Karl Popper is named two hundred and seventy-six times in this book, and every time Naletov quotes him he quotes him from Popper. The Logic of Scientific Discovery in the Basic Books edition of 1959, with page numbers; Conjectures and Refutations, Harper and Row, 1963; The Poverty of Historicism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960; Objective Knowledge in both the Clarendon 1972 and the Oxford 1979 printings; "A Realist View of Logic, Physics and History" in the Plenum volume of 1970; The Self and Its Brain, written with John Eccles, in the Springer edition of 1977. Carnap is read in five separate works. Quine appears in Word and Object, From a Logical Point of View, and "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" cited to the Philosophical Review of 1951. Kuhn is quoted twice from the 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions with pages. Feyerabend's Against Method, Lakatos's contribution to Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Schlick's Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre in the Berlin German of 1925. Adorno is footnoted to Negative Dialektik, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1966, in German. Marcuse to Der eindimensionale Mensch, Luchterhand, Neuwied, 1967, in German. Roy Bhaskar's A Realist Theory of Science appears within a year or two of publication.
This series has been running a test on the Progress volumes: when a book attacks an opponent, does it quote him from his own pages, or does it characterise him and route the footnote through a Soviet intermediary? The test has produced hard results — an Institute history of the world working-class movement that cites Luxemburg's Gesammelte Werke sixteen times and no work by Trotsky once; a volume on the battle of ideas with a thousand footnotes and none to any Trotsky text. It has also inverted once, in Batalov's book on the New Left, where Marcuse is footnoted to his own editions thirty-four times against thirty-one references to Lenin.
Naletov inverts it again, and further. Of roughly a hundred and thirty-five source-bearing footnotes in this book, six go to Soviet or Russian-language work — Ilyenkov, Narsky, Ambartsumyan, Lesevich, Rumer and Fet, and a Frolov–Yudin preface. Lenin is cited four times, from Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, the Hegel conspectus and one 1917 article. Everything else is Western, in the original, mostly in English and where necessary in German and French. Popper is cited to his own works more often than Lenin is cited at all.
So this is not a party-school manual with a bibliography attached, and the first thing to say about it is that it is a real book of philosophy. The second thing to say is that it has one silence, and that the silence is placed with unnerving precision.
The copyright page settles what usually takes hours. The Russian original and the English translation carry the same year and the same publisher: © Издательство «Прогресс», 1984, then "English translation © Progress Publishers 1984". There is no Mysl' or Politizdat or Nauka edition standing behind this one. Progress commissioned the Russian text and issued it in English in the same year, which is unusual in this catalogue and tells you what the commission was. A book on Carnap and Quine had no domestic mass market; it was written to be read abroad, by the sort of Western reader who might actually own Word and Object.
The manuscript is older than the spine. Running the footnotes for their latest dates gives a bibliography that peaks in 1973 and 1977 (eight items each), thins after 1978, and ends. The most recent Western book cited anywhere is Roger Trigg's Reality at Risk of 1980. The only later item in the whole apparatus is the 1982 Progress English edition of Ilyenkov's Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete, which is what an English edition substitutes so that its reader can follow up the reference. There is nothing from 1981 and nothing from 1983. For a book about the philosophy of science, a field that moved fast in exactly those years, a bibliography closing in 1980 is strong evidence: this is a manuscript finished around 1980 or 1981 and published in 1984.
That dating makes the nil returns worth counting, because it fixes what was available to the author. The 26th Congress of the CPSU met in February 1981 and Brezhnev died in November 1982; both were within reach of a manuscript in revision. Neither appears. Nor does anything else. In 116,426 words, the words CPSU, Congress, Communist Party, imperialism, opportunism, revisionism, anti-communism and anti-Soviet occur zero times, and bourgeois occurs eight times. Against a corpus that uses opportunis- at 1.55 per ten thousand words and revisionis- at 1.17, Naletov uses the whole deviation vocabulary — opportunism, revisionism, sectarianism — not once, and dogmatism only four times, every one of them aimed at Popper or at positivism. Whatever this book was commissioned to do, it was not commissioned to perform loyalty. It is one of the least politically decorated volumes in the entire Progress list.
Section 3 of this series' remit is to say plainly where a book's work is good, and here a good deal of it is.
Naletov's opening move is a concession, not an attack. The struggle against metaphysics, he writes, "had both positive and negative aspects", and the positive effect was its opposition to speculative and religious philosophy that "showed little interest in concrete problems of scientific cognition and practical life". Of logical positivism he says flatly: "There is no denying the fact that this school has helped science to get rid of fruitless speculations and dogmatism." He adds, with a candour rare in this catalogue, that he will not dwell on those merits because his interest is in the lessons of the school's failures — an admission that he is writing a polemic and knows it. He calls positivism "a tree planted for the benefit of science and intended to promote its greatness and glory — however bitter the fruit that was eventually born by it".
He states Popper's position correctly and says so. Popper's arguments against verificationism, he writes, "are serious enough, though not at all as original as he claims" — and the two he singles out are the right two: that observation is always preceded by theoretical assumptions, so knowledge does not begin from sense-data; and that Hume's problem of induction does not entail that theory is immune to observational refutation. He reproduces the demarcation argument faithfully, including Popper's own example of an unfalsifiable proposition, and grants Popper the point that there is no sharp line between science and metaphysics, that Copernicus drew on neo-Platonist sun-worship and that ancient atomism began as myth. He gives Kuhn and Feyerabend on incommensurability at length and without caricature.
His criticism of Popper is then a real criticism, and it is one our own tradition made independently. Falsification, in Naletov's account, makes refutation "the end in itself" and cannot describe how knowledge accumulates; Popper's model of science as an unbroken chain of revolutions is, in a phrase he plainly enjoyed, "a concept of 'permanent revolution in science'" that "does not reproduce the true course of science". George Novack reached the same verdict by a different road, in "Positivism and Marxism in Sociology", subtitled "Apropos of Professor Popper and His Methods" — chapter 11 of his Understanding History: Marxist Essays, and recorded by the ETOL index as having appeared in the International Socialist Review vol. 29 no. 4 (whole no. 187), July–August 1968. (The text we hold is the book-chapter page and carries no provenance line of its own, so that issue attribution rests on the index; the essay's own internal evidence, which treats the 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic as recent, is consistent with it.) Popper "teaches that the essence of science consists, not so much in the verification of hypotheses, as in their falsification", Novack wrote, and "the timidity of his sceptical epistemology is evident in this lopsided conception of scientific lawfulness". Positivism "shies away from acknowledging this growth of positive knowledge about the world… It is badly named and should be more precisely termed 'negativism'." Two Marxists, one in Moscow and one in New York, neither citing the other, convict Popper of the same one-sidedness. That convergence is worth more to a reader than either verdict alone, and an introduction that suppressed it would be doing tribalism rather than criticism.
The best passage in the book is Naletov's answer to the charge that dialectics is unfalsifiable. He puts the objection in his opponents' mouths without softening it, quoting Herbert Feigl — "who honestly confesses to having not read a single Soviet publication in philosophy over the past few years" — calling the transformation of quantity into quality "just as vague as the triad, or the 'negation of the negation'". Naletov's reply is that the law is not a licence to relate any quantity to any quality: it applies only "to the quantity of a given quality", within a determinate measure, and requires the analyst to specify the system under consideration first. He works it through with evaporating water and with electrons in an outer shell, and the point survives the examples: a dialectical law asserted without a specified reference system is indeed empty, and specifying it is what makes the assertion checkable. He then draws the conclusion his opponents said he could not draw. The laws of dialectics, he writes, "are not confirmable under any arbitrary set of conditions. They are operative within quite definite epistemological limits and become senseless beyond them. In other words, they can be falsified in principle, if we come across a sufficiently large body of contradicting facts."
That is a Soviet philosopher in 1984 accepting Popper's criterion and submitting his own doctrine to it. It is a better answer than the Jesuit critic Gustav Wetter, whom he engages directly on the same page, gets credit for provoking, and it is more than most of the philosophy volumes in this series attempt.
Now the silence.
Arguing that positivists blame Marxist philosophy for science's difficulties, Naletov prints an honour roll:
Among prominent natural scientists who made invaluable contribution to the theory and philosophy of science are such famous names as Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Vladimir Bekhterev, Ivan Pavlov, Nikolai Vavilov, Ernst Bauer, Vladimir Fock, Dmitri Blokhintsev, and others.
Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was the founder of Soviet plant genetics and the first president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He was arrested in August 1940, sentenced to death, had the sentence commuted, and died of starvation in Saratov prison in January 1943. He was the chief scientific opponent of Trofim Lysenko, and his arrest and death came in the course of Lysenko's rise. Lysenko's name does not appear in this book. Neither does Stalin's. Neither does Zhdanov's, or Deborin's, or Mitin's, or Prezent's. The years 1947 and 1948 are not mentioned.
Elsewhere Naletov credits the modern evolutionary synthesis to "S. Chetverikov, R. Fischer, S. Wright, and other scientists" (the book's spelling of R. A. Fisher). Sergei Chetverikov founded Russian population genetics; he was arrested in 1929, exiled from Moscow, and his school was broken up. So both Soviet geneticists Naletov names for praise are men the Soviet state removed from science.
A sibling introduction in this series found the identical shape in Fedoseyev's Philosophy in the USSR (1977), whose roll of honour names S. I. Vavilov, the physicist, the younger brother. Naletov goes one better and names N. I. Vavilov himself. He is not concealing the man. He is concealing what was done to him.
And he cannot claim not to have known the subject was live, because he raises it. Two sentences after the honour roll, listing the charges positivists bring against Marxist philosophy, he writes:
The development of genetics, too, purports to have been hampered by ill-intentioned dialectics which, according to the positivist "historians" of science did not serve as a guide for scientific thought but acted as a brake on its progress.
The scare quotes around historians announce that the charge is about to be dismissed. It never is. Naletov answers the physics charges — it is not physics' fault that Mach and Poincaré misread their own results — and then makes exactly one concession:
it is not the fault of Marxist philosophy that some of its ill-starred representatives abused and denounced cybernetics as a bourgeois pseudo-science because they were unable to distinguish between its real scientific content and the misrepresentation of its discoveries in Western philosophical literature.
Cybernetics is conceded; genetics is raised and dropped. And the concession is built so that nothing survives it. The agents are "some of its ill-starred representatives" — individuals, unnamed, undated, unfortunate rather than culpable. There is no institution, no decree, no session, no journal. The paragraph then closes on a symmetry: "the fault lies both with natural scientists and philosophers." A state campaign that ended a science and killed the men who practised it is filed as a shared professional misunderstanding.
Our own tradition had already itemised what Naletov here divides into one admission and one evasion. George Novack, in Intercontinental Press vol. 14 no. 12, 29 March 1976 — eight years before this book and four before its manuscript closed — wrote:
The dismissal of the verified results of genetics; the misjudgment of Einstein's theory of relativity and its philosophical implications; the initial disparagement of cybernetics (information theory); the denial of the validity of formal logic within its limits; and the derogations of Freud's contributions to depth psychology and psychopathology… testify to the harm inflicted by Stalinist dogmatism and intellectual terrorism upon Soviet sciences and philosophy.
Five items. Naletov denies the second, concedes the third, states and abandons the first, and does not reach the fourth or fifth.
The full account was in print in this movement's press thirty-three years before Naletov wrote, and its authors did the reporting that his footnotes do not. R. H. Monroe and Joseph Hansen's two-part "The Lysenko Case" appeared in Fourth International vol. XII no. 1 (whole no. 108), January–February 1951, and vol. XII no. 2 (whole no. 109), March–April 1951. It opens: "The Stalinist outlawing of genetics in the Soviet Union in 1948 profoundly stirred the scientific world. The proscription of this important science and the liquidation of world famous Soviet geneticists had repercussions that have not yet died down." It names the victims — "Their opponents, headed by the famous N.I. Vavilov, were men who had come into prominence in the days of Lenin and Trotsky, when science was free in the Soviet Union" — records that Vavilov "had been arrested and condemned during the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact as a 'British spy'", quotes the Minister of Higher Education's implementing order, and reports that "Genetics was labelled a 'foreign' science, its leading representatives, 'bourgeois.'"
Two corrections belong in the open, because this series applies to its own tradition the standard it applies to Progress. Monroe and Hansen place Vavilov's death in "northeast Siberia in 1942"; he died in Saratov, in January 1943. And they list Chetverikov among those who "perished"; he was arrested and exiled in 1929, dismissed again after 1948, and died in 1959. Writing in 1951 from outside the country, with the Soviet record sealed, they got the shape of the thing right and some of its particulars wrong. Naletov, writing thirty-three years later in Moscow with both men's names in front of him, got the particulars right and left the shape out.
The Batalov finding was not that a Soviet author failed to cite, but that his citations thinned in one place and the placement was the point: Adorno named some sixty-seven times and never once quoted from a work of his own. The same test run on Naletov produces one clean result, and it is not Adorno — Adorno is here in German — but Jürgen Habermas.
Habermas is named seventeen times. Naletov gives several pages to his reconstruction of historical materialism: the replacement of productive forces by purpose-oriented rational action, the labour/interaction distinction, the charge that Marx's categories need a "second dimension". The exposition is competent and it is answered at length. It carries no footnote at all — the longest unsourced stretch of substantive exposition in the book — and Habermas's name appears in no footnote anywhere in it. Meanwhile, in the same chapter, Adorno is quoted from Negative Dialektik and glossed through Narsky's article in Filosofskiye nauki, and Marcuse from Der eindimensionale Mensch.
So the question this series has learned to ask — not whether an author cites, but which opponents he reads and which he merely relays — has a sharp answer here. Every philosopher of science is read in the original. The one philosopher of society is characterised and rebutted from nothing. The apparatus is a map of where the author felt free.
The same map explains a smaller absence. Naletov cites Materialism and Empirio-Criticism four times, devotes pages to Mach and Machism, and quotes the obscure Russian Machist V. V. Lesevich from a 1915 Moscow edition. Alexander Bogdanov, the principal target of Lenin's book, does not appear — and Bogdanov's Tektology is the Russian ancestor of the general systems theory that Naletov discusses in his own chapter on the integration of the sciences. Bertalanffy is likewise absent from that chapter. This is a smaller point than the genetics silence and should not be pressed as hard, but it runs the same way.
There is a version of the reflexivity test that this book would pass and that would tell us nothing. Naletov does admit error on his own side: philosophers "unable to distinguish" real cybernetics from its Western misrepresentation, and scientists who "proved incapable of solving important philosophical problems". The sharper form of the test asks something narrower — not whether error is admitted, but whether the category can ever turn inward.
Naletov states the objection himself, in his opponents' voice, and it has two halves:
Referring to the universality of the laws of dialectics, its opponents allege that dialectics can prove or confirm anything in the world, it can be used to justify any political act.
He answers the first half brilliantly, with the doctrine of measure and the concession that dialectics is falsifiable in principle. The second half he does not answer. He does not answer it anywhere in 116,000 words. It is raised in his own sentence and abandoned, exactly as the genetics charge was — and the two are the same charge, since the political act that dialectics was used to justify is the one that killed the man he had just honoured.
The book's closing sentences are the position in miniature:
To be sure, the concrete embodiment of the principles of dialectics offered by one or another scientist in his works may lack the necessary flexibility, completeness or consistency. The blame for subjective weaknesses should not be laid at the door of dialectics itself.
Individuals may be inflexible. The doctrine is insulated in advance from anything ever done in its name. That is a conclusion which cannot be falsified in principle, in a book whose best pages argue that a philosophy which cannot be falsified in principle is not doing its work.
The answer from this tradition is not that a Marxist party should keep its philosophy to itself. Novack was explicit in the piece already quoted, subtitled "On the Right to Think Without Reprisals or Constraint":
It is perfectly in order for a Marxist party or a government guided by such a party to propagate the doctrines and method of dialectical materialism openly and consistently along with its program and proposals. Indeed, it is obligated to do so… But that is entirely different from adopting a state philosophy and then compelling everyone from the scholars and teachers in the universities to schoolchildren to pay obeisance to that viewpoint. That is as bad as enforcing a state religion.
And the consequence he predicted is the one this book quietly exhibits. Where a philosophy meets "no strong and serious open challenges to its positions and formulas, official thought grows dull, slothful, and unsure of itself. It inclines to evade the most burning, sensitive, and complicated questions of everyday life."
Naletov is not dull, and that is what makes him useful. Given Popper, Carnap, Quine and Kuhn — genuine adversaries, read in full, arguing back — he produces first-rate work. Given the one question in his own field that touched Soviet power, he evades it in a single subordinate clause and moves on. The difference between his pages on measure and his sentence on cybernetics is not a difference of talent. It is the difference between the two subjects, and it is visible on the page.
Novack noted in 1976 that "in the past fifteen years, some of this burden has been lightened, though far from being lifted, in the Soviet Union." This book is what the lightened burden looked like: a Soviet philosopher free to read the West without permission and to submit dialectics to a falsifiability test, and not free to write the name Lysenko. Read it for the argument about measure, and for the demonstration that the citation test is a test and not a verdict. Read the silence for what it cost — and notice that the cost is legible only because Naletov was honest enough to print the honour roll and raise the charge, which a more careful man would have done neither.