- 17 Aug 2019 05:00
#15026974
I've been getting hints to it's nature but I'm wondering what insight others might bring to the subject.
Spoiler: show
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/t/r.htm#truth
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259742845_Reality_of_the_Ideal
http://caute.ru/am/text/truth.htm
https://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12613281/index.pdf
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/jordan2.htm
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/story-concept.htm
Truth is usually taken to mean correspondence of an idea to the world outside thought. However, following Hegel, Marxists take truth to be something that may be said of a social formation or social practice itself. The truth of a social practice is always relative, since, as Goethe said: “All that exists deserves to perish” – sooner or later, everything turns out to be false. See Engels' discussion of this in Ludwig Feuerbach, and the End of Classical German Philosophy.
Some philosophical currents believe that the truth of an idea can be established by logical deduction from “clear ideas.” In general, each current has its characteristic criterion of truth: for Rationalism it is Reason; for Empiricism it is Observation and Experiment; Pragmatism makes practice the criterion of truth, but like Empiricism, pragmatism knows only immediate, individual action and misses the cultural and historical content of social practice. If the claim that “practice is the criterion of truth” is to have any content more profound than “the truth of the pudding is in the eating,” then it depends on the notion of truth (as objectively inhering in the object itself) and practice (as social-historical practice, within the totality of a given culture.) If insisted upon too stridently, the claim that “practice is the criterion of truth” simply diminishes the value of philosophical reflection. If “practice is the criterion of truth” pure and simply, then the socialist revolutionary must wait for socialism to discover the truth of his practice, since socialism is the objective of his or her practice.
Ilyenkov shows that Hegel in fact, by insisting on the real, sensuously objective activity of man, solely as a criterion of truth, solely as the verifying authority for thought, betrayed his idealism. Indeed, for Marx, practice is far more than a criterion of truth, it is substance.
Lenin explained that while practice should be first and fundamental in the theory of knowledge, “the criterion of practice can never, in the nature of things, either confirm or refute any human idea completely.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259742845_Reality_of_the_Ideal
"To know an object – and be unable to correlate this knowledge (knowledge of the object!) with the object?! In actual fact, this paradoxical situation arises where a person does not really know an object, but knows something else. What? Phrases about the object. Words, terms, formulas, signs, symbols, and stable combinations thereof deposited in science, mastered (memorized) in place of knowledge of the object – as a special object that exists above and outside reality, as a special world of ideal, abstract, phantom ‘objects’. It is here that an illusion of knowledge arises, followed by the insoluble task of relating this illusory knowledge to reality, to life."
Ilyenkov most probably bears in mind here the ‘third world’ by Popper, populated by ‘linguistic entities’.
The problem of the correlation of knowledge with a thing arises only if they are treated as two primordially different ‘worlds’. Reality (‘world’ number one) seems to be transcendent or ‘the beyond’ with respect to knowledge (‘world’ number three), while the individual consciousness (‘world’ number two) is allotted a part of a medium, correlating ideas with things. All the while truth is being sheltered between the ‘worlds’ like Epicurean gods. Little wonder, then, that Popper considered truth to be a purely relative concept and altogether rejected the existence of absolute truths. However, as Ilyenkov’s disciple S.N. Mareyev noticed, relative truth without the absolute truth is as the North Pole without the South – namely nonsense.
The very concept of truth is different in dialectics and formal logic. The latter demands to eliminate subjectivity – this ideal is clearly pronounced in the title of the report by Popper: ‘Epistemology without a knowing subject’. By contrast, in dialectics truth is understood as a process of transformation of the subjective into the objective, and vice versa. And the ideal is an objective form of a subject’s activity.
http://caute.ru/am/text/truth.htm
ABSTRACT. Marxist philosopher E.V. Ilyenkov argued that truth is the process of ascending to the concrete knowledge of thing by way of resolving objective contradictions, and attacked the formal, nominalistic conception of truth as correspondence of knowledge with its object.
...
The conformity of idea with object is called usually the “truth.” Spinoza, however, considered this conformity to be only denominatio extrinseca of truth [8, vol. 2, p. 447]. The habitual definition of truth as adaequatio intellectus et rei expresses the nature of truth as little as Plato’s “two-footed animal without feathers” expresses the nature of human being. “A true idea must agree with its object” is a mere axiom for Spinoza [8, vol. 1, p. 410]. This feature is certainly belongs to any true idea, but it is not the “agreement” that makes it true. And false ideas do agree with some real object as well.
Spinoza seeks a criterion of truth inside thought itself. The genuine truth needs not to be collated with a thing, it verifies itself: veritas sui sit norma. If some architect makes an idea of building in due order, his thought is true regardless of the fact, whether the building be raised or not. On the other hand, if someone states, for example, that Peter exists, and nevertheless does not know that Peter exists, that thought is not true, even though Peter really exists [8, p. 31]. Hence, there is something real inside thought itself that differs true ideas from the false ones. That “objective essence” of idea Spinoza calls “certainty”. 2
https://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12613281/index.pdf
It should also be noted from the outset that Marx’s epistemology cannot be handled in traditional epistemological terms. In their article “Marxist Epistemology: The Critique of Economic Determinism”, Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff indicate that traditional epistemology operates as if there are two separate realms: “independent subjects seeking knowledge of independent objects” (Resnick and Wolf, 45). In contrast to traditional epistemology, Marx does not see theory and reality as belonging to two distinct spheres. Rather there is a “circular process” in the production of theory where “theory begins and ends with concretes […] the concrete which determines theory is conceptualized as the ‘concrete real’ [the real concrete] and the concrete produced by thought is the ‘thought-concrete’ [concrete for thought]”( Resnick and Wolf, 43).\
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/jordan2.htm
For the understanding of Marx a different point is, however, important. The Marxian conception of nature, of man, and man’s relation to nature disposes of many traditional epistemological problems. Marx neither needs to prove existence of the external world, nor disprove its existence. From his point of view both these endeavours are prompted by false assumptions concerning the relation of man to nature, by considering man as a detached observer, setting him against the world or placing him, as it were, on a totally different level. For man, who is part of nature, to doubt the existence of the external world or to consider it as in need of proof is to doubt his own existence, and even Descartes and Berkeley refused to go to such a length.
This conclusion is of considerable significance for the interpretation of Marxian philosophy. As Marx refused to dissociate nature from man and man from nature and conceived man not only as part of nature but also nature in a certain sense as a product of man’s activity and, thus, part of man, Marx’s naturalism has no need of metaphysical foundation. Moreover, since man knows only socially mediated nature, ‘man’, and not natural reality, ‘is the immediate object of natural science’. To use Marx’s terminology, the natural science of man is logically prior to all other knowledge.[59] What Feuerbach said about his anthropological materialism applies even more fittingly to Marx’s naturalism. ‘The new philosophy’, wrote Feuerbach, ‘makes man, including nature as the basis of man, the sole, universal and highest object of philosophy, makes, therefore, of anthropology, including physiology, the universal science.’ [60]
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/story-concept.htm
Although Nature is always the starting point, Hegel has shifted the focus from relations between human individuals and the material world outside of thought and human life, to the relations between human beings, each other and their own culture. Cultural products are constructed from Nature which remains the ultimate source of human needs, but the understanding of human life means making that life the centre of attention. People living as individuals in Nature is an impossible myth and cannot function as the presupposition for philosophy. Our relation to Nature is mediated by a division of labour within the community and means of production. In Hegel’s terminology, what mediates between the individual person and Nature is Geist (Spirit) or in the terminology of this very early work, the Idea, made up of collaborative forms of activity, a constellation of artefacts and human beings themselves.
Epistemology was posed initially in terms of the relation between the consciousness of an individual and Nature outside of and independently of human activity, and presented intractable problems. When posed in terms of the relation of individuals to their own culture, the situation is transformed. Of course people understand how their own culture works. How could they not, for ‘understanding’ is nothing other than formulating an idea in the terms of one’s own culture? The point then becomes the deeper understanding of the dynamics of culture and the relation of individuals to their own culture and that of others.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
-For Ethical Politics