Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union - Historical Analysis of Soviet Ideology & Social Psychology | Academic Research & Cold War Studies

About a year and half ago, I picked up in a used-book store a copy of Professor Loren R. Graham's book, *Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union*. This 1987 book is a revision of his earlier 1972 book, *Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union*. To the earlier book, Graham added on some new chapters, revised earlier chapters, while deleting some old material. This work, like the earlier one, owes much to research that he was able to do within the Soviet Union.Loren Graham's book on science and philosophy in the former Soviet Union is noteworthy for the scope of its coverage of work done in the natural sciences and the philosophy of science there. Professor Graham provides an almost encyclopedic coverage of many different scientific disciplines including physics (with discussions on relativity, quantum mechanics and cosmology), biology (encompassing genetics, physiology, evolutionary biology), psychology, computer science and cybernetics.He relates Soviet debates in those different disciplines to arguments over dialectical materialism. He points out while a lot of Soviet writing on Marxism and dialectical materialism was pure hackery, a lot of highly talented scientists, philosophers, and other scholars in the Soviet Union took dialectical materialism quite seriously and they wrote some significant works on the philosophy of science from a dialectical materialist perspective.While in Stalin's time, it was almost mandatory for scientists to include in their writings genuflections to Marx, Lenin, and Comrade Stalin to ensure state support for their work, this was generally not true after Stalin's time and it was quite possible for scientists to go about their work without bothering themselves over Marxism or dialectical materialism, just as most Western scientists don't like to bother themselves over philosophical or political issues. Nevertheless, Graham points out many eminent scientists and scholars continued to write on dialectical materialism and attempt to show that system of thought could help to illuminate issues in their own disciplines. In other words they continued to take dialectical materialism seriously as a philosophy even when it was not mandatory for them to bother with it as a means for winning support for their work.Graham in discussing the Soviet dialectical materialists of the 1970s and 1980s, distinguishes between two schools or tendencies: the "ontologists" and the "epistemologists." The latter was a tendency that emerged in the post-Stalin era which attempted to draw clear distinctions between scientific issues and philosophical issues. In effect, they were attempting to elaborate Marxist and dialectical materialist defenses of the autonomy of scientific disciplines in order to curb the sort of state interference and censorship that was characteristic of the Stalin era. These philosophers and scientists argued that the proper concern of the philosophy of science was with issues of epistemology, logic, scientific methodology, and cognition. In their view, it was not the place for dialectical materialism as a world view to pronounce on scientific issues like what was the best theory of the origins of the cosmos, or what was the best theory of heredity. Those were issues that were best left to researchers in the appropriate disciplines, rather than to dialectical materialist philosophers. The attempt to link Marxism to specific theories concerning these issues was in their view bad both for science and for Marxism.The "epistemologists" seem to have been more open to influences from the West. Thus, the philosopher Engels Matveevich Chudinov (yes, he was named after Marx's sidekick), attempted in his writings to work out a sophisticated Marxist epistemology which would take into account the work of such Western philosophers as Rescher, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Russell, Carnap, Quine and Godel amongst others.Igor Naletov's work *Alternatives to Positivism* (Naletov is not mentioned at all by Graham) seems to have been written from a similar perspective.The "ontologists" clung to a more traditional understanding of dialectical materialism in which diamat was seen as "the most general science of nature and society." For these dialectical materialists, the dialectics of nature was thought to be of critical importance. They argued that there were dialectical laws that could be seen as operating at all levels of the organization of matter in the inorganic and organic nature that is studied by chemists, physicists, and biologists. And these dialectical laws can also be seen as operating at the levels of the human psyche and human society.In this book, Professor Graham delineates the shifts in the influence of these two schools within the former Soviet Union during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. As he saw it, for a number of years, the "epistemologists" were gaining influence within Soviet academic circles, especially as older philosophers and scientists from the Stalin era began to retire or die off. However, by the early 1980s the "ontologists" began to regain some lost ground with the emergence of a new generation of scholars who sought to breathe new life into more traditional forms of diamat. Graham points out that the "ontologists" benefited from the fact that their formulations of dialectical materialism were closer to the simplified formulations that were taught in most Soviet schools and institutions of higher education. He suggests that by the mid-1980s the debate between the "epistemologists" and the "ontologists" was winding down.