this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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I don't know if this is going to speak to many here, I hope it does, but it's good anyway in the process of trying to understand what dialectical science would look like, as opposed to our current outlook on science which is metaphysical.

By which I don't mean the scientific method, or scientists themselves, but science as a whole and as itself. If we hold that it doesn't exist outside society (and of course it doesn't), then science has a philosophical character. Metaphysics being the contradiction to dialectics, it's also not the philosophy of the bourgeoisie but rather the philosophy that was the most advanced, the most usable for people's needs, before we discovered dialectics. Much like we first learned to make stone tools before we learned to make them with metal, we first had to know metaphysics and idealism before we could know dialectics and materialism.

Today, science is taught metaphysically; it is seen metaphysically, it's practiced metaphysically, and we take that as fact. We have trouble seeing science any other way because this way makes sense to us, it's all we know.

If you were already aware of this character (studying in isolation, with observations and facts plucked out of their dialectical process and studied by themselves), this question should make sense to you. How do we rethink science in a way that is dialectical. Basically, in a way that we are still doing and studying science, but dialectically?

And of course I don't mean generalities like "it would be placing dialectics back in science", I want to see how far we can struggle with it.

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[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 25 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

https://www.amazon.com/Dialectical-Biologist-Richard-Levins/dp/067420283X

I can't find an online PDF of it, but you'd like Richard Lewontin. He was an evolutionary biologist and dialectician who wrote a few great books and has some really neat lectures on youtube.

Like Engels originally said, nature is the proof of dialectics. It's extremely relevant in fields like ecology, soil science, horticulture, geology, and geography where you have two parties in a material/social relationship. Predators and prey are a dialectic, plants and soil are a dialectic, rivers and canyons are a dialectic, raccoons and cities are a dialectic. A dialectical understanding of raccoon ecology would involve studying things like:

  • the socioeconomic factors that influence their population size, how their population size impacts human health and the desirability of that area, and how human population size impacts the inverse

  • the availability of food and habitat on them and how much food they provide for predators

  • the ways their social groups form in response to their environment and the way their metabolic activity shapes that environment

  • the history of city-raccoon interactions and how that has shaped the evolutionary development of the raccoon, geographic distribution of them, and the societal defenses against them

By the end of that inquiry, you have the most holistic understanding of raccoons situated in their environment possible. When I use it daily in horticulture, I'm considering the full growing environment and social/material/historical/genetic significance of both the plant and land. It's just applying as many angles of analysis as I can and situating both organism and environment in the context of their development.

edit: And the primary difference between dialectical and non-dialectical science isn't idealism so much as it is the Cartesian model where materialist observations are isolated. The river and the canyon can't have a "social" relationship as neither are sentient under a simple understanding of water impacting minerals. The dialectical understanding brings all elements of that environment into the equation. The river shapes the canyon and the canyon influences the hydrology of the river, BUT the river also gets its shape because a surplus of wolves is suppressing the population of elk and they aren't compacting the soil around its banks. The glacier at the headwaters is decreasing the flow because of its dialectic with the atmosphere's dialectic between greenhouse gases and the sun. A dialectician can seamlessly integrate all those things and consider them in an interdisciplinary way between social and material sciences, going as large as the sun and earth or as small as genes and atoms with a sense of continuity.

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Think I found an epub, I'm going to be uploading to prolewiki's library in a minute 😎

[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Ayyy, thanks for uploading it. That, Biology Under the Influence, and Biology as Ideology were all huge influences on my dialectical materialism.

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's up: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Dialectical_Biologist

The equations were absolutely horrible to go through lol, but I did it

[–] LarkinDePark@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 8 months ago

This is so amazing man, thanks very much!

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

This sounds cool and exactly what I'm looking for, thanks! But keep answers coming πŸ˜ƒ

edit: is it accessible to laymen? I'm not a scientist haha

[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I just flipped through my copy and it's about as accessible as a pop science article. He uses a few graphs and tables with technical parts of his studies, but explains it all in normal English without much Marxist vocabulary.

Another really great book is James O'Connor's Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism: https://www.academia.edu/48811710/OConnor_1998_Natural_Causes

Because it's an essay collection it can be repetitive. There's one neat chapter in it where he studies Monterey Bay in California as a Marxist ecologist. It's not just the present conditions of the bay or the wildlife or the people or the structures framing those things, but a wonderfully dynamic natural history that merges with sociopolitical theory and political economy and the physical sciences. It's a coherent picture of where things came from, how they presently exist, and how the principal/secondary contradictions could rupture.

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You should request an account and upload all those books lol, we recently started a science section on the library and really wanted to start filling it in. We have a library editor role that is easier to get; you still have to answer all the questions, but we're more lenient lol

We could also start an ecology category!

[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I only have the physical copies unfortunately. They're probably online or at least on torrent trackers.

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 8 months ago

I was surprised how easy it was to find a copy of the dialectical biologist, I just googled it and found a website called Ebin, and it was right there. Gonna join my list of free epub providers

[–] QueerCommie@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 8 months ago

I’m fifteen and I thought it was pretty good.

[–] alicirce@lemmygrad.ml 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)

My experience as a scientist is that to do good science, you need to be thinking dialectically. I think a lot about why more scientists are not Marxists; people who are good at thinking about the interconnectivity and changing nature of things in their science turn to eclecticism in their political beliefs/philosophy. Part of this is that I think we treat science and politics as such disparate things that must never interact.

A lot of the "business" of science is very undialectical, and that's where you see the failures of the field manifest. For example, assessment of a scientist's contributions based on first authorship, journal prestige, etc, encourages bad practices with respect to collaboration and sharing results.

You might enjoy this article by Bernal, a Marxist scientist: https://redsails.org/the-social-function-of-science/

Already we have in the practice of science the prototype for all human action. The task which the scientists have undertaken β€” the understanding and control of nature and of man himself β€” is merely the conscious expression of the task of human society. The methods by which this task is attempted, however imperfectly they are realized, are the methods by which humanity is most likely to secure its own future. In its endeavour, science is communism. In science men have learned consciously to subordinate themselves to a common purpose without losing the individuality of their achievements. Each one knows that his work depends on that of his predecessors and colleagues and that it can only reach its fruition through the work of his successors. In science men collaborate not because they are forced to by superior authority or because they blindly follow some chosen leader, but because they realize that only in this willing collaboration can each man find his goal. Not orders, but advice, determine action. Each man knows that only by advice, honestly and disinterestedly given, can his work succeed, because such advice expresses as near as may be the inexorable logic of the material world, stubborn fact. Facts cannot be forced to our desires, and freedom comes by admitting this necessity and not by pretending to ignore it. These things have been learned painfully and incompletely in the pursuit of science. Only in the wider tasks of humanity will their full use be found.

[–] bunbun@lemmygrad.ml 9 points 8 months ago

Extremely well put. I personally always thought of science as evidence that the dialectical approach makes the most sense, so OP's question was hard for me to rationalize. To touch the moon we needed experts from almost every field to work together on a single goal. It doesn't really get more interconnected than that.

[–] GrainEater@lemmygrad.ml 17 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm not sure I'd agree that modern science is taught non-dialectically at an advanced level. When studying the human body, you're not studying each organ in isolation (aside from some simplification depending on the level of study). When studying biological evolution, you're not ignoring the material conditions at the time. At some point, you have to draw a line between what is likely relevant and what isn't, because no scientist can have advanced knowledge in every single field

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I agree with the first sentence to a certain extent. The problem I think is how much we want to concede something as being metaphysical vs dialectical (both being in contradiction with each other). Within the study of the human body, there are many different fields that do not entirely interact with each other: one is concerned with studying the illnesses of the body (medicine), another is concerned with studying the metabolism (biology). Nutrition, pharmacology, biomechanics, sport sciences, etc.

Where is the metaphysics there; is it in the number of fields, in what they study and focus on? I think that's the crux of the question and I don't have a definitive answer yet.

Likewise, I wouldn't say that knowledge in every field = dialectical. Dialectics looks at processes and certainly needs to look at the entire process, but it doesn't have to look at every single process and contradiction that exists. Rather, I think we would start having to think about how we teach science differently, in a way that's dialectical. Though again that's the original question lol. So to summarize, I would more easily say that I don't see "knowing specialized knowledge" as being contradictory to dialectics.

[–] GrainEater@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 8 months ago

It's true that different fields focus on different areas of a dialectically connected field, but I don't think they necessarily ignore the relevant processes outside of their focus (for the most part), they just don't focus on it. It does vary -- study of medicine is also concerned with metabolism to a significant degree, whereas study of metabolism might largely ignore external processes. Ideally (no pun intended) it would take them into consideration, but realistically you'd just have scientists from different fields working together rather than making one person try to understand the highly complex web of processes

(I'm only talking about natural science; I think we can all agree that Western social science is highly undialectical)

[–] bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I am not part of the academic community so i want to know how the process of developing knowledge is done as of today, i think we first have to know how it is done as of today.

Things i've noticed hitherto that would be changed with the introduction of dialectics:

  • Isolated research is of no use. (nature is connected and determined, a principle of dialectics)
  • Peer-review process has to involve experts from a multitude of fields, not just experts on the field. (This would create a need for more interdisciplinary careers).
  • IP law has no place in science. Knowledge has to be freely flow and follow up papers have to be encouraged. (nature is state of continuos motion and change, thus there is no end to a study)

Everything has to be revised!

[–] comradecalzone@lemmygrad.ml 12 points 8 months ago

our current outlook on science which is metaphysical.

Metaphysics, coming from the Greek words for "the things after physics," is something that by its etymology is literally outside of science. To understand where you're coming from, you'll need to elaborate on how you're defining "metaphysics" and how your conception of "science in general" is based in it.

By which I don’t mean the scientific method... but science as a whole and as itself.

There is no disentangling the scientific method from the term and our conception of "science." It is the cornerstone of the philosophy, and is inherently dialectical by its nature: it is a process by which a falsifiable (hypo)thesis is pitted against its antitheses through experiment and observation. The synthesis is a new, revised thesis that is again pitted against its antitheses in iteration. Its fruits are a testament to power of dialectics.

As others have noted, bourgeois decision making regarding the application of science does not tend to use dialectical analysis, but that is not unique to "science," and I'm not convinced that the decision making of the bourgeoisie is "metaphysical" in any essential way.

[–] bunkyprewster@startrek.website 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

What do you mean by metaphysical? I'm not sure I really understand all the philosophical terms but I've always thought of mainstream science as positivist.

[–] bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 8 months ago

In this context we mean it is "isolated" or "in a vacuum".

I've always thought of mainstream science as positivist.

Agreed. The question could be what does a Marxist philosophy of science and epistemology look like

[–] ExotiqueMatter@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I think physics is currently affected by metaphysics because physicists tend to not see the dialectical relationship between the mathematical formalism of a theory and it's physical interpretation and as such often mistake the former for the latter which cause a lot of problems in the way physics is researched and taught.

For example, the most famous attempt at a "theory of everything" (i.e. uniting relativity and quantum mechanic), string theory, as been hipped up solely on the basis that it works well mathematically while the fact that it completely contradict many of our current physical observations such as its need for more than 3 spatial dimensions is simply hand-waved away with very ad-hoc conjectures such as when string theorists suppose that we don't see their additional dimentions because they are either compactified or because our observable universe in a 3d hyperplane of a higher dimensional space. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for continuing to give it a try, why not, but string theory certainly doesn't deserves its #1 spot as a potential theory of quantum gravity in my opinion, and it's also very sad that other candidates theories are completely overshadowed by it.

It also affect well established theories which end up lacking satisfying physical interpretations despite their success, for example, special relativity despite it's age is still stuck with this very counterintuitive almost mystical sounding interpretation of movement somehow affecting time itself in a way that's not ever really explained even though it is possible to give it a satisfying and even quite intuitive mechanistic interpretation.

[–] TankieReplyBot@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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[–] LarkinDePark@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 8 months ago

I can't answer your question directly but this article may provide some elucidation.