Gnoseology - Trusting sensations

[Luisrah]

Dialectical materialism opposes Kant's phenomenist idealism or classical idealism, whatever it's called, that says that knowing is understanding the representations, because we can't know what is the reality itself.
It also opposes agnosticism which says we can't know anything because our sensations depend on our state of mind, age, experience, tastes, etc.

I have been reading Historical and Dialectical Materialism, I don't know who wrote it, but in it says that we can't always trust our sensations while also saying that knowledge is gained through practice, which is the instrumental activity on objects. This means that sensations are a fundamental thing in knowing the external world. Beyond this, it doesn't explain the contradiction.

Can someone enlighten me on this?

[Hit The North]

It'd help to know who wrote the work you're studying, as many of these ontological and epistemic questions are not resolved within Marxism. It sounds to me like the author is promoting a realist conception of Marxism which argues that sometimes there is a lack of fit between the thing in itself and our or others representations of that thing; and that real scientific work is stripping away the representations in order to reveal the thing itself. Marx claims to do this with his critique of political economy.

So Marx doesn't claim that representations are direct copies of an underlying reality. His discussion about moving from the abstract to the concrete in order to present society in all its many-sided relations is interesting. I don't think Marx would go so far as to imagine that the 'concrete' in our thinking is identical to the concrete thing itself - but the best approximation of it.

As its hermeneutic basis, I'd argue that Marxism sees knowledge as historically conditioned. We have no way of understanding the world except through society and, hence, through more or less ideological lenses.

[Roach]

It also opposes agnosticism which says we can't know anything because our sensations depend on our state of mind, age, experience, tastes, etc.

Well,Engels said that an agonostic is an ashamed materialist,on Utopian and Scientific Socialism.I think he meant that an agonostic doesn't want to directily atack the social foudations of religion,only to expose it's irrational principles.


I have been reading Historical and Dialectical Materialism, I don't know who wrote it, but in it says that we can't always trust our sensations while also saying that knowledge is gained through practice, which is the instrumental activity on objects. This means that sensations are a fundamental thing in knowing the external world

Stalin wrote a book with this title.It might not be the best source on this subject since many other tendencies say that his dialectical method was weak, but I fully recommended it.
Since Marxism is built on scientific grounds,it doesnt allows feeling's or sensation's beying used in conclusions because of it's easily manipulative nature that can make people jump into wrong conclusions, many times for selfish reasons,but it's not meant to you use the scientific method on things like ''what I will have for breakfast''.Dialectical materialism is not a lyfestyle.The ''pratice and knowledge'' part is also based on the scientific method since it theaches that everything should be proved through logic, reason and experimetation on the real world.That's why the name is Materialism.

[Luisrah]

Thanks for the help until now, I'm 17 and I've just discovered the complex, and hard to understand, world of philosophy. Almost frightening, but very interesting :)

If the book has an author, it is here written in russian, but it is from Editorial Progreso in Spain, or so it seems to have been translated by them. Produced in the USSR. Maybe it's just a mix of parts from other books to make a small manual.

From what the book says, it seems Dialectical Materialism ''escapes'' the question ''Do our sensations correspond to the reality?''. It says that DM focuses it's efforts in studying how this sensations, representations and concepts appear and how the knowledge that they contain can help Man.

So from reading the posts and reading it again I think he's trying to say that even if our representations don't correspond to reality, it doesn't matter. For example, if I have a knife, and if me and everyone looks at it and says it's grey and shiny, and that it's pointy and it can be used to cut an apple (or our representation of an apple) than why should we care if in truth it is blue, round and and doesn't cut? No one can realize that so even if our representations and sensations don't correspond to reality, it doesn't matter because in practice, and for every purpose they do.

[Hit The North]

So from reading the posts and reading it again I think he's trying to say that even if our representations don't correspond to reality, it doesn't matter. For example, if I have a knife, and if me and everyone looks at it and says it's grey and shiny, and that it's pointy and it can be used to cut an apple (or our representation of an apple) than why should we care if in truth it is blue, round and and doesn't cut? No one can realize that so even if our representations and sensations don't correspond to reality, it doesn't matter because in practice, and for every purpose they do.

Firstly, if you are only imagining that you are cutting the apple because, in reality the knife is blunt, you aren't suffering from epistemological doubt, you are suffering a delusion.

Secondly, don't fall into the trap of imagining that we can cut into "the representation of an apple" - we can only cut into the apple itself.

Don't forget that as well as our representations of reality we deal with an everyday, sensuous reality which exists prior and independently of our consciousness of it.

The question as to the nature of your proverbial knife can only be proved in practice. Either it cuts the apple or it doesn't.

[Meridian]

'"Do our sensations correspond to the reality?"Talking about what we can sense in this manner is senseless, because there is nothing which falls outside of this category.



Don't forget that as well as our representations of reality we deal with an everyday, sensuous reality which exists prior and independently of our consciousness of it.
I have never dealt with any representation of reality, I have never heard of anyone deal with such a thing either before now.

[ZeroNowhere]

Sometimes our sensations correspond to reality, while sometimes, such as when we have consumed LSD, they do not. Hopefully this has answered your question.

Other than that, you're just using the word 'truth' differently to how it is used in the English language, and perhaps you may look among the foreign language forums in case one utilizes it similarly.


I have never dealt with any representation of reality, I have never heard of anyone deal with such a thing either before now.To be fair, it is perfectly intelligible to say, for example, that a certain novel is a representation of the reality of life for a Mexican illegal immigrant. The problem comes from taking such a thing as a picture, in Wittgenstein's sense, which one applies indiscriminately and in so doing forgets the reality of our use of the word 'reality'.

[Luisrah]

Firstly, if you are only imagining that you are cutting the apple because, in reality the knife is blunt, you aren't suffering from epistemological doubt, you are suffering a delusion.

Secondly, don't fall into the trap of imagining that we can cut into "the representation of an apple" - we can only cut into the apple itself.

Don't forget that as well as our representations of reality we deal with an everyday, sensuous reality which exists prior and independently of our consciousness of it.

The question as to the nature of your proverbial knife can only be proved in practice. Either it cuts the apple or it doesn't.

Ok, but the point I was trying to make was that even if our representations of reality don't correspond to reality itself (meaning that our sensations don't correspond to reality) why would it matter?
What Kant defends seems like a child's joke. It's like you are seeing a blue pen, and someone says it's red. Well, why would it matter if it was a red pen, if I see it as blue and everyone does too?
Either it's that, or I'm not really understanding Kant's theory of the representation and the ''thing itself''.

What he says is that the thing itself is there, and that for you to understand it, it ''goes'' through 2 ''filters'', your sensations and your mind, so your concept/representation of the thing itself might not correspond to it. This is correct right?

However, we know that leaves are green, and people in the other side of the world know that too, so even if the ''leaf itself'' isn't green, it doesn't really matter, because only it's green color affects us.
From what I've read, Kant really looks like he's saying that everything might be an illusion because our sensations might not be accurate or we may not know how to interpret them.