----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, February 02, 2002 12:39 PM Subject: [PEN-L:22240] Historical Materialism
Historical Materialism by Ian Murray 01 February 2002 22:33 UTC ================ Ok, but given the Quine-Duhem underdetermination problem-link below-is not the burden of proof for the indispensability of Marx's value theory on those who wish to retain it? Steve Fleetwood has an essay on this in a recent issue of Capital & Class. Ian ^^^^^^^^ CB: Before you get to that, isn't the burden on you to demonstrate that the theory alternative to Marx's explains what Marx's theory does ? Justin and the AM's haven't quite proven that to everybody yet. ================= If Marx's value theory is axiomatic and purely analytic how can it explain? If the quantitative aspects of the theory are not capable of generating consistent derivations -whether inductive, abductive or deductive- from the abstractions that are the 'hard core', what's being explained? I'm not convinced that explanation=proof in non-quantitative social theory and it seems that too many have argued that explanation must = proof for their opponents yet don't apply this to their own formulations, so round and round we go, like theists and atheists. What we see from AM's are investigation of hypotheses that are in KM's corpus and thinking through the consequences. If those hypotheses don't hold up let them go; if they do, retain them. It's a matter of discussion as to whether the hypotheses that are discarded even need to be replaced. There's still a big Mirowskian-Klamerian project of investigating all the metaphors, similes etc., in the 'hard core' [metaphor alert] of Marx's work, no? Ian
