so i've wondered for a long time about how leftists use the terms 'materialism' and 'idealism', and how it relates to those terms usage in broader philosophical discussions on epistemology.
i may be incorrect in my interpretations, but it seems to me that leftist uses of the term (even its usage in some of marx's writings, from what little i've read) are such that 'materialist' means 'understands that the material conditions of a society drive its development via dialectical processes' and that 'idealist' means 'focuses on artificial/socially constructed ethical or legal principles (such as 'freedom' and 'democracy' and 'rule of law' and 'free speech') rather than material conditions of society like quality of life, literacy, etc.'.
the broader philosophical definitions of these terms are slightly different, however.
epistemologically, a 'materialist' is someone who believes that we can (and do) directly apprehend the mind-independent external world. this is contrary to epistemological idealism, which argues that we can only ever know the contents of our own mind. we can use these contents to infer things about 'true reality' but can never truly verify them.
ontologically, materialism argues that all of reality can be described in terms of physics, or that all facts of the universe are causally dependent on or reducible to physical processes. this is again opposed to Idealism, which argues that existence is in some way irreducibly and fundamentally mental.
so my first question for you beautiful posters is, are my perceptions of these definitions and usages overall correct or incorrect? How exactly does Marx (or Engels or any other marxist philosopher) use these terms, and do they intend an epistemological, ontological, or other interpretation? am i missing something fundamental about the philosophical definitions or about the colloquial/leftist usage? What's the deal with that 'philosophy is pointless, the goal is to change the world' quote, is understanding reality not a benefit for efficiently manipulating it?
My next point, is that it seems to me like Marx and Engel's Dialectical Materialism, or at least the political program and methods of Socialism/Communism, are not necessarily at all incompatible with either philosophical Idealism or Materialism, in terms of epistemology or ontology. Neither is necessarily incompatible with basic empiricism, but is rather a difference in interpretation of what our empirical knowledge is. Whether reality is fundamentally mental or matter, it consists of opposing energies and dialectical processes that play out in our experience with the extrinsic appearance of physical matter. Whether the world is in the mind or 'really out there', our experiences of it are the same.
A bit ago i stumbled across this article that seemed to be making a similar point, a point i've never really seen made by anyone else before. I haven't read past the abstract yet, and It seems like someone random person's college dissertation or thesis or something so I'm probably not well read enough to interpret this without context, so i was wondering if anyone had seen any similar discourse? What would Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao say about this line of thought? is it a heresy against socialism, a useless detour into pointless philosophical questions that serve no practical purpose for the revolution, or is it something potentially useful in framing Marxism's relationship to epistemology and ontology?
my point is that you say there is no answer to ontology or any difference between answers, yet you still exclusively use the term 'idealist' when describing any ontology at all, when you could say the same thing for non-idealist ontologies, including materialist/physicalist realist ones.
to reiterate: Materialist Ontologies are EXACTLY as unfalsifiable as Idealist Ontologies
so why exclusively use Idealist as a pejorative, instead of ontological or metaphysical? and besides, in the philosophical sense, Materialists/physical realists/scientific realists do indeed make metaphysical claims, they are indeed doing metaphysics. i recommend the Stanford article about scientific realism/antirealism elsewhere in the thread.
Okay, I think it’s fair to say that materialism is also unfalsifiable in the ontological sense.
Some Marxists may claim that the material world is “real.” If I want to be more precise, I would say that materialism is the only thing that is “useful,” and therefore the only thing worth treating as “real,” while idealism offers nothing “useful.” All idealism ever does is pile extra, superfluous unfalsifiable concepts on top of our lived material experience.
but so does materialism, right? what we have direct access to is our experiential world, and the existence of an external material world on top of that is itself a culturally constructed, likely fictitious, abstractive layer on top of that. we can call the empirically verified experiential world anything we want, but all those empirical verifications tell us is the patterns and regularities of culturally collected experiences, they can't tell us what underlies them or what 'reality is made of'. so it's weird to me to say 'materialism is the only thing that is useful' rather than 'empiricism is the only thing that is useful'.
Marxists basically don’t make a distinction between materialism and empiricism. I’m not sure if the two had yet been made distinct in the 19th century.
Perhaps more precisely still would be: empiricism is the only thing that is useful, and materialism is the unfalsifiable Occam’s razor of what we’ve discovered empirically.
this is the only part here that i'm skeptical of. is it not parsimonious enough to define empiricism on its own terms without reference to any metaphysics whatsoever? would occam's razor not suggest to make no claims whatsoever about that which we can have no knowledge? in this case, given the choice between equally unfalsifiable, hypothetically empirical formulations of materialism and idealism, can we really say that one is more plausible than the other?
(edit: in fact, would it not be more parsimonious to assume that only mind exists, since we can't really refute its existence (as it is all we have direct epistemological access to), rather than assuming on top of that, there is yet another layer of 'physical' or 'material' reality?)
i guess my concern with the way we use language around these topics, is that we may lose sight of the socially constructed aspects of empirical knowledge and the stories we tell to make sense of it, if we use overly literal language and overly simplified thought processes that take these stories literally, and at face value. we can't let the societal discourse on the sciences be dictated by ignorant if not potentially malicious actors by ignoring how knowledge is created and spread and what theories really are.
Occam's razor is a heuristic tool, so if it’s to be applied at all, it’s to give probabilistic weight to proposed theories. The whole point is that not everything is as equally probable.
Which is more likely, the world as it appears to us, or the world as it appears to us plus Russell's teapot? What about the world as it appears to us plus Russel’s Teapot plus it’s all in a computer simulation? Why??? Why seriously consider any superfluous unfalsifiables at all? There’s nothing to be gained.
What kinds of malicious actors are you thinking of? What is being ignored? The information that idealists create and spread?
If this in defense of postmodernism, we think it was/is an intentional bourgeois ideological project to undermine Marxism/socialism.
You got me there: fascist solipsism it is then 😭
how is anything i said fascist or solipsistic? i literally believe that other peoples minds exist, i literally use my idealism as a foundation for empathy, i literally believe in the power of people to come together and organize society for their own benefit, or the benefit of others. i believe a communist dem-cent dictatorship of the proletariat is the best hope to make as many people happy as possible. i just dont understand your absurd characterization of my arguments. its like you are intentionally ignoring my points. you know what, nevermind. i dont really care what you have to say at this point. if someone else wants to make your point without being as much of a jerk then i welcome it.
i mean the mfer is literally coming at me with 'fascism is when solipsism and solipsism is when idealism and idealism is when philosophy, whereas communism is when materialism and materialism is when coal mine', absolutely the silliest shit ive ever heard