Is Marxism a science?

[Dermezel]

Morberticus

Although your paragraph isn't relevant to what I said (by attempting to fisk me, you missed the point), I'll respond to it in an attempt to make it relevant. Statistical mechanics is a framework capable of making strict predictions about what we observe in thermodynamic and chemical systems. Unlike Marxism, statistics in statistical mechanics (such as Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics) are used to derive principles which can be tested carefully and rigorously (Avogadro's law, for example, emerges from simple Newtoniam mechanics). This means statistical mechanics is accepted because it uses a well verified scientific theory (classical mechanics, and sometimes quantum mechanics), along with some statistics and probability theory, to make claims which have been verified by experiments.

I am not attempting "fisk" you in any way (that is a false accusation meant to detract from the objective arguments) .

You argued, specifically, that Marxism cannot be a science since it "relies" i.e. makes use of statistics. I responded by noting many sciences make use of statistics, including chemistry, which relies on a statistical assumption.

As for Avogadro's theory of molecules, how does this stem from Newton's theory exactly? Many chemists who accepted Newtonian theory rejected Avogadro's theory of molecules for almost forty years.

Morberticus

A laboratory is not always a room with expensive equipment. A paleontologist can test scientific hypotheses related to homologies or population distributions/relationships predicted by evolutionary models. An astronomer can test hypotheses about stellar formation or the large scale structure of our universe. Their laboratories are reliable because inference from their "experiments" stem from strict, uniform natural law. The only difference between them and a traditional lab is paleontologists and astronomers don't get to pick what experiments are carried out.

That only means you are re-defining "laboratory" to include the world in general. Now any observation which you approve of, even geological stratum, or galaxies, can be defined as "laboratories" because they "are reliable because inference from their "experiments" stem from strict, uniform natural law".

Never mind that Marxists base their hypothesis on natural law, this sounds like a standard based on convenience. I hope you do not have any ambitions into going into science, because it sounds like you use your personal feelings as a sort of determinant as to what does, or does not constitute actual science. Like Isaac Newton when he gained his position of authority, it means you would be willing to suppress other hypothesis for personal reasons. That is to say, you sound like you don't like Marxism, and thus dismiss it a priori.

In any case, I have participated in the evolution/creation debate online for over a decade, and I must say your arguments against Marxism sound very much like arguments I heard against Darwinism.

Morberticus

Marxists don't have such a strictly controlled or understood laboratory.

They do in China, not in the US. Can you imagine why this is not the case in the US?

Morberticus

They have to second guess human psychology and sociological behaviour to try and fit the data to their claims. It generates an interesting political philosophy, but little else.

Marx wished to dedicate his first volume of Capital to Charles Darwin. Seeing as evolutionary psychology is fast becoming the paradigm of that specific field I fail to see how Marxism is "fitting" psychology to fudged data."

In fact, I would urge you to actually read Capital, and tell me where he does this exactly.

Morberticus

I did. Did you write the article? I am asking you if you are claiming gravity and natural selection are untestable?

No. They are testable, but appear untestable because of how you can formulate them

Natural selection= the fittest survive. How do you determine the fittest? By those that survive.

Gravity= what goes up, must come down. How do you determine this? By formulating the rate at which things fall.

Both appear tautologies to those that have only a superficial understanding of the concepts and history of the concepts. Just like the labor theory of value or cost of production which merely sounds at first like "if you do not pay the cost of production, you cannot continue production in the long-term" but in reality mean that supply and demand by itself is not sufficient to explain economics.

Note that the same objection to Marxism (that supply and demand are superfluous) were raised against Darwinism (i.e. that natural selection was an untestable tautology) by Karl Popper. Now, I have no doubt that Popper's ideas of "unfalsiability" are useful, but by not recognizing this is a borrowed concept, he was forced into the absurdities of rejecting Darwinism as a "metaphysical research program" and Marxism respectively.

[Morberticus]

Dermezel

I am not attempting "fisk" you in any way.

You argued, specifically, that Marxism cannot be a science since it "relies" i.e. makes use of statistics. I responded by noting many sciences make use of statistics, including chemistry, which relies on a statistical assumption.

That sentence you responded to was meant to be understood in the context of the next sentence, which is why I placed it in the same paragraph. Of course statistics aren't inherently unreliable. The difference is statistical assumptions in chemistry (among others) are used to produce uniform, testable principles.

Quote:

As for Avogadro's theory of molecules, how does this stem from Newton's theory exactly? Many chemists who accepted Newtonian theory rejected Avogadro's theory of molecules for almost forty years.

Pressure is the result of imparted momentum. By considering how the momenta of particles in an ideal gas contribute to pressure, it's possible to show that gasses with the same pressure and the same number of molecules, with the same kinetic energy distribution, will occupy the same volume.

Quote:

That only means you are re-defining "laboratory" to include the world in general. Now any observation which you approve of, even geological stratum, or galaxies, can be defined as "laboratories" because they "are reliable because inference from their "experiments" stem from strict, uniform natural law".

Never mind that Marxists base their hypothesis on natural law this sounds like a standard based on convenience.

It is not a standard based on convenience. It is a standard based on rigour and testability. If Marxism can be shown to be derived from natural laws then I will accept it as a science, and by natural law I mean a uniformitarian formal description of the behaviour of things.

Quote:

I hope you do not have any ambitions into going into science, because it sounds like you use your personal feelings as a sort of determinant as to what does, or does not constitute actual science. Like Isaac Newton when he gained his position of authority, it means you would be willing to suppress other hypothesis for personal reasons. That is to say, you sound like you don't like Marxism, and thus dismiss it a priori

.

Firstly, I am already "in" science. Secondly, I have no urge to "supress a hypothesis" for personal reasons. Thirdly, my knowledge of Marxism is very small; however, I know that Marxism is an economic theory, and I do not consider economics to be a science. Economics might be able to become a science, though I doubt the fickle nature of man will ever be able to be predicted by a psychological framework, evolutionary or otherwise.

So no, it's not about convenience or personal opinion. It's about stable, reliable laws and reputable tests related to those laws.

Quote:

Morberticus

Marxists don't have such a strictly controlled or understood laboratory.

They do in China, not in the US.

So what does Marxism predict will happen in China? Were all previous predictions verified? Or were excuses made for those that failed?

Quote:

Morberticus

They have to second guess human psychology and sociological behaviour to try and fit the data to their claims. It generates an interesting political philosophy, but little else.

Marx wished to dedicate his first volume of Capital to Charles Darwin. Seeing as evolutionary psychology is fast becoming the paradigm of that specific field I fail to see how Marxism is "fitting" psychology to fudged data."

In fact, I would urge you to actually read Capital, and tell me where he does this exactly.

How do Marxists model human choices? How do they derive predictable behaviour from evolutionaty psychology?

Quote:

They are testable, but appear untestable because of how you can formulate them

Natural selection= the fittest survive. How do you determine the fittest? By those that survive.

Gravity= what goes up, must come down. How do you determine this? By formulating the rate at which things fall.

Both appear tautologies to those that have only a superficial understanding of the concepts and history of the concepts. Just like the labor theory of value or cost of production which merely sounds at first like "if you do not pay the cost of production, you cannot continue production in the long-term" but in reality mean that supply and demand by itself is not sufficient to explain economics.

Note that the same objection to Marxism (that supply and demand are superfluous) were raised against Darwinism (i.e. that natural selection was an untestable tautology) by Karl Popper. Now, I have no doubt that Popper's ideas of "unfalsiability" are useful, but by not recognizing this is a borrowed concept, he was forced into the absurdities of rejecting Darwinism as a "metaphysical research program" and Marxism respectively.

Ok, though I was not arguing that Marxism was unscientific because its claims are tautological. I am arguing it is unscientific because it lacks a strict set of laws to draw hypotheses from.

[Hristis]

OH BOY! rolleyes I'll make this one short, since I won't come back to engage myself into some mud-wrestling about this topic, since there is obviously no use in it;
I'm just very fed up with the attitude you show here, and your response was just too insolent regarding the circumstances to leave it totally uncommented.
Even if YOU probably won't take any of this to heart, of which I'm sure, it may at least save other people the time and trouble to post here, as it's obviously pretty useless to advance an opinion in this topic that is different from yours.



To sum things up:

1. You spam everybody who brings arguments against your "thesis" with your "sources" - "sources" which wouldn't even be regarded in the least quotable in academic sheets or discussions, since they are either popular sience or simply just not serious. Haven't seen one really scientifical useful source in here. Everybody who knows how to build a website and has a bit of a talent in writing could make such things - they're not provable, and can't thus be used for such purposes. I've seen one source which relates to only ONE book, which didn't even sound serious to me. Besides the quality of your so called sources, creating texts and arguments from carefully picked, one-sided sources so that they all fit into the concept of one's thesis is also regarded highly unscientifically...
And besides all this, you are dealing here with a topic that is in it's roots all about science itself. That's somehow contradictory to me.


2. The only FALLACY here is that you believe you know everything better than people who obviously DO know better than you since it's their daily business, people that are spending their whole life with such things. And I'm not even talking about me in this paragraph, not in the least (though I actually felt quite affronted to be honest, but I'll come back to that later on) I'm talking about the guys that wrote things like the Oxford Dictionaries mentioned somewhere in this topic or SCIENTIST that wrote REALLY scientifical papers, books etc. - don't you think contradicting them on the basis of trashy stuff you picked up somewhere on the web is a bit insolent?


3. You switch in your arguments quite often from Marxism being "A science" to "scientifical" and mix those concepts quite often up, though they obviously are neither synonyms nor necessarily entailing each other - and it seems to me that you even do this on purpose every time your argumentation would fail if you didn't, which is really unfair in a discussion.

So to put it in easy terms, your use of concepts - which are actually quite well defined and not left to any discussion - looks like that to me:

Apple = red
red = A colour
-> Apple = A colour

(Marxism = scientifical
scientifical = hm, has something to do with sciences
-> Marxism = a science)

... which is just not right. Just because something is scientifical, it's not a science on it's own! Go to a real library and take out a real scientifical book and read about it if you don't believe me. You do this twists over and over again, e.g.: yeah, Jane's work is considered to be SCIENTIFICAL, but it is NOT A SCIENCE on it's own!!!!


4. I hope you don't say to your doctor after he checked you whether he doesn't think that his diagnosis isn't a FALLACY, since you've read something about it on wikipedia. What you did up there is the same.
IF you should do so, I wish you good luck surviving the next 10 years then...



This topic is no discussion; you accept no other opinions beside your's, you only use people's posts to act like some kind of professor with expertise on this topic who graciously takes the time to show all those poor, uneducated souls out there how wrong they are, or, what would be worse, you only use any response to this topic to make all that loads of your ideas and the things you found out there on the web public, to get some audience for it. But it has nothing to to with a real, equal discussion, as you put yourself on a level high above everybody else during all those pages of this topic. I couln't find one piece of converstation in here in which you really admitted to have said something which might not be right or even considered another opinion to be right. You just spam it all with your "evidences". And have you maybe ever realized that unlike in other topics, you don't leave ANY space for users discussing AMONGST EACH OTHER about this topic? You basically respond to every post made in here as if people were only talking to you. You leave no room for interaction, but dominate the whole show (which is actually what this thread really is - a One-Man-Show, not a discussion)



And coming back to your demeanor on the subject:

You should be a bit more decent if you ask me. I mean, you're obviously not a professor in any of the disciplines touched by this topic, not even a practitioner in the least, so you shouldn't run around telling everybody you're the man.
Yeah, and this time I am talking about me inter alia. Men, I know I'm not omniscient on the topic of Marxism as I'm not focusing on it, but I'm studying disciplines of which it's a part amongst others, and those are disciplines whose rules and terms would have to be applied on it; I deal with those things every day, and I know quite well what the difference is between terms as science, scientifical, theories, ideologies and the like, as well about methods and the formalia of scientifical argumentations. And I dare say that I'm a good deal more qualified to talk about such definitions than a layman picking up random things on the web. So YOU are deifinetly not the one to tell ME that I'm uttering fallacies! But what is more important than my personal stuff is that it's also about all the other people that posted very often really really reasonable and good things in this topic, people which have qualified, accepted opinions, which could have probably led a quite intereting and flourishing discussion with each other, but whose arguments you simply declared being wrong, fallacious or idiotic all the like, leaving no space for a real exchange of ideas.
I just wondered from the very beginning and before even posting here for the first time on which right you do this. If it's about ego-boosting, I highly recommend sports instead.


Oh, and you don't have to spend your time throwing your nice and competent sounding words at me or quote half of my post to negative it's arguments with your "sources" and your "scientifical argumentations", since I won't come back to take even one more look on this scientifical tragedy. Your ignorant composure towards terms and facts originating from the academic universe, towards the work of generations of scholars or pure rationality was already defamation enough - Adieu. talk2hand

[Dermezel]

Hristis

Everybody who knows how to build a website and has a bit of a talent in writing could make such things - they're not provable, and can't thus be used for such purposes. I've seen one source which relates to only ONE book, which didn't even sound serious to me.

Well let me give you an example of one of Marx's hypothesis, and how it was verified by modern empirical data, and I want you to argue against this by showing me specifically why you think the data is unreliable, or why it is that the claim is untestable.

I'm going to do this by delving into one of Marx's most basic concepts, constant capital and variable capital, and how they effect the rate of surplus value:

Quote:

The surplus-value generated in the process of production by C, the capital advanced, or in other words, the self-expansion of the value of the capital C, presents itself for our consideration, in the first place, as a surplus, as the amount by which the value of the product exceeds the value of its constituent elements.

The capital C is made up of two components, one, the sum of money c laid out upon the means of production, and the other, the sum of money v expended upon the labour-power; c represents the portion that has become constant capital, and v the portion that has become variable capital. At first then, C = c + v: for example, if £500 is the capital advanced, its components may be such that the £500 = £410 const. + £90 var. When the process of production is finished, we get a commodity whose value = (c + v) + s, where s is the surplus-value; or taking our former figures, the value of this commodity may be (£410 const. + £90 var.) + £90 surpl. The original capital has now changed from C to C', from £500 to £590. The difference is s or a surplusvalue of £90, Since the value of the constituent elements of the product is equal to the value of the advanced capital, it is mere tautology to say, that the excess of the value of the product over the value of its constituent elements, is equal to the expansion of the capital advanced or to the surplus-value produced.

Simply put we have C (capital) = v + c (v= variable capital/human labor, c= constant capital/machinery and technical advances). C= v+c--&C'=v+c+s. C'= Capital accumulated at the end of the working day. s= surplus value.

In other words, you get more capital at the end of the working day then you had at the beginning of the working day.

Now Marx calls constant capital this because once established it generally sticks around. Once a factory has a better machine, or a company develops a way to increase work efficiency by say a new managerial method, these are rarely down graded. You don't often see factory owners purposely installing worse machines then they already have, it just doesn't make any sense economically.

But you do see them firing workers. That is why the last part of the above paragraph is essential, is basically notes that value transfers from variable capital to constant capital over time.

Or to put it in other words, machines replace human labor. That is what (s) is- surplus labor. And the more efficient you make the economy, the more value that is transferred to constant capital, the more productive the machines, the more free labor you have to allocate to other areas of the economy.

For example, if I buy a new machine for my factory that is twice as productive, I only need half as many workers.

Now how do you test this?

Well one way to test this would be to see if the prediction holds true, have various areas of the economy become more machine-intense over time? And the answer to that seems to be yes. Take candy production. The history channel recently did a special on candy and the history of candy production.

Quote:

It pulls, stretches, bubbles, hardens, crunches, and melts! We eat about 7-billion tons of it yearly. We're talking about Candy--loved by kids and savored by adults. Candy-making evolved from a handmade operation to high-tech mass production. Nowhere is that more apparent than at Hershey's. On a tour of their newest production facility, we learn how they process the cocoa bean. At See's Candy, we see how they make their famous boxed chocolates--on a slightly smaller scale than Hershey's. We get a sweet history lesson at Schimpff's Confectionery, where they still use small kettles, natural flavors, and hand-operated equipment.

Now this was quite telling because it actually compared the production rates of a modern day, major roboticized candy factory and a basic confectionery where candies are still made by hand and older machinery. They compared the production of these two factories by measuring against the confectionery's highest demand product- "hot reds". They calculated how much the confectionery can produce in a year, and then calculated that against the productive power of a modern candy factory like Hershey's. The results were very one sided- Hershey's candy factory can produce twice as much in a day as the can produce in a year.

Now this being the case, which way do you think the market will go? According to Marx's hypothesis, the more efficient factory, Hershey's will be able to sell much more candy at lower prices. It can do this because it requires much less work, and consequently labor to make the product.

And which way has the market actually gone? Well I think everyone has heard of Hershey's, but I never heard of Schimpff's Confectionery before this history channel special.

And it is not just candy, car production is heavily influenced by the trend of automation. In fact something like one out of every eight car factories now has a robotic assembly line.

Or to take a more chilling example, consider cars and horses. Horses used to be the primary means of transportation, and now travel horses are a rarity, at least in the industrialized world. In fact one could argue that cars have basically driven horses into extinction as a practical tool in modern society.

There are of course more examples, ranging from the beer industry of the US vs. Germany, with the US means of production being more centralized and machine intense, while Germany still relies primarily on local breweries, which are less automated and more dependent on human labor:

Quote:

What about the German beer industry? Well, the Germans are very efficient in some of their industries. The German metal-working industry and the German steel industry are equal in productivity to those of the United States, but the German beer-producing industry has a productivity only 43% that of the United States. And it's not that the Germans make bad beer; the Germans make wonderful beer. Whenever my wife and I go to Germany, we take along an extra suitcase specifically for the purpose of filling it up with bottles of German beer, which we take back and dole out to ourselves for the year after each of our trips to Germany. Why, then, since the Germans make such great beer, and since their industrial organization works so successfully for steel and metal, can't they achieve a successful industrial organization for beer?

Quote:

It turns out that the German beer industry suffers from small-scale production. There are 1,000 little local beer companies in Germany, shielded from competition with each other because each German brewery has virtually a local monopoly, and shielded from competition with imports. The United States has 67 major beer breweries, producing 23 billion liters of beer per year. Germany has 1,000 major beer breweries, producing only half as much beer per year as the United States. That's to say that the average brewery in the U.S. produces 31 times more beer than the average brewery in Germany.

That fact results from German local tastes and German government policies. German beer drinkers are fiercely loyal to their local brand of beer. And so there is no national brand of beer in Germany, analogous to Budweiser or Miller or Coors in the United States. Instead, most German beer is consumed within 30 miles of the place where it is brewed. And any of you who have been in Germany know that Germans love their local beer and loathe the beer that comes from next door. The result is that the German beer industry cannot profit from economies of scale. In the beer industry, as in other industries, production costs decrease greatly with size. The bigger the refrigerator unit for making the beer, and the longer the bottle-filling line, the cheaper is the cost of brewing beer. So these tiny German beer industries are relatively inefficient. There's no competition; there are just 1,000 local monopolies.

That outcome, of Germans having their local beer loyalties, is reinforced by German government law. The German government makes it hard for foreign beers to compete on the German market. The German government has so-called beer purity laws. The German government specifies exactly what can go into beer, and not surprisingly what can go into beer is what German breweries put into beer, and it's not what American, French, and Swedish breweries like to put into beer. So it's difficult for foreign breweries to compete on the German beer market. The result is that German beer is not exported very much. Any of you who like to buy Lowenbrau in the U.S. should look at the label in the supermarket: your U.S.-bought Lowenbrau is not brewed in Germany, it's brewed on license in the United States with American productivity and American efficiencies of scale.

The same inefficiency turns out to characterize some other German industries. The German soap industry and the German consumer electronics industry are also inefficient; their companies are not exposed to competition with each other, nor are they exposed to foreign competition, and so they do not acquire the best practices of international industry. But that disadvantage is not true for the German metal-producing industry or steel industry. There, big German companies compete with each other and they compete internationally, and therefore they are forced to acquire best international practices through competition.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond_rich/rich_p9.html

Now consider, how may German beer companies do you know of vs. brands like Miller, Budweiser, and Coor's? As Diamond notes, even German brand beer that we drink is usually not brewed in Germany.

So these specific examples are one way Marx's hypothesis of constant capital can be verified and tested.

Another way to test the theory is to look at GDP and GNP and see how much money has been going to labor vs. machinery, or that is to say, how much wealth has been transferred from variable capital to constant capital via ownership.

This can be done in two ways, first directly. The US government has kept track of how much of the overall GDP has been allocated to wages over time. This number has steadily declined since the measurement date.

Quote:

Wages, meanwhile, have fallen from 51.8 percent of GDP in 1960 to 45.6 percent in 2006.

http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/chcm012808oth.cfm

Another way is by measuring the income/wealth of those who own machines vs. those who rely on wages:

Quote:

Table 1: Distribution of net worth and financial wealth in the United States, 1983-2007
Total Net Worth
Top 1 percent Next 19 percent Bottom 80 percent
1983 33.8% 47.5% 18.7%
1989 37.4% 46.2% 16.5%
1992 37.2% 46.6% 16.2%
1995 38.5% 45.4% 16.1%
1998 38.1% 45.3% 16.6%
2001 33.4% 51.0% 15.6%
2004 34.3% 50.3% 15.3%
2007 34.6% 50.5% 15.0%

Financial Wealth
Top 1 percent Next 19 percent Bottom 80 percent
1983 42.9% 48.4% 8.7%
1989 46.9% 46.5% 6.6%
1992 45.6% 46.7% 7.7%
1995 47.2% 45.9% 7.0%
1998 47.3% 43.6% 9.1%
2001 39.7% 51.5% 8.7%
2004 42.2% 50.3% 7.5%
2007 42.7% 50.3% 7.0%


Table 3: Share of wealth held by the Bottom 99% and Top 1% in the United States, 1922-2007.
Bottom 99 percent Top 1 percent
1922 63.3% 36.7%
1929 55.8% 44.2%
1933 66.7% 33.3%
1939 63.6% 36.4%
1945 70.2% 29.8%
1949 72.9% 27.1%
1953 68.8% 31.2%
1962 68.2% 31.8%
1965 65.6% 34.4%
1969 68.9% 31.1%
1972 70.9% 29.1%
1976 80.1% 19.9%
1979 79.5% 20.5%
1981 75.2% 24.8%
1983 69.1% 30.9%
1986 68.1% 31.9%
1989 64.3% 35.7%
1992 62.8% 37.2%
1995 61.5% 38.5%
1998 61.9% 38.1%
2001 66.6% 33.4%
2004 65.7% 34.3%
2007 65.4% 34.6%

Table 5a: Concentration of stock ownership in the United States, 2001-2007
Percent of all stock owned:
Wealth class 2001 2004 2007
Top 1% 33.5% 36.7% 38.3%
Next 19% 55.8% 53.9% 52.8%
Bottom 80% 10.7% 9.4% 8.9%

Table 5b: Amount of stock owned by various wealth classes in the U.S., 2007
Percent of households owning stocks worth:
Wealth class $0 (no stocks) $1-$10,000 More than $10,000
Top 1% 7.4% 4.2% 88.4%
95-99% 7.8% 2.7% 89.5%
90-95% 13.2% 5.4% 81.4%
80-90% 17.9% 10.9% 71.2%
60-80% 34.6% 18.3% 47.1%
40-60% 52.3% 25.6% 22.1%
20-40% 69.7% 21.6% 8.7%
Bottom 20% 84.7% 14.3% 2.0%
TOTAL 50.9% 17.5% 31.6%

http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

Simply put, stock ownership can be equated to machine ownership, or control of constant capital. Variable capital can be equated to wages. If you look at the owners of stock vs. the people who primarily rely on wages, a clear picture emerges as to who is becoming wealthier over time.

This explains things, like why it is CEOs are making hundreds of times more then their fellow employees.

These are just some of the many ways a hypothesis of Marxism (constant capital displaces variable) has been empirically proven beyond all reasonable doubt. This is not my opinion. This is fact. Please try actually reading before you make a criticism again.

[Hristis]

Men, are you even taking a look at the things you're replying to??? eek
You quoted me on something I said about your SOURCES, not on anything Marx has said at all. I assume this happened just because you scanned the post for words like "not provable".
It is so out of context what you replied. What you did up there proved exactly every little statement I made up there about you and your argumentation, and I highly recommend to re-read what I have written. I think I was right saying that you use replies in this topic only to spread your ideas and "sources" to the world, being not even interested in what other users post in here.
I said I wouldn't return here to respond, and I won't do it - this last bit was just because you posted here after me while I still had the page opened and because it was sooo much showing that my statements about your strategy of leading this discussion was utterly right. And with this, I'm leaving this topic.

[Morberticus]

http://books.google.ie/books?id=EU_r2eBDBZYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false

An interesting book dealing with Marxism and science. It talks about the type of hypotheses mentioned by Dermezel in chapter 2.

[Ekeda]

Why in the holy piss is this thread still around?

[Dermezel]

Hristis

Men, are you even taking a look at the things you're replying to??? eek
You quoted me on something I said about your SOURCES, not on anything Marx has said at all. I assume this happened just because you scanned the post for words like "not provable".
It is so out of context what you replied. What you did up there proved exactly every little statement I made up there about you and your argumentation, and I highly recommend to re-read what I have written. I think I was right saying that you use replies in this topic only to spread your ideas and "sources" to the world, being not even interested in what other users post in here.
I said I wouldn't return here to respond, and I won't do it - this last bit was just because you posted here after me while I still had the page opened and because it was sooo much showing that my statements about your strategy of leading this discussion was utterly right. And with this, I'm leaving this topic.

Well I'm sorry you feel what I said was out of context, but generally in science debates works by comparing different theories according to the evidence and data. Some examples include Big Bang theory vs. Steady State, Darwinism vs. Lamarckism.

To quote Dr. Massimo Pigliucci*

Quote:

How does science work, really? You can read all about it in plenty of texts in philosophy of science, but if you have ever experienced the making of science on an everyday basis, chances are you will feel dissatisfied with the airtight account given by philosophers. Too neat, not enough mess.

To be sure, I am not denying the existence of the scientific method(s), as radical philosopher Paul Feyerabend is infamously known for having done. But I know from personal experience that scientists don’t spend their time trying to falsify hypotheses, as Karl Popper wished they did. By the same token, while occasionally particular scientific fields do undergo periods of upheaval, Thomas Kuhn’s distinction between “normal science” and scientific “revolutions” is too simple. Was the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s and 40s in evolutionary biology a revolution or just a significant adjustment? Was Eldredge and Gould’s theory of “punctuated equilibria” to explain certain features of the fossil record a blip on the screen or, at least, a minor revolution?

But, perhaps, the least convincing feature of the scientific method is not something theorized by philosophers, but something actually practiced by almost every scientist, especially those involved in heavily statistical disciplines such as organismal biology and the social sciences. Whenever we run an experiment, we analyze the data in a way to verify if the so-called “null hypothesis” has been successfully rejected. If so, we open a bottle of champagne and proceed to write up the results to place a new small brick in the edifice of knowledge.

Let me explain. A null hypothesis is what would happen if nothing happened. Suppose you are testing the effect of a new drug on the remission of breast cancer. Your null hypothesis is that the drug has no effect: within a properly controlled experimental population, the subjects receiving the drug do not show a statistically significant difference in their remission rate when compared to those who did not receive the drug. If you can reject the null, this is great news: the drug is working, and you have made a potentially important contribution toward bettering humanity’s welfare. Or have you?

The problem is that the whole idea of a null hypothesis, introduced in statistics by none other than Sir Ronald Fisher (the father of much modern statistical analyses), constraints our questions to ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers. Nature is much too subtle for that. We probably had a pretty good idea, before we even started the experiment, that the null hypothesis was going to be rejected. After all, surely we don’t embark in costly (both in terms of material resources and of human potential) experiments just on the whim of the moment. We don’t randomly test all possible chemical substances for their role as potential anti-carcinogens. What we really want to know is if the new drug performed better than other, already known, ones—and by how much. That is, every time we run an experiment we have two factors that Fisherian (also known as “frequentist,” see below) statistics does not take into account: first, we have a priori expectations about the outcome of the experiments, i.e., we don’t enter the trial as a blank slate (contrary to what is assumed by most statistical tests); second, we normally compare more than two hypotheses (often several), and the least interesting of them is the null one.

An increasing number of statisticians and scientists are beginning to realize this, and are ironically turning to a solution that was devises, and widely used, well before Fisher. That solution was contained in an obscure paper that one Reverend Thomas Bayes published back in 1763, and is revolutionizing how scientists do their work, as well as how philosophers think about science.

Bayesian statistics simply acknowledges that what we are really after is an estimate of the probability of a certain hypothesis to be true, given what we know before running an experiment, as well as what we learn from the experiment itself. Indeed, a simple formula known as Bayes theorem says that the probability that a hypothesis (among many) is correct, given the available data, depends on the probability that the data would be observed if that hypothesis were true, multiplied by the a priori probability (i.e., based on previous experience) that the hypothesis is true.

In Fisherian terms, the probability of an event is the frequency with which that event would occur given certain circumstances (hence the term “frequentist” to identify this classical approach). For example, the probability of rolling a three with one (unloaded) die is 1/6, because there are six possible, equiprobable outcomes, and on average (i.e., on long enough runs) you will get a three one time every six.

In Bayesian terms, however, a probability is really an estimate of the degree of belief (as in confidence, not blind faith) that a researcher can put into a particular hypothesis, given all she knows about the problem at hand. Your degree of belief that threes come out once every six rolls of the die comes from both a priori considerations about fair dice, and the empirical fact that you have observed this sort of events in the past. However, should you witness a repeated specified outcome over and over, your degree of belief in the hypothesis of a fair die would keep going down until you strongly suspect foul play. It makes intuitive sense that the degree of confidence in a hypothesis changes with the available evidence, and one can think of different scientific hypotheses as competing for the highest degree of Bayesian probability. New experiments will lower our confidence in some hypotheses, and increase the one in others. Importantly, we might never be able to settle on one final hypothesis, because the data may be roughly equally compatible with several alternatives (a frustrating situation very familiar to any scientist and known in philosophy as the underdetermination of hypotheses by the data).

You can see why a Bayesian description of the scientific enterprise—while not devoid of problems and critics—is revealing itself to be a tantalizing tool for both scientists, in their everyday practice, and for philosophers, as a more realistic way of thinking about science as a process.

Perhaps more importantly, Bayesian analyses are allowing researchers to save money and human lives during clinical trials because they permit the researcher to constantly re-evaluate the likelihood of different hypotheses during the experiment. If we don’t have to wait for a long and costly clinical trial to be over before realizing that, say, two of the six drugs being tested are, in fact, significantly better than the others, Reverend Bayes might turn out to be a much more important figure in science than anybody has imagined over the last two centuries.

http://www.freeatvt.org/massimo/jan02.html

So what this tells us is that first of all the claim that including statistics, or even heavy reliance on statistics is incompatible with science is wrong. Organismal biology heavily relies on statistics, as does astrophysics.

Second, science is usually about competing hypothesis. The scientific method does not work like Descartes method of hyperbolic doubt where you subject a theory to every possible objection in a vacuum. You generally compare two or more theories and find which is more warranted by the data.

[zz1000zz]

I don't get the point of this topic. The opening post does not address the question raised in the topic title, so just what is the discussion supposed to be over?

[Dermezel]

Ekeda

Why in the holy piss is this thread still around?

It's probably some ideological issue with Marxism that transfers to his economic theories, so like if a person disagree with one they disagree with the other. Also a lot of people here sound confused on the issue of demarcation in science, and how that has never been definitively resolved.

[Dermezel]

zz1000zz

I don't get the point of this topic. The opening post does not address the question raised in the topic title, so just what is the discussion supposed to be over?

Wait, are you arguing it does not reach some philosophical demarcation, like testability? Or that it is not a practical explanation for scientific data? Also it is naturalistic, whereas marginalism is metaphysical.

[zz1000zz]

Dermezel

zz1000zz

I don't get the point of this topic. The opening post does not address the question raised in the topic title, so just what is the discussion supposed to be over?

Wait, are you arguing it does not reach some philosophical demarcation, like testability? Or that it is not a practical explanation for scientific data? Also it is naturalistic, whereas marginalism is metaphysical.

Your opening post never discusses what is required to be "a science," nor did it make any attempt to show Marxism meets such a requirement. The opening post and the title do not discuss the same thing. This point was highlighted in the very first response you received in this topic:

Golden Dysprosium

What on earth would make Marxism a science? neutral
MArxism is not science; Marxism is a philosophical system.
Stop trying to pass off Eggos as toast!

You completely ignored this post.

The question in your title is, "Is Marxism a science?" Despite the length of your initial post, you made no attempt to answer the question. When directly questioned about that issue, you simply refused to answer. I am hard pressed to find any explanation other than willful trolling.

You made this topic. I think it is about time for you to deal with the topic. So tell us, what is the definition of "a science"? Does Marxism fit this definition?

[Golden Dysprosium]

lol that totally made my day. xd

[Dermezel]

Morberticus

http://books.google.ie/books?id=EU_r2eBDBZYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false

An interesting book dealing with Marxism and science. It talks about the type of hypotheses mentioned by Dermezel in chapter 2.

Okay one point the author makes early on in the chapter is that Marx's "labor theory of value" (actually developed by Ricardo and economists of that period) is that there is no evidence that the cost of labor determines value. The author specifically says there is no empirical evidence that supports this and implies the claim is untestable.

This really goes against a great deal of empirical data. It is well known that the higher general wages are in a country, the higher the costs of goods and services tend to be in a country. Consider for example how much goods and services cost in India vs. the US, or Mexico vs. Northern Europe.

Consider this study of price determinants in Sweden for example, where it shows that the labor theory of value is empirically correlated with general prices.

[Golden Dysprosium]

It also says:

Quote:

This study is unfortunately limited by lack of data on capital stocks, so profit rates and organic
composition of capital are all in flow, rather than stock terms...This reveals a real problem of measurement. Since no skill weighting is used we are in effect
assuming that all labor hours are of average skill, 'simple labor'. If one uses wages instead the
assumption would be that different wage-rates reflect exact skill differences. Reality lies somewhere
between these opposite assumptions and although the empirical significance of this problem is
likely to be limited, both methods are tested...Moreover, it excludes four sectors from the original data that exhibit strong rent
effects, no such considerations were taken in this study. If one uses the wage-bill instead of
estimated direct labor hours, as discussed above, coefficient of variation drops from 0.463 to 0.372.

You also keep switching it between Marx and Smith. The LtoV was created by Smith/Ricardo, but it's more commonly associated with Marx. If you're saying that it supports the labor theory of value, you're saying that it supports Smith's work, which Marx "stole" (being a hack, and all), since the LtoV was originally from him, rather than Marx.