Between knowing and doing - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

Wandering the information superhighway, he came upon the last refuge of civilization, PoFo, the only forum on the internet ...

Discourse exclusively on the basis of historical materialist methodology.
Forum rules: No one line posts please. This forum is for discussion based on Marxism, Marxism-Leninism and similar revisions. Critique of topics not based on historical materialism belongs in the general Communism forum.
User avatar
By ingliz
#14644155
Quoting Lenin:

Our theory is not a dogma, but, a guide to action; and it is the greatest mistake, on the part of Marxists, that they have not understood this. In our revolution we advanced along the path of practice, and not of theory... Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality.


#14689901
ingliz, quoting Lenin, wrote:Our theory is not a dogma, but, a guide to action; and it is the greatest mistake, on the part of Marxists, that they have not understood this. In our revolution we advanced along the path of practice, and not of theory... Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality.

Quoting Kant: "Thoughts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind."

Let's emphasize that, while practice may be "higher" or "more complete", it suffers in the absence of a worldview adequate to the purpose of action. Acting at random, in ignorance, or in error, is not necessarily "higher" than sitting at home and thinking things through. This thinking is a practice, and is part of a practice.

Can we say: Practice without theory is not practice; and practice with wrong theory is wrong practice?

But of course, theory without practice is less than a dream.
#15218466
Could go as far to say that if one can not act on such 'knowledge' then it is not in fact knowledge at all. However, if there is the prospect of actualizing that ideal, then it is clearly knowledge even if not enacted.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/activity/index.htm
In pedagogy, there is a troubling and (when you think about it) strange problem that is usually described as the problem of “the practical application of knowledge to life.” And it is in fact true that the graduate from school (whether high school or college) finds himself in the quandary of not knowing how to “apply” knowledge to any problem that arises outside the walls of school.

This seems to imply that human abilities should include the special ability of somehow “correlating” knowledge with its object, i.e. with reality as given in contemplation. This means that there should be a special kind of activity of correlating knowledge and its object, where “knowledge” and “object” are thought of as two different “things” distinct from the person himself. One of these things is knowledge as contained in general formulas, instructions, and propositions, and the other thing is the unstructured chaos of phenomena as given in perception. If this were so, then we could clearly try to formulate rules for making this correlation, and also to enumerate and classify typical errors so that we could warn ahead of time how to avoid them. In instructional theory, one often tries to solve the problem of knowing “how to apply knowledge to life” by creating just this kind of system of rules and warnings. But the result is that the system of rules and warnings becomes so cumbersome that it starts to impede rather than help things, becoming an additional source of errors and failures.

Thus, there is every reason to believe that the very problem we are trying to solve arises only because the “knowledge” has been given to the person in an inadequate form; or, to put it more crudely, it is not real knowledge, but only some substitute…

In fact, knowledge in the precise sense of the word is always knowledge of an object. Of a particular object, for it is impossible to know “in general,” without knowing a particular system of phenomena, whether these are chemical, psychological, or some other phenomena.

But, after all, in this case the very phrase about the difficulties of “applying” knowledge to an object sounds rather absurd. To know an object, and to “apply” this knowledge – knowledge of the object – to the object? At best, this must be only an imprecise, confusing way of expressing some other, hidden situation.

But this situation is rather typical.

http://caute.ru/am/text/truth.htm
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
#15218562
American Serf wrote:
Quoting Kant: "Thoughts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind."

Let's emphasize that, while practice may be "higher" or "more complete", it suffers in the absence of a worldview adequate to the purpose of action. Acting at random, in ignorance, or in error, is not necessarily "higher" than sitting at home and thinking things through. This thinking is a practice, and is part of a practice.

Can we say: Practice without theory is not practice; and practice with wrong theory is wrong practice?

But of course, theory without practice is less than a dream.


American Serf wrote:
suffers in the absence of a worldview adequate to the purpose of action



Got that worldview for ya. Just finished it recently:


Social Production Worldview

Spoiler: show
Image



Also:


Consciousness, A Material Definition

Spoiler: show
Image



---


Wellsy wrote:



quandary of not knowing how to “apply” knowledge to any problem that arises outside the walls of school.



It's called 'the scientific method'. I turned it into an everyday useful taxonomy:


universal paradigm SLIDES TEMPLATE

Spoiler: show
Image



universal paradigm DATABASE

Spoiler: show
Image



‭Also see:

A Few Tools for Your Computer

viewtopic.php?f=70&t=178872
Russia-Ukraine War 2022

Hamas are terrorist animals who started this and […]

It is possible but Zelensky refuses to talk... no[…]

Israel-Palestinian War 2023

@skinster Hamas committed a terrorist attack(s)[…]

"Ukraine’s real losses should be counted i[…]