Re: positivism (was Re: "rise of china" and wst)

Warren,

No offense taken - I was, after all, criticizing your book.  However, I
continue to disagree profoundly with your characterization of positivism.  
You are correct in stating that sensory data cannot give us absolute
truth.  Yet, the very abstraction from truth and its separation into the
phenomenal and noumenal spheres (what you refer to as "knowledge" and
"truth") is in fact a truth claim.  As Wallerstein notes in his
forthcoming edited volume on the structures of knowledge (now under
construction), the modern world-system is unique in that it has two
entirely different methods for determining truth - one based on facts, one
on values.  The difference is based on the imposition of an a priori
metaphysical distinction onto reality - you yourself have just noted that
it is virtually impossible to draw a line between aspects of reality where
laws apply, and those where they don't (and you further note, correctly, 
that in physics itself the issue is not so clear-cut, either).  Similarly,
it is impossible to exhaustively define what constitutes observation and
being observed - these differ from case to case, and, as Knorr-Cetina
points out, from discipline to discipline.  Hence, the assumption that a
purely phenomenal knowledge distinct from noumenal truth is possible is
very much a truth claim. For this, assertion, no better support exists
than Marx's statement that "one basis for life and another for science is
a priori a lie" (though in case it is assumed that I am trumpeting a
particular ideological cause I hasten to add that conservative opponents
of positivism have said basically the same thing).  Historically, of
course, positivist claims have hardly remained confined within anything we
might define as the sphere of phenomena or science (it is enough just to
look at the Brazilian flag).  And I'm sure I don't need to tell you that
the Popperian incarnation of positivism (which you seem to favor) was very
much in the business of making value claims as well. 

With relation to your claim that your book was intended to be a utopia
rather than a prophecy, I'd like you to clarify, since prophecy has two
meanings (only one of them entailing prediction), while utopianism and
positivism have of course been very intimately linked (the very idea of
separating the phenomenal and the noumenal involves placing yourself
outside time and space - that is, in no place - utopia, and in no time,
where the difference between past and future is irrelevant).


On Sun, 4 Mar 2001 wwagar@binghamton.edu wrote:

> 
> Boris--
> 
>       I wasn't laughing at you, believe it or not.  I was entertained,
> but also enlightened.  In many ways you hit the proverbial nail on its
> proverbial head.  The whole problem with the futurist endeavor from the
> get-go has been an incorrigible tendency to project the past into the
> future.  No matter how many whizzes, bangs, and sharp left (or right) 
> turns we introduce into our anticipations, the echo of the past is loud
> and clear.  The last hundred years have included the global triumph of
> capital (Book the First), a vast experiment (USSR) in a would-be socialist
> commonwealth (Book the Second), which came unraveled more or less
> peacefully, and many of the same kinds of technological and cultural
> exploits imagined for the House of Earth (Book the Third).  So, to that
> extent, A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FUTURE is the last hundred years transposed
> into the next two hundred.  If you see it as a work of prophecy.  I don't
> however.  For me it is an exhibition of utopias, both "bad" and "good."
> 
>       But I am not a disciple of Auguste Comte.  I am more of a logical
> positivist.  The rejection of truth claims is not a truth claim by any
> stretch of the imagination.  It doesn't say that sensory data can give us
> truth.  It says that sensory data can give us knowledge, which is an
> entirely different animal.  And that knowledge is subject to infinite
> revision as more data come into view and more logics and theories are
> contrived that enable us to arrange and rearrange the data in more ways.
> Nor would I have any use for the notion of "laws" once we pass from the
> observation of inanimate nature into the worlds of life, mind, and
> society.  Even inanimate nature is so massively complex that I might be
> reluctant to speak of "laws" if I were a physicist.
> 
>       Cheers,
> 
>       Warren

-- 
Boris Stremlin
bc70219@binghamton.edu