Shorbe

With regard to your comments about falsifiability, I’m not quite sure what you mean. It sounds like you have moved from Nietzsche to Popper. What you seem to be suggesting is that rather than view things as a whole, we should apply an idea to a small section of the system, i.e. in a quantifiable place and time and to particular problem – a reform of some sort, and then measure the effects, then we can see if the idea works or not – falsifiable. So you have some hypothesis and you test it and can demonstrate its veracity as a hypothesis – or not.

You then take it a step further, viewing socialism as an isolated-theory or reform tested in a certain place and time, you believe that the veracity of socialism as a hypothesis has not been demonstrated by “practical-examples” - you think socialism has been falsified – it has been proven incorrect and we should discard it as a theory. The implication is then, that of two competing theories – socialism and capitalism – socialism has been falsified, but capitalism has not – so capitalism must be correct, or better, or whatever. Your criticism of Marxists then stems from the fact that despite proof that their theory is “false” they try to get out of this obvious falsification by coming up with excuses – how infuriating!

However it seems to me that the concept of falisifiability doesn’t work that way at all. All it seems to be saying is that we can’t have, or test for, positive-knowledge that a theory is true, because even though some theory appears to be a plausible explanation for some phenomenon, there may be another explanation for it.

What apparently follows from this is that the only thing we can “positively” do is demonstrate that a particular theory is not a plausible explanation of something, i.e. it is falsified, and therefore discard that theory, and we can come to no conclusion about what is true, except that it has not yet been falsified.

This all seems logically plausible, and possibly incontrovertible. However falsifying a theory does not necessary lead to a conclusion that a theory is “false” which is where I believe you “miss-the-boat”. If we can’t positively know anything because there could be some other explanation, how do we know we have actually falsified-something and it should be discarded, or that there is no other explanation for our results.

Take the smoking-study for example. Say the hypothesis they were testing was that quitting-smoking is beneficial to health - the results of the study have falsified the hypothesis. Or, say the hypothesis was that quitting-smoking leads to increased risk of heart-attack - the results have not falsified the hypothesis. What conclusion can we draw? Can you say that quitting-smoking is not beneficial to health (i.e. that the first hypothesis is false), or that quitting smoking does lead to increased risk of heart attack? I’d say the only conclusion you can draw is that the first-hypothesis has been falsified, and the second has not. Should we discard the first hypothesis, or should we look for other explanations for the results? And then, what action should we take? Given our “knowledge” of other factors, and other explanations, it would not be sensible to throw the baby out with the bathwater and tell everyone not to bother quitting-smoking on the basis of either the falsification of the first-hypothesis, or the non-falsification of the second.

So, to go back to the idea of measuring some small reform in isolation and testing for falsifiability, even if you did get some measurable-results, you could never say that something was a success because there could be other explanations, and while you might be able to falsify the idea, you could never really say it was a failure because there could be other explanations.

Falsifiability might be acceptable when you have an isolated-system in a laboratory in which you can control all variables – then you might be able to have “positive-knowledge” that the factor you are testing is the one that falsified the theory (although by its own logic that is impossible). However in the complex world of human socio-economics it is pretty dodgy. For example, take the Howard Government’s private-health-care-rebate – the theory was to encourage more people to take out private-health-insurance thereby relieving the burden on the public system. To falsify this theory you could (a) show that more people had private health insurance than before the rebate’s introduction, and/or (b) that the burden on the public-health-care-system has not been decreased. Now, you might be able to objectively show that more people have private-health-insurance, and less people were relying on the public system. The theory is therefore not falsified. Howard claims success! However, what if the reason for the increase in private-health-insurance wasn’t due to the rebate, but was due to the fact that funding to the public-health-system was cut, public health services got worse, and people decided that they had better take out private-health-insurance? Apparently this is the case in NSW. So what you actually measure has a bearing on what the “truth” is (even though the falsification-concept holds that we can’t actually know the “truth”). If you isolate what you are measuring, and ignore inconvenient-factors, you can make the data fit what you want it to say. The theory’s not falsified, so the private-health=insurance rebate must work (even though we can’t know it works).

Then this theory can be used to look at all sorts of little concepts and conditions of capitalism in isolation from everything else. Sectarian-violence in Bagdad has nothing to do with the US invasion, its all to do with those evil-religious-nutters and insurgents who just want to kill and control others and want a religious-caliphate. Ignore the fact that prior to the invasion, Iraq was a secular country where the people were relatively peaceful.

In fact the US-invasion of Bagdad had nothing to do with US-capitalism at all, only US-style-democracy in isolation which the President who stole the 2000 election decided beneficently to spread to the Middle-East. None of these things would falsify your concept of capitalism as benign.

Then, you take the falsifiability-concept, and apply it to Marxism. However you do it a little differently this time. First, you categorise every person or thing which ever had a sniff of Marxism about it as Marxist or Socialist or Communist – no need to examine them to see if there are any differences (or “falsify” your own idea) – they are all the same. Only after that do you completely isolate YOUR-CONCEPT of “socialism” or “Marxism” from everything else – it just exists in a bubble unaffected by outside-forces. Then you hold up the horrors to me and say “see Marxism is falsified” – therefore you must be crazy. Then, because I try to point out why I don’t accept the veracity of what you have said, because there are other-explanations, you claim that I’m not accepting the falsification of Marxism. And because I don’t accept the “falsification” of YOUR-CONCEPT of Marxist-theory as evidence that Marxist-theory is FALSE, Marxism is just another fundamentalist-religion and I must therefore believe it on faith.

Yet the falsification-concept doesn’t of itself allow anything to be proven false, it just says that we can’t have positive knowledge that something is true. But one would imagine that you think that what you’re saying is true! You must be believing it on faith!

As with most theories (and particularly post-modern anti-Marxist ones) that try to deny that there is an objective truth (i.e. something that exists independently of what we subjectively think about it, or that we can gain-knowledge of that objective-truth) it disappears up its own arse. Such theories essentially deny that there is such a thing as truth, only to assert that the theory itself is the truth – but if there is no truth then the theory itself cannot be true. The falsifiability-theory, once falsified, must be discarded!

"Oh, that was easy," says tao, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Posted by BOAZ_David, Friday, 16 March 2007 5:39:37 AM
‘Any employer who thinks they can get away with unfair or unjust or miserly wages to their workers, will have the following outcomes.
1/ Quality of work and committment will be virtually negative.
2/ His business will therefore suffer and go down the toilet.’

This will come as a surprise to the hundreds of companies like Nike who make a fortune exploiting cheap Asian labour and an excellent example of the self-delusion in which free-market advocates indulge.

It has always interested me that when a tyrannical leader rises under communism it is deemed to be a fault of communism when a tyrannical leader rises under democracy it is deemed to be the fault of the individual (remember Hitler was elected).

And as for the ‘inevitable’ excesses of Marxism – traditional ‘primitive’ societies right across the globe from time immemorial have practiced communalism without such excesses and moreover practiced it within a sustainable economic model. The consumption driven capitalist model must inevitably run out of things to consume and when it does there will be hell to pay.

Far be it from me to get back on topic but ‘were the Apostle’s communists?’ was the question - a simple yes or no could be at least part of the answer, couldnt it?