It's definitely my own experience with calling people rightwing (when they constantly defend Trump and oppose immigration and think their race is genetically superior and worry SJWs are coming for their kids), right down to getting taken away (banned) when I called them rightwing too much.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Are you saying that the right wing is an evil commensurate with Nazism? Or that when you tell trump supporters that they're right wing they deny it? I've never seen anybody rightwing deny being rightwing, but they will deny being Nazis....bc the vast majority of the time they're not
I've seen Trump *defenders* deny they are Trump *supporters* (they just defend him all day and hate Hillary and worry about SJWs and oppose immigration etc.) Those same people also deny they are rightwing. It's really quite bizarre.
I've also seen several people formerly in /r/slatestarcodex (now in /r/TheMotte) identify as white-nationalist or say they have white-nationalist sympathies, but get very upset when people call them white *supremacists*. Supremacist is not the same as nationalist, you see. And to clarify, those same people also believe in HBD (i.e. they happen to think whites are genetically smarter than other races, in addition to their white nationalist philosophy).
As for the term Nazi - as used modernly, it does not literally refer to being a member of the National Socialist German Worker's Party anymore. Here's a dictionary definition: "a person with extreme racist or authoritarian views."
It seems pretty easy to me, people call others nazi's because 'this person is nazi/neo-nazi/white nationalist/white supremacist/white ethnonationalist/fascist/neo-fascist/HBD'er/NrX/old fashioned reactionary/or other variant of far right chucklefuck' is a bit too long for twitter.
Which is super weird this is something the right gets mad over as they have been doing the same with socialist/communist/anarchist/social democrat/liberal/etc for ages. (My fave moment on twitter was when somebody blocked me after I said I didn't consider myself a liberal, after being accused of being one).
>Revealed preferences surely don't spring from the whims of the individual, or else we shouldn't expect them to be so patterned. So there must be some system that overdetermines the preferences of individuals, and this system would theoretically be in the wheelhouse of social science...or at least that's how the argument goes. However, no such science is possible given our limited metacognitive ability, and any ideology that claims to solve this problem, like marxism, is pseudoscience.
1. Where does Marxism claim to have 'solved this problem'? Please quote primary sources if possible.
2. To claim something as a pseudoscience you should first prove that its claims are incorrect or incoherent. Therefore you should be able to explain where Marx was wrong
Yeah that's my fault for not explaining what I meant. I'm saying that every genealogical method (which springs from the masters of suspicion, marx included) claims to have discovered the material causes of ideology (thus solving the problem), but this just invites the opponent to speculate about the material causes of genealogy. This leads to endless disputation for two reasons. First, it poses a naturalistic explanation couched in intentionalist terms. It is impossible to explain intentional precepts with naturalistic explanation because metacognition seems to be more about convincing others than about getting-it-right. So you're never sure if your opponent or yourself are actually getting at the truth or just trying to win others over. Second, it betrays the spirit of trust that is a prerequisite to solving disputes short of using force. This is relevant to this post bc it is the failure to take the opponents reasons seriously qua reasons that creates this hatred.
Marxism is pseudoscience because it is still couched in intentional precepts like class, subjectivity, consciousness, etc. These terms are underdetermined explananda. It's hard to see how scientific investigation could proceed if no one can even agree about what it is they're studying. If you aren't convinced, read manuel delanda's work on the subject.
I'm not saying marx is useless, but we shouldn't take him too seriously. I'm also not a right winger, but I think the best we can do is to take everybody's arguments in good faith
>If you aren't convinced, read manuel delanda's work on the subject.
What if I...and sit down for this one, because it might come as a shock...*disagree with Manuel Delanda?*
OK, one more time, and I know multiple replies are frowned upon but I don't really care:
The really telling thing that's really bugging me about this bad comment is the casual and dismissive way you threw out that DeLanda reference, a bit like the grad student in Good Will Hunting who gets trounced at a bar by the titular whiny genius
(kudos, also, on the servile reference to Paul Ricoeur you made *without even citing him*, as if it just described an unassailable fact about Marx - very Sorbonne *and* very Left Bank, well done)
But the DeLanda thing is what we're here for and which is telling that you're the grad student instead of math head Jason Bourne
1. You don't actually say why DeLanda is right here
2. You don't actually say why DeLanda is *convincing* here, which is a different thing: DeLanda could be right but unconvincing, you've made the far stronger claim that all you need to do to be convinced is to read DeLanda
3. You don't actually say what DeLanda says, other than referencing underdetermination
4. You don't define underdetermination and how "class" is an undetermined explananda
5. You don't define "explananda" or "intentional precepts"
6. For DeLanda "intentional precepts" are presumably an object of technical study, and the term is not in common use even in e.g. philosophy of science (a field in which I hold an advanced degree). Or it could be you've used an obscure jargony construction of your own devising, because the term is difficult to google and no connection turns up with DeLanda
7. How can a precept's intentionality fuck with its ability to underscore scientific authority in the first place? Husserl followed Brentano in attempting to use intentionality *to ground the epistemic authority of science* and is a *far* more widely read and authoritative philosopher than DeLanda. Have you heard of Husserl, or read *Logical Investigations?*
The whole comment, with its jargon dropping and obscure references to cultural theorists (you don't even namedrop Ricoeur, one of the big names of the last century, because that would look too gauche?) and implied philosophical authority lightly worn and almost certainly stolen and/or a lazy book-report rewrite of somebody else's ideas (I'm vacillating as to whether you know who Paul Ricoeur is), absolutely reeks of wannabe Gallic Literature Dept. academic pretension and take it out of my subreddit
>(kudos, also, on the servile reference to Paul Ricoeur you made without even citing him, as if it just described an unassailable fact about Marx - very Sorbonne and very Left Bank, well done)
Lulz that bit was pretty good. Respect
This and his other reply are the most beautiful example of philosophy grad student pretentiousness I've seen in a while. Just namedrop as much as possible without ever really making a point or putting forth an argument.
I can't believe how good an album closer this [Tim Hecker track is](https://timhecker.bandcamp.com/track/you-never-were), but I'm worried that involves admitting intentional precepts into my naturalistic ontology
Ughhhhh
I was thinking of dennett's version of intentionality, which I take to be thinking-in-terms-of-mental-phenomena. He is trying to avoid creating separate ontological categories for naturalistic and intentional modes of cognition, which I think is an improvement on the continental version. For the purposes of my argument, this is basically the descriptive/normative divide, but transposed onto cognition. So the problem then is the perennial one for social science, how do we 'stick to the facts', except with a twist. Instead of trying to bootstrap normativity onto natural science, I want to ask why the social sciences, at least up to relatively recent developments in new fields like neurosci, are stuck using intentionalist 'posits' or 'precepts', which if we were to take as real, we'd have to argue the reality of normativity, which is exactly why it isn't scientific. these posits are no more than self-reported mental phenomena and will lead to error given the unreliability of introspection and social cognition. social and metacognition are unreliable when trying to provide causal explanations bc they are extremely fractionate and heuristic. It's like Kant paved the way for genealogy by dispelling the illusion that cognition is passive (that 'what we see is all is all there is'), which allowed marx to question the material causes of ideology. However, since metacognition can't actually provide plausible causal accounts of cognition, as it is adapted to win others over rather than get-it-right (as Valery said (I know, another French guy) "Knowing oneself doesn't mean reforming oneself. Knowing oneself is a roundabout way of finding excuses for oneself") there's no way to be sure you've actually hit on smth or you've merely become a stage two dogmatist. You made a great point that I had never considered when you said that all scientific explananda are underdetermined by the current data, but I think the difference here is that in matters concerning humans, we suffer from brain neglect. Much like how "nothing the field of vision tells you it's an eye that sees it," so, out of economy, evolution gave us this brain that fails to take itself into account. So genealogies strike me as pseudoscience bc they attempt to provide causal explanations of social behavior (which is definitely a step toward science) without rly questioning their use of intentional posits, which is equivalent to brain neglect. from the outside it looks like you're criticizing various dogmas while privileging your own. You have to buy into the genealogy before it actually makes sense. I test this by comparing competing genealogies and trying to choose between them. Bc none of them have been shown to consistently yield accurate predictions, the only choices I have are to either accept one that suits my preference, try to synthesize as many as I can, or just reject them all. But maybe all sciences go through a stage like this, and maybe marx is actually prescientific and will eventually become more than aspirational. I have no idea.
And the biggest gap I see in my argument is that I can't account for how naturalistic cognition, by which I mean cognition that searches for extremely high correlativity which yields accurate predictions, arises out of a brain that depends so much on heuristics.
The whole delanda thing I had in mind was just the difference between dialectics, which has yet to yield accurate predictions about material change, and morphogenesis, which has. I think that could be extended to illustrate the difference between prescientific investigation that relies on the language of mental phenomena versus one that doesn't. Idk. Take it or leave it
And I have read ricoeur and husserl btw
And I do make servile quotations of their work
You still haven't quoted any Marx (or other Marxists) or explained how he's wrong.
I'm not sure why you're contrasting dialectics and morphogenesis as if they're two incompatible concepts?
This is a bizarre answer that seems to be generated entirely out of half-read reviews of the authors, like Dennett, you purport to be discussing, and as /u/MarxBroshevik points out you still haven't actually referred to any of the material you claim to be criticising.
I don't have enough energy to engage any further with this surreal unparagraphed screed.
Look I appreciate the effort you clearly have put in to going *some* way to explaining what you're up to, but honestly as a reader I feel kind of insulted by the totally unframed way you've done it: you're putting a shocking amount of the onus on me to unpack what you've said.
Sorry, the more I read and reread this terrible comment the more I am totally mystified by what you're saying.
>Marxism is pseudoscience because...These terms are underdetermined explananda.
In spite of some isolated and generally quite mad objections, the underdetermination of scientific theory by data is widely held to characterise *all of science up to and including physics*.
The idea that we should give the label "pseudoscience" to some aspiringly scientific endeavour just because data available at time *t* don't *perfectly* explain *all possible scientific knowledge* is insane.
Firstly, I asked for you to quote Marx or other Marxists, which you failed to do. Of course you're going to fail to be scientific if you can't rebut Marx's arguments in good-faith
Secondly, I'm not opposed to using force and I don't see why any scientist (or person in general) should be opposed to force.
I'm genuinely curious what you mean by using force. Aside from scoring in-group points from the occasional milkshaking, what could you possibly achieve by force?
I mean armed conflict between two political groups. What we achieve is a total re-organisation of society in which proletarians seize politcal power. This has happened many times before; for example Cuba, China, USSR. Force is a ever-present part of our society. Although I advocate for a very particular use of force, you'll find that people who have completely different political views also call for force. This could be through warfare, or it could be simple everyday force like policing.
edit: Strange how you claim that Marx's work is "pseudoscientific" yet freely use vague concepts like "in-group".
idk where you're from, but generally the state has a monopoly on force. Unless you're living in the equivalent of a deteriorating tsarist regime or china ravaged by warlordism and colonialism, it's not gonna end well for you. In fact, it will most likely produce the opposite outcome. Any ideology that espouses futile armed conflict doesn't seem too rational to me
Conflict doesn't arise from the minds of Marxists, but rather the structure of capitalist society itself. Anyhow, it's going well for me. If you can produce any evidence that it's not going well for me, I would love to see it.
>Any ideology that espouses futile armed conflict doesn't seem too rational to me
You're the one who has posited that it's "futile". Obviously advocating for armed conflict that is by definition "futile" would be irrational. However, it has not been proven that armed conflict is futile.
>Unless you're living in the equivalent of a deteriorating tsarist regime or china ravaged by warlordism and colonialism, it's not gonna end well for you.
Weird how you spent so long claiming Marx was "unscientific" and are now using the standard language and categories of political science; colonialism, warlords, tsars, regimes, states with a monopoly of force, nations. Seems like you should read Marx for a scientific discussion of many of these concepts.
>Conflict doesn't arise from the minds of Marxists, but rather the structure of capitalist society itself.
Lol I could see that being a poster hanging on the wall of a Soviet middle school. Fair enough
I have, anecdotally, seen a lot of people who hold core right-wing or even far-right positions insist that they are some kind of liberal. It's quite maddening.
Yeah, come to think of it, you're right. There are some self-proclaimed liberals who hold "race realist" views. I just take issue with calling anybody who supports immigration control Nazis
Make sure to turn the English subtitles on if they’re not on by default.
This is excellent.
I am not a racialist!
So is this the actual experience of paranoid lefties who imagine all their opponents are Nazis? Yeah good stuff