LOV and LTV by Justin Schwartz 05 February 2002 20:05 UTC
I >think Marx was genuinely dialectical in a specific Hegelian sense--he >proceeds by immanent critique, for example--but this isn't a matter of >giving an alternative to explanation by means of probabalistic laws or >tendecies, but rather a style of explanation that offers a framework for >offering lawlike explanations. > >^^^^^^^^^ > >CB: What's the difference between a lawful explanation and a lawlike >explanation ? ( no fuzzy answers) > The explanations invoked in physics are lawful, i.e., they use preciselt formulated lawsto generate specific (if sometimes probabilistic) predictions. ^^^^^^ CB: Of course, admitting probablism admits the very fuzziness that this old superiority complex of "hard" sciences claims is its superiority to "soft" social science. Hawking is oh so fuzzily dialectical. Physics is now a contradictory unity of extreme precision and extreme fuzziness, just as a dialectics of nature might have expected. Even many of physics' laws now remind of jurisprudential laws ( as I mentioned to you in correspondence ten or so years ago, before you were in law) - probablistic and tendencies. ^^^^^^^ On the most charir=table interpretation of laws in social science, any lawlike generalizations that exist are not like this. ^^^^^^^^ CB: Naw. I overcame my social science inferority complex to physical sciences long ago. This won't fly anymore with us social scientists. Social scientist generalizations are very lawlike, in the original sense of "law" , to which physics and certainly biology, have come full circle and retuned to. To paraphrase the leading anthropologist Leslie A. White (sort of opposite to postmods) a main reason that social science is rendered "soft" and impotent in the bourgeois academy is that the best social science today, Marxism, would overthrow the existing order. Marxism makes very good and lawlike generalizations. I'm mean you can say that the laws of history are not as mechanical as the laws of mechanics, i.e. physics. But that's a tautology. So what ? Physics is not the archtype model for all science. ^^^^^^ They are riddled with exceptions, burdened with ceteris paribus clauses, and generally fuzzy. ^^^^^^^ CB: There are lots of these in physics, chemistry and biology. But that subjectivities play a bigger role in social science does not mean there are not also objective exactnesses. There are subjectivities in law situations, but the law manages to put a very precise grid over social situations. Social science can obtain a literally similar _lawlike_ precision. So, natural scientists need a new word. "Lawlike" is closer to what social scientists have. ^^^^^^^^ Moreover many social scientific explanations are, like the explanations in evolutionary biology, entirely nonwalike, but instead proceed by giving a specific sort of narrative. Darwinian explanations are generally like this. However, there sre some more or lessrobust explanatory generalizations that are like laws, if not ful--fledged laws like the laws of physics. Precise enough for you? Books have been written on this; I could give you cites. ^^^^^^^^^^ CB: See my discussion above. I have been studying and essaying this issue for over 30 years. I have concluded that the claims of physics to being more "lawlike" is ironically upside down. But not only that, social science has identified satisfactorily , from the standpoint of knowledge, many generlizations, and laws,that can guide practice. I reject the physical sciences claims to lawlike superority and the like. >CB: Is exploitation a heuristic ? Does the other way of showing that >exploitation is going on use heuristic devices ? > No, exploitation is a fundamental fact. And yes my way of proceeding does use heuristics; there's nothing wrong with using heuristics, as long as you remember they are not fundamental theoretical concepts that describe the Way Things Are. (I was a graduate student of Prof. Mary B. Hesse, author of the pioneering study "Models and Analogies in Science," still the place to start in thinking about this stuff.) ^^^^^^^^ CB: In this sense, Marx's "value" is not heuristic, but a fundamental theoretical concept.
