The Relation of Marxist Epistemology to Empiricism

Abstract

In the previous essay, I have compared various contemporary conceptions of the growth of science and confronted them, in general terms, with the view typical for Marxist theory of scientific cognition, as I understand it. In this essay, I will undertake a similar comparison of various conceptions of empirical foundations of sciences. In both cases, what I have to say goes only marginally beyond the scope of purely immanent critique of the literal contents of various points of view. A full critical analysis of the ‘thought material’, especially of the material accumulated by traditional empiricism, could only be made after a detailed historical study has been completed and resulted in a presentation of the developmental phases of several branches of research practice, which have grown under the historically changing, objective influence of a non-scientific social practice on the one hand, and found their subjective expression in different variants of traditional empiricism on the other. These variants should then be analysed as philosophical verbalizations of successive developmental stages of the social methodological consciousness. Such historical studies, fully applying the directive of correspondence in theory of scientific cognition, are at the moment no more than a design for the future. But even in full awareness of its limitations, a confrontation of various elements of philosophical verbalization of different developmental stages of the social methodological consciousness can be useful as an attempt to systematize ‘thought material’ and present the uniqueness of the Marxist point of view.