In my last piece, I formulated and criticized Geese’s peculiar form of idealism, which I dubbed “pragmatic idealism,” i.e., idealism about practice, the belief that everything is human practice and that scientific knowledge is therefore about human practice. I pointed to the fact that this shares features with more conventional forms of idealism in that 1) it denies the existence of a human-independent world and that 2) scientific knowledge is necessarily about the human-dependent world. I did not intend to show in this piece that idealism is to be rejected; definitive arguments for which are probably impossible to produce in philosophy. I did try to argue, though perhaps repetitiously and not entirely satisfactorily, that all forms of idealism provide epistemic structure to deny the probative force of facts themselves, e.g., climate change. This was above all a political argument.

I only focused on two pieces, and within the two pieces on certain sections. But there is a moment, an argument in Gandakin’s essay, that left me baffled. I am convinced that if they do respond to my piece, they will try to utilize this argument to defend their position as materialism and reject my latent materialism and scientific realism as idealism. Philosophy lives and dies by arguments, and although perfect clarity is an impossibility, it is the responsibility of all writers to attempt to communicate clearly and to put forward the reasons for their beliefs. There is a putative criticism within Gandakin’s piece on materialism which attempts to show that belief in the existence and knowability of a mind-independent world is in fact covert idealism. The argument is invalid, which is to say that the conclusions do not follow from the premises; the assumptions can be true and yet the conclusion false. The argument is stated here:

Here, Feuerbach’s conception of reality as an object that a subjective individual interacts with rather than effectively constitutes is retained. The ideal is limited to being an attempt to ‘understand’ reality, while practice is limited on one hand to being an attempt to ‘modify’ reality and on the other being a way for the ‘understanding’ sought by the mind to progress through the process of experimental verification. Meanwhile, the expansion of human freedom and the development of society is conceived as tied to the accumulation of truth-propositions achieved through this process of verification which allows man to better cognize objective reality and modify their subjective beliefs and social relations to more effectively conform to it. The result of this procedure, however, is that reality is conceived “in the form of the object or of contemplation,” i.e., as something that can be understood in its whole as a set of static and ideal propositions that are possessed by a rational mind. Whether these truth-propositions are derived through induction or deduction, rationalism or empiricism, etc., the assertion of their absolute descriptive truth can only mean that external reality is exactly the same as mind in its structure. As a consequence, objective reality can only either be objective thought or the subjective thought of an Absolute Mind, and the positing of the superiority of the concept of matter over mind is only the positing of the superiority of the concept, i.e., the superiority of mind—over mind itself!

I will first try to reconstruct as best as possible what this means in clearer terms. I may fail to construct as the author intends, but I will try to produce the best consonant argument. The argument tries to show that given propositions of what they consider to be wrong Marxist philosophy, which regards itself as materialism, the conclusion is idealism. It is a sort of philosophical reductio ad absurdum:

Assumptions :

1. There exists a human-independent world
2. Human thinking (the ideal) is limited to understanding reality
3. Human activity (the practical ) is limited to modifying that human-independent world or verifying human thinking via experimental verification
4. Human social development is related to the accumulation of truth-propositions about reality through verification
   1. Verification allows humans to adjust their beliefs and relations to conform to reality
5. The human-independent world can be understood as a set of propositions intelligible to a rational mind
   1. These propositions have truth-values, i.e., can be true or false.

Conclusions:

Therefore,

C1) The human-independent world is exactly the same as mind in its structure.

C1A) Mind is either the human mind or some other kind of mind, call it supra-human mind.

Therefore,

C2) The human-independent world is either human mind or supra-human mind.

Therefore,

C3) The statement that matter does not fundamentally exist because of mind (superiority), is really the statement that mind, supra -human thinking, does not exist because of mind.

The last conclusion C3 means materialism, as typically conceived, is a tautology that actually has the same propositional content as idealism, i.e., everything is mental activity. We take the premises as true for the sake of argument, but the conclusions do not necessarily follow. Furthermore, Assumptions 2-5 seem otiose with respect to the conclusions. But let us grant all of them.

Let us start with the first conclusion. That propositions about the human-independent world admit evaluation as true or false means that “the human-independent world is exactly the same as mind in its structure” is to put all the weight on the meaning of “structure”. I will have to give a meaning to “structure,” and this is the weakest part of my retort, but alas I must because the whole argument turns on it.

To be fair, let us make a distinction between mereological and causal structure so as to try to flesh out this argument on multiple construals. “Causal structure” means “a structure is whatever accounts for features and relations of a thing”. “Mereological” means “a structure is the way the pieces of a composite are organized”. They are clearly not mutually exclusive concepts, but two different connotations of “structure” that we find operating in philosophical, scientific, and everyday language.

On both construals, conclusion 1 does not follow from assumptions 1-5. Say we take mind to be as C1 states. Take 1-5 to be true, assume there is a God. Then God would not have the same structure as the human-independent world understood by humans in thought. God is not caused; it has no causal structure, and God is not organized like human beings; it does not have the same mereological structure as human beings. No one of any theological import can argue that in monotheism God has arms, legs, eyes, eats food, etc. That is, 1-5 are taken as true, and C1 is false.

Say, however, C1 somehow was valid, or better say C1 is redefined to now be a premise. Now C2 absolutely does not follow from C1. A could have the same structure as B; B is C or D; therefore A is C or D is a fallacy for the simple reason that identity of structure does not imply sortal identity tout court or vice-versa. What I mean by “sortal identity” is that if A is a kind and B is a kind, and if A and B share a structure, that does not mean kind A=kind B. Restrict ourselves simply to “mereological structure". I built a doll house that has the same structure as a house. I use the same plans, the same design, the same materials. The only difference somehow is scale, but scale does not account for features and relations of the house, nor does it relate to how things are organized, how parts are assembled into a whole. A house is taken as either a human habitation and/or a commodity. That does not mean my doll house is a human habitation or commodity. It certainly can be a commodity. Good luck moving into it. There is also a very simple way to see the problem with the passage from the assumptions C1 to C2. It is not necessary that facts about the world be accessible to minds, and that the external world has the same structure as mind. We can imagine that the mind is made of some kind of mental stuff and the world out of some other kind of stuff. This is precisely the gambit of dualism.

Now, since this identity between mind and matter is not established via the isomorphism of mind and world, the “killer” conclusion C3 does not follow. It is a standalone statement. New arguments have to be educed to show it if it is indeed a “theorem” or something that can be deduced from less controversial, more basic statements. Perhaps auxiliary assumptions can make the argument valid

Finally, there are a number of things I would like to say about materialism and the philosophy of science. I believe a Marxist philosophy of science is a species of scientific realism. Call that species “dialectical materialism” to make it sound sexy. I have in mind a specific form I think is best for Marxists, and I would like to state it here dogmatically. First, it must be noted that this philosophy of science is but a moment in a wider philosophical constellation.

Those background statements of scientific realism:

1. Ontological realism: there exists a mind-independent world
2. Causal realism: the mind-independent world has causal structure
3. Natural kind realism: the mind-independent world has natural kind structure
4. Epistemic realism: the mind-independent world is knowable
5. Scientific privilege: knowledge about that mind-independent which is inter-subjectively binding takes the form of scientific knowledge

The more specific analytical propositions associated with scientific realism:

1. Entity realism: there exist unobservable entities that populate the mind-independent world
2. Entity causalism: those unobservable entities constitute the deep structure, causal and mereological, of our observable world
3. Theoretical realism: mature scientific knowledge takes the form of theories
4. Semantic realism: mature theories can be evaluated in a truthy way; they are truthy or falsey
5. Veridical realism: mature theories are approximately true in that they track how the world is

As I stated, the best reason to accept these propositions of scientific realism is the No-Miracles argument, i.e., that most other philosophies of science make the long-term practical and theoretical success of science and technology a miracle. Another connected argument is that scientific realism is the “best explanation” of the successes and failures of scientific knowledge. I will produce an essay solely on this no-miracles argument and on the explanatory superiority of realism.

This is all rather generic to analytic philosophy. So what is Marxist? Marxism has specific contributions, elucidations, or concerns that represent novelties in the history of the philosophy of science and that only recently have gained traction in academia. Unlike most, we can affirm both the truthiness and historicity of scientific knowledge. Our history of science enters into our normative philosophy of science and vice-versa.

Marxist Specifics on Philosophy of Science:

1. Activism: scientific knowledge is not exhausted by scientific theory, and the only way to truly understand natural phenomena is in actively engaging the world beyond pen and paper. This active intervention in the world is experimentation. Experimentation is not the slave of theory. Experimentation itself is discovered. Experimentation itself demands and informs new theories. Experimentation is the proof of the “this-sidedeness” and immanence of scientific knowledge.
2. Technological Argument for Entity Realism: entity realists often point to the laboratory as “evidence” for realism about unobservable entities, but outside the lab or academy, this knowledge comes to be used in less controlled settings, in development, production, and use of technologies, instruments and machines, shaping the lives of those unaware of any deeper workings.
3. Epistemic Anti-reductionism: scientific knowledge cannot be exhaustively reduced to physics. Even physics itself cannot be reduced to a grand unified physical theory. Social science cannot be reduced to psychology, which cannot be reduced to biology, which cannot be reduced to chemistry, which cannot be reduced to physics.
4. Ontological anti-reductionism, or emergentism: the world has a “layer-cake” structure because the higher-level dynamics and entities studied by lower-level sciences give rise to emergent phenomena which are scale-dependent and insensitive to basal dynamics and entities. For instance, in physics, one can deform the smaller-scale physics to produce the same long-wavelength physics, an idea precisely captured in the brilliant "renormalization group” pioneered by Kenneth Wilson.

Historical Materialism about Science:

1. Sociality: Scientific knowledge is something produced by human beings in a social context. The truth of scientific knowledge is not a matter of human election, but scientific knowledge itself has a history. Historical materialism and class analysis are indispensable to its study as a social phenomenon.
2. Institutionalism: Scientific research is conducted by persons of a certain class in the context of certain institutions, economic and political. These institutional forms shape and mediate research , e.g., the questions posed and investigated, the experimentation conducted.
3. Productive Force thesis: Scientific knowledge can be a productive force, entering into the economic base and shaping the material mode of production. It can provide a blueprint for technologies which are means of production or enter into the organization of the social mode of production and labor process.
4. Commodification thesis: Scientific knowledge can be a commodity; under the commodity form, it can be appropriated and exchanged and even take the form of capital, therefore subjected to the imperatives of capitalist competition and accumulation.
5. State-force: Scientific knowledge can also be a state force. It can serve as a blueprint for technologies that bolster population control, the carceral state, and “biopolitical” functions of the modern state.
6. Ideological thesis: Scientific knowledge , even natural, can be ideological when scientific knowledge is deployed in the justification or rationalization of class rule and society.
7. Internal-External dialectic: the change of scientific knowledge has internal and external causes, those internal to the workings of scientific activity, e.g., philosophical debate, dissonance with experimentation, argumentation, and extra-scientific sources, e.g., wars, state demands, technological requirements of the production process.

I call this philosophical bundle a materialist dialectic of science. There are many other contributions Marxism can make to the philosophy, history, and sociology of science. I have not spoken on such a philosophy of science regarding social science, and so no views should be attributed to me that I flatten the distinctions between natural and social science (although I am skeptical of the notion that social science requires some entirely incommensurable, special, never-before-seen methodology).