>>21898
>Its not "merely" speculation its a type of speculative realism, you could even call it a speculative materialism.
Speculating based on a materialist framework still doesn‘t move it beyond the scope of mere speculation.

>Marxism is scientific in a larger sense then what is narrowly called scientific today.
There is a good reason why it‘s limited to such a degree. You simply have no experience with wasting time on plausible theories that are validated in a sloppy manner by people who *want* to believe the theories are correct.

>The default physicalist empiricist positivism
That‘s also a mere claim by Marxists that they depict science of today as positivistic, but the modal realism and constructivism we see in science today definitely has a dialectical process, given previous models and theories are exhaustively shown to be insufficient and better alternatives arise.

>>21901
if marxism is so easy to debunk why dont you do it right now? the thesis presented by marx is quite simple

>>21849
Marxist economics (or political economics) is to be taken with the same rigor as political science and economics, which is to say, not that much.

Scientific, when not said by people who have stuck their heads up their ass too far, means essentially engineering socialism. Using all the scientific means to bring about socialism. This means engaging with reality, measuring metrics, KPIs, etc.

It is essentially against simply willing socialism into existence.

Basically, ""scientific"" socialism is "data-driven socialist policy". This was a response to utopianist socialists of the time.

As to whether Marxism is scientific, it is as scientific as economics and political science, which is to say, not so much, or it is not a rigorous science as other more "hard" fields. This doesn't mean you can't measure stuff. Political economy, Marxist or not, requires understanding how to process and interpret large amounts of data and statistical models.

I can recommend Anwar Shaikh's material on this to see how it looks, but there are much more. There are even strong debates within Marxist economists regarding the temporality of labor which leads to wildly different models. Unfortunately I don't know much about it so I can't really explain it to you.

>it's another thread about the word "scientific" being cofined to mere falsification
OP, if you want to, you can start reading about methodology and philosophy of science more. The most popular - popperian - notion of science is barely the surface. I'd strongly recommend to familiarise yourself with more modern methodologies like those developed by Poznan School (Idealisation theory of science).

>>21904
That‘s very interesting. What does it mean though?

>>21893
you should feel bad for comparing marx to race realists

it isn't soyence, it's wissenschaft

>>21901
You conflating speculation with arbitrarily making shit up when it actually means thinking about thinking in the same way you are conflating science with empiricism.

The preface is Hegel’s phenomenology of philosophy; it treats the various forms of philosophizing and delineates their defects. In a sense the preface is the completion of the section on absolute knowing. The book is itself a circle, the form Hegel attributes to the system as a whole. A theme that runs through the center of the preface is Hegel’s criticism of reflection and the understanding (Verstand) as capable of producing true philosophy and his characterization of speculation and reason (Vernunft) as the replacement for this inadequate form of philosophizing.

We find two sets of images in the preface. On the first page Hegel speaks of anatomy as being not a true science but only an “aggregate of information” (par. 1). Because it is a knowledge of only the parts of the body regarded as inanimate, we lack, in anatomy, a knowledge of the living body itself, of its principle of life. On the second page Hegel introduces the contrasting image of the bud of a plant producing a blossom that becomes a fruit. He characterizes this as an image of “organic unity” (par. 2) and as representing stages of necessity in the life of the whole.

Hegel says that the understanding schematizes experience, “a table of contents is all that it offers” (par. 53). The understanding, which proceeds through reflection on the object, produces, in thought, a world that is dead. All objects are fully categorized and rendered lifeless, labeled, like parts of a skeleton, or pigeon-holed, like boxes in a grocer’s stall. Reason, which proceeds speculatively, seeks out the principle of motion or life that is within the object, that makes the object, so to speak, what it is. Reflective understanding grasps the body as an anatomically ordered substance. Speculative reason goes within the body to its spirit to grasp its principle as a living subject.

The answer to this lies principally with Kant, with transcendental philosophy and critique. In his effort to answer David Hume and to secure, for the understanding, its own categories of experience, not derived from the senses, Kant forces himself to abandon reason. This causes Kant to formulate a very limited notion of experience, in which reason plays no role in the constitution of the object. Once one enters the world of critique there is no way out, no way to restore reason to its rightful place. Reason is sacrificed to reflection and to the trap of the transcendental.

How does Hegel move from the established fact of reflection to speculation? To do this he first embraces a doctrine of the absolute. A doctrine of the absolute means that “The true is the whole [Das Wahre ist das Ganze]” (par. 20). Critique moves across experience, not within its inner life. Since critique is a doctrine of the part, analyzing this kind of knowledge and then that, we never can produce the whole. To analyze a great number of words will not produce a language and to analyze a great number of phenomena will not produce a world. “The true as the whole” is what we must begin with, and it is a circle. Speculative truth is always a circle. The true, Hegel says, “is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning” (par. 18).

We cannot achieve the absolute by a formalism of the idea any more than we can achieve it by a formalism of the schema. To relate the contents of experience to the idea externally, showing how each instance is an instance of the absolute is what Hegel calls a “monochromatic formalism” (par. 15). It is a form of thought that repeats the same formula in the same way in relation to whatever it encounters. This way of thinking notices the connections among things and then passes on to the assertion that in the absolute all is one. This is an absolute in which A = A, or the “night in which all cows are black” (par. 16). It is a static form of speculation because there is no principle of self-development whereby the particular determinations of things are comprehended as transforming themselves into larger and larger wholes so that the whole itself is articulated in terms of the particular determinations it encompasses. Hegel attributes this formalistic or empty absolute of pure identity to Friedrich Schelling. He regards Schelling as having moved from the subjective idealism of Kant to the objective idealism of the absolute, but as not having overcome the formalism inherent in reflection by so doing.

Reflection placed at the service of reason is the basis of speculation. Hegel must take up reflection and absorb it into speculation, thus passing beyond it. The fundamental point on which the Phenomenology turns is Hegel’s claim that substance becomes subject. He says: “everything turns on grasping and expressing the true, not only as substance, but equally as subject” (par. 17). Kantian formalism cannot get beyond substance; it can offer the object of reflection only as externally ordered. Such reflection cannot offer us the inner form of the object. The object becomes something only when it is externalized from what it is in itself and is taken up by the knower as the phenomenal object. The phenomenal object is functional, but the thing-in-itself is substantive. Speculation requires us to approach the object as not substance but subject, as having an inner life—not simply, so to speak, as a body with anatomy but as a living body.

Hegel’s Preface: Reflection versus Speculation - https://sunypress.edu/content/download/451722/5494463/version/1/file/9780791469637_imported2_excerpt.pdf

>>21909
The question of language goes right to the core of Hegel’s notion of systematic science, of truth that actually takes place in the embrace between thought and being. If a language of science is one meant to convey objective truth, then Hegel’s singular take on science must imply a special grasp of both its language and objectivity. What sort of discourse can claim to express objective truth within an idea of science that sees itself as the systematic articulation of existing knowledge? To answer this question we must guard against importing epistemological and linguistic notions foreign to the Hegelian idea of objective truth, neither must we import notions of objectivity and discourse alien to his idea of science.

Failure to comprehensively understand the nature of Hegelian scientific language has allowed to go unchallenged a wide-spread misunderstanding regarding the nature of Hegelian objectivity. This misunderstanding can be bluntly summarized as follows: the world itself operates dialectically, obeying an inherently dialectical logic. Many who know something of Hegel will probably find nothing objectionable in this statement. In fact, it appears readily verifiable with regard to that part of worldly objectivity Hegel deals with on the Spirit side of his philosophy, for example the rise of consciousness and inter-subjective relations. Indeed, spirit, as human activity, can easily be said to reflect thought or "mind", which, as the Logics tell us, is inherently dialectical. And it is this objectivity or "second nature"i that most commentators are interested in. When the natural world itself is brought into consideration, however, there is some embarrassment. It is indeed hard to verify, for example, that cosmological phenomena and chemical reactions operate along strictly dialectical lines. Hegel's Philosophy of Nature therefore tends to be taken less seriously, or ignored.

However, even when the inherently dialectical nature of Hegelian objectivity is ascribed solely to the Spririt side of his philosophy, crucial (Kierkegaardian, Marxian) questions arise concerning the coherency of the entire philosophical endeavor. If objectivity itself operates dialectically, what is the status of the philosopher subject (i.e. Hegel)? Or, more precisely, what is the status of Hegel's scientific discourse? From where does it derive its own objectivity and truth? It should be obvious to readers of Hegel that his scientific discourse cannot claim to simply represent or reflect objectivity, and garner its own truthfulness and objectivity from the exactness of this representation.

Such a view could not help but fall within what Hegel refers to as (Kantian) subjective idealism, i.e. the representation, whether faithful or not, would never be more than mere appearance (Schein), the reflection of Hegel's own self-certainty; the supposed "truth", stemming from personal observations, would, in fact, reflect nothing other than subjective certitudeiv. In other words, this view contradicts Hegel's explicit rejection of scientific truth based purely on confirmed observation (perception) of empirical, experimental data, which we find reiterated in all his major works and in a good deal of his minor onesv . This does not mean that Hegel entirely discounts empirical science. For example, as I will show, there is a place, or a level, for the representations of the natural sciences within the body of systematic (philosophical, Hegelian) science. However, as we will see, this level of representation only achieves objective truth through a certain notion of discourse essential to this science.

Hegel's repudiation of sense perception as an adequate ground for systematic, objective truth must be understood in linguistic terms; sense certainty goes hand in hand with the notion of referential language, i.e. with the idea that language refers to, reflects or denotes an objectivity which is real but somehow removed from the language itself. According to this view, truth and objectivity are entirely based on the exactness of the reflection, on the faithfulness of how "sentence-tokens" signify "reality". Although many commentators understand Hegel's critique of sense perception and its corresponding referential languagevii, they seem unable to break away from the idea of Hegelempiricist, the lucid and profound observer of the world around him. I believe this is because they have been unable to grasp the true nature of Hegel's scientific language as non-referential, where there is no distance between signfier and signified, and where the objectivity of language is not the impoverished objectivity of "sentence-tokens".

In dealing with the question of how Hegel sees the truth of his discourse as objective, I therefore want to show that his claim to scientific truth implies a certain grasp of objectivity different from the one summarized above, and a certain notion of language that is not referential and which is constitutive of Hegelian objectivity. More explicitly, I will argue that the Hegelian idea of "Science" supposes a discourse that is not only objectively true but is also, itself, true objectivity. he use of the term "objectivity" in the preceding paragraphs may cause some consternation. This is because we are accustomed to using the term in two distinct acceptations: 1) in the sense of non-subjective, non-arbitrary truth; 2) in the sense of a concrete reality existing outside the subject. By saying that, for Hegel, science is a discourse that is "not only objectively true but is also, itself, true objectivity", I am purposely conflating the two acceptations. For Hegel, scientific objectivity is non-subjective, non-arbitrary truth existing as a concrete reality.

Whether we question a modern-day theoretical physicist or an 18th century empiricist, his or her definition of objective truth in science will involve the adequation of thought and being, of concepts and experience. For example, a subjective theory (thought) takes on objective truth when it can be adequated to reality (being). The adequation of thought and being also lies at the heart of the Hegelian scientific endeavour.

According to the notion of Hegelian scientific objectivity I am proposing, the adequation of thought and being is realized in language, in a language which can therefore be grasped as truth and "objectivity", in both senses of the word, namely, language that is not based on subjective representation and language which is itself a real object or thing (Sache) ix that is both thought and being. This language occurs in several different contexts, and each of these expressions forms specific, objective content for science. The total content of science thus appears as the true and objective discourses of natural science, subjective and objective spirit, art and religion. This is another way of saying that the Hegelian project, consisting of finding true objectivity in the meeting between (natural) being and the dialectical or negating activity of thought takes place, on the highest scientific or systematic level, in the articulation itself of the Encyclopedia.

https://philarchive.org/archive/REIOLA

>>21904
>(Idealisation theory of science).
Idealism