> >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.
Not at all. With quantum probabilities you can predict values down to as
many decimal places as you care to write. Quantum is not riddled with
exceptions and ceteris paribus clauses.
>Physics is now a contradictory unity of extreme precision and extreme
>fuzziness, just as a dialectics of nature might have expected.
What are you talking about?
>>
>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.
It's not superiority/inferiority thing, it's just different.
>This won't fly anymore with us social scientists.
I'm a Michigan=trained socisl scientists myself, Charles--my PhD is joint
polisci and philosophy.
>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.
Some and some, but more like evolutionary biology, which hardly has any
lawlike generalizations at all. That doesn't, I say again, make it worse or
inferior.
>
>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.
I said something like this in The Paradox of Ideology, by way of explaining
why therre is no consenus in social science.
>
>Marxism makes very good and lawlike generalizations.
>
A few, but which are you thinking of?
>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.
>
You asked what the difference was. I never said social science should aspire
to be like physics.
>
> They are
>riddled with exceptions, burdened with ceteris paribus clauses, and
>generally fuzzy.
>
>^^^^^^^
>
>CB: There are lots of these in physics, chemistry and biology.
>
Biology, yes. Name a few in physics and chemistry.
>But that subjectivities play a bigger role in social science does not mean
>there are not also objective exactnesses.
I agree.
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.
Not a _very_ precise grid.
So, natural scientists need a new word. "Lawlike" is closer to what social
scientists have.
>
That's what I said.
>
>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.
Me too.
>
>CB: In this sense, Marx's "value" is not heuristic, but a fundamental
>theoretical concept.
>
I'm not persuaded.
jks
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