So therefore I see attempts to create value-free knowledge as unscientific because they leave out their own production.

To understand positivism as a dominant theme in science in the bourgeois era, I think it is useful to consider Marx’s argument that the workings of the capitalist mode of production inverts subject and object so that impersonal economic relations (“relations between things”) appear to dominate relations between humans. In fact, he argues, this is a “fetishised form of appearance” and these relations between things are in fact the form of appearance of relations between humans. Nevertheless, this means that there appears to be a primacy of objective phenomena which then leads to the hegemonic modes of thought seeing objective things as being able to be understood as if outside of social relations.

The second aspect to this is that the workings of the system therefore appear naturalised and dehistoricised, and hence you get silliness like people thinking that complex social behaviours can be understood as the ahistorical, automatic workings of biology.

Actually, the problem is that Labor has not provided any standout principles to inspire more active support. And in the face of the murdochery’s assault on everything the ALP does, they would need to have strong principles and stand up for them to get traction. No hope – if anyone discovers principles alive in the Labor caucus, I’m doubtful they will be anything that would help the average voter anyway.

One minor quibble: I think it’s exaggerating to say the Greens “actively demobilized supporters in the climate movement.” Their policy stance has implicitly done so, I think that’s definite, but I’m not personally aware of them discouraging climate campaigning, more often the opposite.

Since 2007 organised reformists have accepted that the Left’s role has been to govern, and not build an alternative politics based around a different kind of agency. After 2007 the ALP and union leaderships dismantled the revival of trade union politicisation embodied in YRAW, and then the Greens actively pursued the subordination of climate campaigning to their political needs (not to mention softening a whole host of criticisms they had of the ALP — including over refugees — during the alliance).

I would argue that politically the Greens remain a very contradictory force: On the one hand proving the possibility that there is life on the Left outside the ALP, and on the other narrowing the range of what politics is allowed to be into governmental/parliamentary channels. This then has a profound impact on the very possibility of building movements, and (collectively) we on the radical Left have not found a clear set of arguments to challenge this, instead tending to fall back into arguments about “the need to build social movements” or “the need for struggle”. These are correct but one-sided.

I’d argue we need to talk more about building an independent Left politics that can engage with the official politics that overdetermines every social conflict. Yet with all the talk of “revolutionary unity” going on around the place, this seems the furthest thing from most organised Marxists’ thinking.

Positivism sounds like the dominant philosophical perspective in psychiatry – I wonder to what extent that flows from a preference for “value-free” explanations because of positivist fears of “values” as merely subjective and therefore “unscientific” – as opposed to a preference for reduction on other grounds more properly considered to be “scientific merit”?

This post particularly took my interest because, in my view, one of the most important areas of philosophy considers the role (or rather curious absence of) values in inquiry, especially given the (apparent) dominant influence of positivism – at best a philosophical program with many crucial problems which is far from universally accepted. I dunno if you’re familiar with it, but Hilary Putnam’s work in this area, and in particular his book “The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy” is highly recommendable. I’ve found his arguments useful in making the case for values – one time I had a professor of logic, fairly internationally renowned, couldn’t quite respond to what I was saying – “there MUST be something wrong with that, but I just can’t see what it is.” I’m still grappling with it all, but it’s fertile stuff.

If it sounds interesting, here’s an extremely brief attempt to summarise Putnam’s perspective. Values are judicious evaluations of what’s “good” by way of whatever it is you’re doing, be that discovering knowledge (epistemic values), living in a community with others (moral or political values), or making art (aesthetic values). Done objectively, the evaluation refers to the objective features of what’s being studied, and in this way reality can refine standards of judgment and science can progress; when done subjectively, the evaluation might refer to simple matters of taste – e.g., “I just like the blue one”, and inquiry’s likely to get stuck in the mud (“fail again, fail better”?). Seen in this way, “objective” science, and even physics (positivism’s great pet), involve epistemic evaluative judgments top to bottom. (Putnam himself claims to have made these observations to a room full of hundreds of Nobel winners, with no complaint). If these judgments are of a similar kind, then arguing against “values” as such threatens to prove too much against science and, e.g., render theory selection in physics an exercise wherein scientists merely express their subjective preference for one theory and not another, e.g., “I just like the one which doesn’t overthrow the paradigm in which I’ve been professionally invested for the past 40 years ”

Then I guess there’s the political aspect of admitting values – we don’t like to think of experts as making value decisions for people, just value-free objective technical judgments. Otherwise we might have to take that dangerous “democracy” thing seriously, eh

All the best, Dr_Tad.

Tim.

When I talk about “value-free” I’m referring to scientific positivism, which in psychiatry expresses itself in attempts to model the discipline on what is presumed to be the approach found in the natural sciences. That usually means some kind of biological reductionism that strips mental disorders of human/social meanings. So the NIMH states that diagnostic criteria it wants to develop will be based on premises (which it considers essentially proven) such as “mental disorders are biological disorders involving brain circuits that implicate specific domains of cognition, emotion, or behavior”.

For me this misses two things: (1) That the best scientific explanations of causation of mental disorders is not necessarily done with a reductionist framework of this sort, and (2) that the very decision that some entity is “healthy” or “disordered” is itself a socially-constructed meaning, and hence the product of social struggles over meaning.

Most of my learning has been in the field of philosophy, vastly ignorant of psychiatry (sadly, though how I would love to remedy that), and reading this sentence:

“in its claim that psychiatry can be a value-free brain science when dealing problems that are clearly value-laden and thoroughly embedded in social realities.”

I’m wondering in what sense “value-free” is meant? What follows seems to suggest the kind of valuations a human being necessarily engages in by virtue of occupying a first-person perspective on their own life? So to take an example, you talk about sadness following bereavement. “Valuations we necessarily make from a first-person perspective on our own life”: my life partner is very important to me losing them is a devastating blow. Does the reductionist (who I guess we’re talking about) claim that kind of valuation has nothing to do with the “Major Depression” – i.e. it’s just a faulty brain, sort of thing?