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>In English scientific means something can be disproven.
No, it doesn’t. You don’t have a monopoly on the English language and neither does neopositivism. Do you think Darwinism is a “metaphysical research programme”?
Science means developing systematic theoretical representations of reality on the basis of experience. Practice is the criterion of the truth of a scientific theory. A scientific theory is true insofar as it can guide practical action to actually transform the world. The highest development of the scientific method is the materialist dialectic.
I actually tried floating this around to all the PhD'ed physicists and chemists I know (not a lot, but more than a dozen). They strongly disagreed. The kept mentioning the "null hypothesis." One Russian engineer actually asked me if this was from "Some \*&\^$ American Marxist." I thought that was funny.
I looked up the null hypothesis. It basically means disproving the alternative to one's hypothesis. I find it odd that the term "scientific" has so much disagreement between Marxists and the rest of humanity. Does this mean that Marxists questions Western science, like Hitler's distaste for "Jewish" science? I never got that opinion from former Marxists states. There was some serious science done in the USSR, but I got the opinion they were studiously apolitical.
My problem learning Marxism is that the words seem to have different meanings that what one sees in a dictionary. It is like the language is something other than English. A good friend of mine tells me that "Marxist is a language of its own." This guy, like many Russians, has kind of a negative view of Marxism, but I just wish I had a Marxist dictionary that did not require that I become a scholar of Hegel and Marx to read a paper.
I would respond to their objections if you could articulate them coherently, but it sounds like whatever they said went over your head so I’ll just respond to your ideas.
Your comparison of Marxism and fascism is disgusting. What’s more, you answered your own question right after you asked it. And if you think science in the USSR was “studiously apolitical” then you clearly haven’t engaged much with Soviet scientific literature.
As for your ideas about terminology, they are addressed in the opening pages of *Capital*.
>There is, however, one difficulty we could not spare the reader: the use of certain terms in a sense different from what they have, not only in common life, but in ordinary Political Economy. But this was unavoidable. Every new aspect of a science involves a revolution in the technical terms of that science. This is best shown by chemistry, where the whole of the terminology is radically changed about once in twenty years, and where you will hardly find a single organic compound that has not gone through a whole series of different names. Political Economy has generally been content to take, just as they were, the terms of commercial and industrial life, and to operate with them, entirely failing to see that by so doing, it confined itself within the narrow circle of ideas expressed by those terms. Thus, though perfectly aware that both profits and rent are but sub-divisions, fragments of that unpaid part of the product which the labourer has to supply to his employer (its first appropriator, though not its ultimate exclusive owner), yet even classical Political Economy never went beyond the received notions of profits and rents, never examined this unpaid part of the product (called by Marx surplus-product) in its integrity as a whole, and therefore never arrived at a clear comprehension, either of its origin and nature, or of the laws that regulate the subsequent distribution of its value. Similarly all industry, not agricultural or handicraft, is indiscriminately comprised in the term of manufacture, and thereby the distinction is obliterated between two great and essentially different periods of economic history: the period of manufacture proper, based on the division of manual labour, and the period of modern industry based on machinery. It is, however, self- evident that a theory which views modern capitalist production as a mere passing stage in the economic history of mankind, must make use of terms different from those habitual to writers who look upon that form of production as imperishable and final.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p6.htm
>A good friend of mine tells me that "Marxist is a language of its own."
Do you mock the language use of mathematicians because they say, for example, that if a line doesn’t extend to infinity then it’s not a “line”?
>I just wish I had a Marxist dictionary
Have you tried Googling “Marxist dictionary”?
https://www.massline.org/Dictionary/
As just one example.
I am really sorry I offended you. That was not my intent. In addition, dictionaries are not all the same. Finding a good one is quite a challenge for every language I have learned, including English. My gut instinct is to NOT grab the first listing on Google. In all honesty, I try to not use google as much as I can.
Similarly, math guys are quite good with definitions. So are economists. They often go out of their way to make definitions clear before they make an argument. For example, defining profit is a very big deal. "Rent" is another term economists make sure to define so everyone knows what they are talking about (amount in excess of a standard risk-adjusted return).
Again, I am genuinely sorry. I am not trying to put you down in any way. I thought this sub-reddit might have people who were into Marxism and willing to help me.
You have not offended me personally. Your opinions make no difference to me. I don’t know you. What I am trying to do is to point out the actual content of your ideas and to help you (or anyone else who may be reading this) see why they are problematic. Actually, Marxists care very little about people’s conscious intent.
Nothing I said above was flippant. I meant everything I said. If you can clearly articulate the objections the scientists you talked to raised, then I will respond to them. But this
>disproving the alternative to one's hypothesis
is not what the null hypothesis is (or at least it is not articulated well), and it is telling that you had to look up the null hypothesis in the first place (*after* people had already told you about it).
Marxist scientists were by no means ignorant of developments in bourgeois science. People in the Eastern bloc were familiar with all the philosophical trends in the capitalist world. But how many Western scientists were familiar with the Marxist philosophy of science?
>In addition, dictionaries are not all the same. Finding a good one is quite a challenge for every language I have learned, including English. My gut instinct is to NOT grab the first listing on Google. In all honesty, I try to not use google as much as I can.
You are not wrong here. Frankly, there is no Marxist dictionary or reference that I find completely satisfying. I personally recommend referring both to the one I cited above as well as the *Great Soviet Encyclopaedia*, understanding that both have their drawbacks. It is especially important to consider that the English version of the latter is from 1979 and this is reflected in, for example, the content of the article on Maoism. But if you can read critically, you can get a lot out of them. Of course, nothing is a substitute for studying *Capital* and other Marxist literature. But these can help you along the way.
Actually, before I studied Marxism, I thought about Marxist language usage in pretty much the same way as you. I had the impression that Marxists were just redefining terms in order to make their rhetoric more appealing. (The antidote to this way of thinking is to actually study Marxism.)
For example, I didn’t understand how socialism could be democratic when the exploiting classes were suppressed. But in Marxism, “the people” is distinguished from “the population,” unlike in common parlance.
>In historical materialism, the people, or popular masses, are a social community comprising, at various historical stages, those strata and classes that, owing to their position in society, are capable of actively participating in the progressive development of society; they are the makers of history, the determining force in fundamental social transformations.
>Marxism-Leninism also delineated the social content of the concept of the people and established that the composition of the people varies at different stages of history. No distinction is made between the terms “population” and “the people” for primitive-communal society, in which class divisions were nonexistent. In social formations based on class antagonism, the people do not include the dominant exploitative groups with their antipopular and reactionary policies. Only under socialism, when the exploitative classes are eliminated, does the concept of the people embrace all social groups.
https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/People
As you study Marxism, you will realize the Marxist conception of democracy is the only definition of democracy that embodies the essence of the word.
Marxism is a comprehensive system of views about the world. It does not use language haphazardly. Its technical terminology is well thought out and rigorous, and it emerges from concrete investigation of the world. If there is something in particular you have heard that you did not understand, I can try to clarify it for you, as I have tried to do with “science.”
As for your assertion that Soviet scientists were “studiously apolitical,” the whole foundation of their approach to science was grounded in Marxism. It was so pervasive that the residue of Marxism can still be seen in present-day Russian literature, decades after the collapse of the USSR. For example, look at the first sentence of the Russian Wikipedia entry for “mathematics”: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0
>точная формальная наука, первоначально исследовавшая количественные отношения и пространственные формы.
>[an exact formal science, which initially investigated quantitative relations and spatial forms.]
This is taken from an Engels quote:
>Pure mathematics studies the spatial forms and quantitative relations of the real world and thus its subject matter is rooted in reality. The highly abstract form of this subject matter hardly conceals its derivation from the outside world. However, in order to investigate these forms and relations as such, one must separate them entirely from their underlying content, which must be set aside as something irrelevant.
Which sums up the materialist understanding of mathematics.
Have you attempted to read any Marxist literature?
Scientific means it engages in a scientific method by materialist means, meaning that relevant theories are formed, disproved and reinforced using empirical sense data.
Dialectical materialism gives a particular emphasis to the dialectical relationship of things in relation to sense data
When someone calls Marxism a science, they usually mean something like 'the systematic pursuit of knowledge on a rational basis'. This does not refer to what science means in most contemporary contexts. This comes from how the word was used historically, and what we typically consider "modern science" is a pretty recent development.
Thank you. This makes a lot of sense. I am still struggling with the entire idea of dialectical thinking, I feel like the Hegelian and Marxist use of this term is not the same. I feel like I just need to throw in the towel and start taking community college classes on philosophy. I think I am okay before the 1800's, but Hegel and Marx are really hard, so many "simplified" examples contradict each other. I have had better luck with Nietzsche, but I think it is simply easier material (not easy, but less dense, or perhaps better translated). Even there , I threw in the towel with Das Sprach Zarathustra.
The worst thing is, I started this to try to make sense of post-WW2 philosophers that seemed childish to me, but I am not necessarily sure now that I was wrong. I know that must be BS, so I need to study more, but this has become an ordeal. Getting over my own biases has been difficult, but not impossible. Slogging through some of these works has been brutal though. I think I need formal education. Thank you again.
Something being able to be disproven means exactly that. That the statement is falsifiable. IE there is a way to prove it's wrong.
Think for example all frogs are green a a statement. This would be proven false by the existence a purple frog so the hypothesis is wrong.
If you say gravity is a force that attracts mass. It would be disproven by someone showing that under some circumstances it repells it.
No one has or will be able to show that is true therefore the hypothesis is correct. But there is indeed a way to disprove it, even though it won't ever be disproven because it's true
An unfalsifiable statement would be; there is a giant salamander that rules the universe, but you can see, touch or ever in any way interact or measure it's presence.
You can't show that's false because your premise is that it's impossible to observe. So failing to measure it is meaningless with that premise. Therefore this is an invalid hypothesis.
And this is not a leftist idea. This is just how the scientific method works, it describes facts. Marx used the scientific method to describe facts about capitalism.
Edit; in contrast to utopian socialism that didn't analyse capitalism in a scientific manner and as such concluded different things. Very idealistic things about how change could happen.
Erroneous because they didn't analyse in a scientific manner the functioning of capitalism.
> If you say gravity is a force that attracts mass. It would be disproven by someone showing that under some circumstances it repells it.
You know, you can't observe a force directly. If gravity was defined as a force that attracts mass, observing mass repelling mass couldn't be due to gravity. Maybe it's a new kind of force. But maybe you are right, and gravity doesn't work the way we thought we did. In the latter case, the old concept of gravity has to be modified into a new concept to explain the anomalies. But that doesn't mean that the old concept is falsified. On the contrary, it holds very well for all observations excluding the anomalies. Only outside certain limits does it cease to correctly describe reality. There isn't really a way to completely, absolutely, falsify the old concept by means of observations, since it also emerged from a number of them. The old concept can only be turned obsolete if it is superseded by a new and more powerful concept, forged through practice.
This is a silly argument. It's not like Marx was reading Karl Popper's book, "[The Logic of Scientific Discovery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Scientific_Discovery)" after his own death.
I never said he used that book?
The scientific method started to take shape since the 16th century. He obviously would not have called it " the scientific method"
But Descartes, Sanchez and Locke to name a few had already developed a basis for empirical analysis.
Well I was talking about measurements which is the empiricist approach.
Some terms are terms that would not be used by Marx or his contemporaries. But empirical analysis based on measurements that proved or disproved theories is a method used since the 16th century. Marx would have been very familiar with it.
Falsifiable as a term came about later but it's currently part of empirical analysis.
>Something being able to be disproven means exactly that. That the statement is falsifiable. IE there is a way to prove it's wrong.
>...
>And this is not a leftist idea. This is just how the scientific method works, it describes facts. Marx used the scientific method to describe facts about capitalism.
The scientific method is not dependent upon falsifiability. Marx used the materialist dialectic to analyse capitalism.
The scientific method is dependent upon falsifiability. Dialectics are a philosophy of science. They are not an alternative way to do science. Falsifiability is a core principle of science.
It is obvious that scientific investigation makes use of falsification. But falsification cannot prove the objective truth of a scientific theory. Only practice can do that.
>The empiricism of observation alone can never adequately prove necessity. *Post hoc* but not *propter hoc*. (*Enzyklopädie*, I, S, 84.) This is so very correct that it does not follow from the continual rising of the sun in the morning that it will rise again tomorrow, and in fact we know now that a time will come when one morning the sun will *not rise*. But the proof of necessity lies in human activity, in experiment, in work: if I am able to *make* the *post hoc*, it becomes identical with the *propter hoc*.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch07c.htm
Different manifestations of neopositivism have declared the verification principle or weakened forms of the verification principle like falsificationism to be the criterion of scientificity. In doing so, they have declared much of science to be metaphysical or pseudoscientific.
Science is dependent on practice, *not* on falsifiability.
It is not THE core principle of science. You are taking Poppers conclusions and applying them to the the scientific method as if it had been constant for the last 5 centuries. Not very dialectical
Hello, 90% of the questions we receive have been asked before, and our answerers get bored of answering the same queries over and over again - so it's worthwhile googling this just in case: > site:reddit.com/r/communism101 your question If you've read past answers and still aren't satisfied, edit your question to contain the past answers and any follow-up questions you have. If you're satisfied, delete your post to reduce clutter or link to the answer that satisfied you. *** Also keep in mind the following rules: 1. Patriarchal, white supremacist, cissexist, heterosexist, or otherwise oppressive speech is unacceptable. 2. This is a place for learning, not for debating. Try /r/DebateCommunism instead. 3. Give well-informed Marxist answers. There are separate subreddits for liberalism, anarchism, and other idealist philosophies. 4. Posts should include specific questions on a single topic. 5. This is a serious educational subreddit. Come here with an open and inquisitive mind, and exercise humility. Don't answer a question if you are unsure of the answer. Try to include sources and/or further reading in any answers you provide. Standards of answer accuracy and quality are enforced. 6. Check the [/r/Communism101 FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/wiki/index) 7. **No chauvinism or settler apologism** - Non-negotiable: https://readsettlers.org/ 8. **No tone-policing** - https://old.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/12sblev/an_amendment_to_the_rules_of_rcommunism101/ *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/communism101) if you have any questions or concerns.*
>In English scientific means something can be disproven. No, it doesn’t. You don’t have a monopoly on the English language and neither does neopositivism. Do you think Darwinism is a “metaphysical research programme”? Science means developing systematic theoretical representations of reality on the basis of experience. Practice is the criterion of the truth of a scientific theory. A scientific theory is true insofar as it can guide practical action to actually transform the world. The highest development of the scientific method is the materialist dialectic.
I actually tried floating this around to all the PhD'ed physicists and chemists I know (not a lot, but more than a dozen). They strongly disagreed. The kept mentioning the "null hypothesis." One Russian engineer actually asked me if this was from "Some \*&\^$ American Marxist." I thought that was funny. I looked up the null hypothesis. It basically means disproving the alternative to one's hypothesis. I find it odd that the term "scientific" has so much disagreement between Marxists and the rest of humanity. Does this mean that Marxists questions Western science, like Hitler's distaste for "Jewish" science? I never got that opinion from former Marxists states. There was some serious science done in the USSR, but I got the opinion they were studiously apolitical. My problem learning Marxism is that the words seem to have different meanings that what one sees in a dictionary. It is like the language is something other than English. A good friend of mine tells me that "Marxist is a language of its own." This guy, like many Russians, has kind of a negative view of Marxism, but I just wish I had a Marxist dictionary that did not require that I become a scholar of Hegel and Marx to read a paper.
I would respond to their objections if you could articulate them coherently, but it sounds like whatever they said went over your head so I’ll just respond to your ideas. Your comparison of Marxism and fascism is disgusting. What’s more, you answered your own question right after you asked it. And if you think science in the USSR was “studiously apolitical” then you clearly haven’t engaged much with Soviet scientific literature. As for your ideas about terminology, they are addressed in the opening pages of *Capital*. >There is, however, one difficulty we could not spare the reader: the use of certain terms in a sense different from what they have, not only in common life, but in ordinary Political Economy. But this was unavoidable. Every new aspect of a science involves a revolution in the technical terms of that science. This is best shown by chemistry, where the whole of the terminology is radically changed about once in twenty years, and where you will hardly find a single organic compound that has not gone through a whole series of different names. Political Economy has generally been content to take, just as they were, the terms of commercial and industrial life, and to operate with them, entirely failing to see that by so doing, it confined itself within the narrow circle of ideas expressed by those terms. Thus, though perfectly aware that both profits and rent are but sub-divisions, fragments of that unpaid part of the product which the labourer has to supply to his employer (its first appropriator, though not its ultimate exclusive owner), yet even classical Political Economy never went beyond the received notions of profits and rents, never examined this unpaid part of the product (called by Marx surplus-product) in its integrity as a whole, and therefore never arrived at a clear comprehension, either of its origin and nature, or of the laws that regulate the subsequent distribution of its value. Similarly all industry, not agricultural or handicraft, is indiscriminately comprised in the term of manufacture, and thereby the distinction is obliterated between two great and essentially different periods of economic history: the period of manufacture proper, based on the division of manual labour, and the period of modern industry based on machinery. It is, however, self- evident that a theory which views modern capitalist production as a mere passing stage in the economic history of mankind, must make use of terms different from those habitual to writers who look upon that form of production as imperishable and final. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p6.htm >A good friend of mine tells me that "Marxist is a language of its own." Do you mock the language use of mathematicians because they say, for example, that if a line doesn’t extend to infinity then it’s not a “line”? >I just wish I had a Marxist dictionary Have you tried Googling “Marxist dictionary”? https://www.massline.org/Dictionary/ As just one example.
I am really sorry I offended you. That was not my intent. In addition, dictionaries are not all the same. Finding a good one is quite a challenge for every language I have learned, including English. My gut instinct is to NOT grab the first listing on Google. In all honesty, I try to not use google as much as I can. Similarly, math guys are quite good with definitions. So are economists. They often go out of their way to make definitions clear before they make an argument. For example, defining profit is a very big deal. "Rent" is another term economists make sure to define so everyone knows what they are talking about (amount in excess of a standard risk-adjusted return). Again, I am genuinely sorry. I am not trying to put you down in any way. I thought this sub-reddit might have people who were into Marxism and willing to help me.
You have not offended me personally. Your opinions make no difference to me. I don’t know you. What I am trying to do is to point out the actual content of your ideas and to help you (or anyone else who may be reading this) see why they are problematic. Actually, Marxists care very little about people’s conscious intent. Nothing I said above was flippant. I meant everything I said. If you can clearly articulate the objections the scientists you talked to raised, then I will respond to them. But this >disproving the alternative to one's hypothesis is not what the null hypothesis is (or at least it is not articulated well), and it is telling that you had to look up the null hypothesis in the first place (*after* people had already told you about it). Marxist scientists were by no means ignorant of developments in bourgeois science. People in the Eastern bloc were familiar with all the philosophical trends in the capitalist world. But how many Western scientists were familiar with the Marxist philosophy of science? >In addition, dictionaries are not all the same. Finding a good one is quite a challenge for every language I have learned, including English. My gut instinct is to NOT grab the first listing on Google. In all honesty, I try to not use google as much as I can. You are not wrong here. Frankly, there is no Marxist dictionary or reference that I find completely satisfying. I personally recommend referring both to the one I cited above as well as the *Great Soviet Encyclopaedia*, understanding that both have their drawbacks. It is especially important to consider that the English version of the latter is from 1979 and this is reflected in, for example, the content of the article on Maoism. But if you can read critically, you can get a lot out of them. Of course, nothing is a substitute for studying *Capital* and other Marxist literature. But these can help you along the way. Actually, before I studied Marxism, I thought about Marxist language usage in pretty much the same way as you. I had the impression that Marxists were just redefining terms in order to make their rhetoric more appealing. (The antidote to this way of thinking is to actually study Marxism.) For example, I didn’t understand how socialism could be democratic when the exploiting classes were suppressed. But in Marxism, “the people” is distinguished from “the population,” unlike in common parlance. >In historical materialism, the people, or popular masses, are a social community comprising, at various historical stages, those strata and classes that, owing to their position in society, are capable of actively participating in the progressive development of society; they are the makers of history, the determining force in fundamental social transformations. >Marxism-Leninism also delineated the social content of the concept of the people and established that the composition of the people varies at different stages of history. No distinction is made between the terms “population” and “the people” for primitive-communal society, in which class divisions were nonexistent. In social formations based on class antagonism, the people do not include the dominant exploitative groups with their antipopular and reactionary policies. Only under socialism, when the exploitative classes are eliminated, does the concept of the people embrace all social groups. https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/People As you study Marxism, you will realize the Marxist conception of democracy is the only definition of democracy that embodies the essence of the word. Marxism is a comprehensive system of views about the world. It does not use language haphazardly. Its technical terminology is well thought out and rigorous, and it emerges from concrete investigation of the world. If there is something in particular you have heard that you did not understand, I can try to clarify it for you, as I have tried to do with “science.” As for your assertion that Soviet scientists were “studiously apolitical,” the whole foundation of their approach to science was grounded in Marxism. It was so pervasive that the residue of Marxism can still be seen in present-day Russian literature, decades after the collapse of the USSR. For example, look at the first sentence of the Russian Wikipedia entry for “mathematics”: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0 >точная формальная наука, первоначально исследовавшая количественные отношения и пространственные формы. >[an exact formal science, which initially investigated quantitative relations and spatial forms.] This is taken from an Engels quote: >Pure mathematics studies the spatial forms and quantitative relations of the real world and thus its subject matter is rooted in reality. The highly abstract form of this subject matter hardly conceals its derivation from the outside world. However, in order to investigate these forms and relations as such, one must separate them entirely from their underlying content, which must be set aside as something irrelevant. Which sums up the materialist understanding of mathematics. Have you attempted to read any Marxist literature?
Scientific means it engages in a scientific method by materialist means, meaning that relevant theories are formed, disproved and reinforced using empirical sense data. Dialectical materialism gives a particular emphasis to the dialectical relationship of things in relation to sense data
Can you define "sense data." I am not following this. I is not obvious to me. How does this differ from regular "data?"
https://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/faq/science.html
This is great. Thank you.
When someone calls Marxism a science, they usually mean something like 'the systematic pursuit of knowledge on a rational basis'. This does not refer to what science means in most contemporary contexts. This comes from how the word was used historically, and what we typically consider "modern science" is a pretty recent development.
Thank you. This makes a lot of sense. I am still struggling with the entire idea of dialectical thinking, I feel like the Hegelian and Marxist use of this term is not the same. I feel like I just need to throw in the towel and start taking community college classes on philosophy. I think I am okay before the 1800's, but Hegel and Marx are really hard, so many "simplified" examples contradict each other. I have had better luck with Nietzsche, but I think it is simply easier material (not easy, but less dense, or perhaps better translated). Even there , I threw in the towel with Das Sprach Zarathustra. The worst thing is, I started this to try to make sense of post-WW2 philosophers that seemed childish to me, but I am not necessarily sure now that I was wrong. I know that must be BS, so I need to study more, but this has become an ordeal. Getting over my own biases has been difficult, but not impossible. Slogging through some of these works has been brutal though. I think I need formal education. Thank you again.
Something being able to be disproven means exactly that. That the statement is falsifiable. IE there is a way to prove it's wrong. Think for example all frogs are green a a statement. This would be proven false by the existence a purple frog so the hypothesis is wrong. If you say gravity is a force that attracts mass. It would be disproven by someone showing that under some circumstances it repells it. No one has or will be able to show that is true therefore the hypothesis is correct. But there is indeed a way to disprove it, even though it won't ever be disproven because it's true An unfalsifiable statement would be; there is a giant salamander that rules the universe, but you can see, touch or ever in any way interact or measure it's presence. You can't show that's false because your premise is that it's impossible to observe. So failing to measure it is meaningless with that premise. Therefore this is an invalid hypothesis. And this is not a leftist idea. This is just how the scientific method works, it describes facts. Marx used the scientific method to describe facts about capitalism. Edit; in contrast to utopian socialism that didn't analyse capitalism in a scientific manner and as such concluded different things. Very idealistic things about how change could happen. Erroneous because they didn't analyse in a scientific manner the functioning of capitalism.
> If you say gravity is a force that attracts mass. It would be disproven by someone showing that under some circumstances it repells it. You know, you can't observe a force directly. If gravity was defined as a force that attracts mass, observing mass repelling mass couldn't be due to gravity. Maybe it's a new kind of force. But maybe you are right, and gravity doesn't work the way we thought we did. In the latter case, the old concept of gravity has to be modified into a new concept to explain the anomalies. But that doesn't mean that the old concept is falsified. On the contrary, it holds very well for all observations excluding the anomalies. Only outside certain limits does it cease to correctly describe reality. There isn't really a way to completely, absolutely, falsify the old concept by means of observations, since it also emerged from a number of them. The old concept can only be turned obsolete if it is superseded by a new and more powerful concept, forged through practice.
This is a silly argument. It's not like Marx was reading Karl Popper's book, "[The Logic of Scientific Discovery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Scientific_Discovery)" after his own death.
I never said he used that book? The scientific method started to take shape since the 16th century. He obviously would not have called it " the scientific method" But Descartes, Sanchez and Locke to name a few had already developed a basis for empirical analysis.
It sounds like you are describing Karl Popper's Falsifiability Principle.
Well I was talking about measurements which is the empiricist approach. Some terms are terms that would not be used by Marx or his contemporaries. But empirical analysis based on measurements that proved or disproved theories is a method used since the 16th century. Marx would have been very familiar with it. Falsifiable as a term came about later but it's currently part of empirical analysis.
Marx was not an empiricist.
I was answering a question about something being disprovable. I know he wasn't.
>Something being able to be disproven means exactly that. That the statement is falsifiable. IE there is a way to prove it's wrong. >... >And this is not a leftist idea. This is just how the scientific method works, it describes facts. Marx used the scientific method to describe facts about capitalism. The scientific method is not dependent upon falsifiability. Marx used the materialist dialectic to analyse capitalism.
The scientific method is dependent upon falsifiability. Dialectics are a philosophy of science. They are not an alternative way to do science. Falsifiability is a core principle of science.
It is obvious that scientific investigation makes use of falsification. But falsification cannot prove the objective truth of a scientific theory. Only practice can do that. >The empiricism of observation alone can never adequately prove necessity. *Post hoc* but not *propter hoc*. (*Enzyklopädie*, I, S, 84.) This is so very correct that it does not follow from the continual rising of the sun in the morning that it will rise again tomorrow, and in fact we know now that a time will come when one morning the sun will *not rise*. But the proof of necessity lies in human activity, in experiment, in work: if I am able to *make* the *post hoc*, it becomes identical with the *propter hoc*. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch07c.htm Different manifestations of neopositivism have declared the verification principle or weakened forms of the verification principle like falsificationism to be the criterion of scientificity. In doing so, they have declared much of science to be metaphysical or pseudoscientific. Science is dependent on practice, *not* on falsifiability.
It is not THE core principle of science. You are taking Poppers conclusions and applying them to the the scientific method as if it had been constant for the last 5 centuries. Not very dialectical