 Good day. Again, as Professor Resnick, today I want to pick up on our discussion last time of Richard Rorty, and I want to talk more on epistemology and how that connects to Marxism, the focus of this course. First, consider Marxism as a kind of conceptual object. There are physical objects like this lectern, an automobile, and so forth, but consider a conceptual object, a different adjective. And the question there is, how do we figure out what it is? So how do we figure out this object, conceptual Marxism, that we're going to study in this particular course? And there are two traditional answers to this question within the study of epistemology. First, notice that the conceptual object, Marxism, is assumed to be independent of us. It's out there in the syllabus that I've asked you to read. It's out there in these brief lectures that I'm presenting to you. It's there in capital, the book by Marx that we're going to read. So one answer to the question of what is this conceptual object, Marxism, is to read it. Read the stuff on the syllabus, read the book, and then via the mind, your mind, induce the truth of what it's all about. So in this approach, reading experience, the experience of reading is the standard of truth. That's called empiricism. So the answer to the question of what is Marxism, which again is assumed to be independent of us, is experience in order to induce the truth of that conceptual object. Let me give you a different answer to the question. Let me begin with an attack actually on the first answer that I just provided. Read the book. You can read everything on that reading list. You can listen to these lectures and you're not going to figure it out. What you need, according to the second view, is a key set of ideas to allow you to sort through all those readings. The readings are going to provide you with an infinity of different facts. But in fact, the way you will sort through those to figure out what are valid, what are not, and so forth, is through a sorting mechanism which is your mind. The second way argues that there are certain key ideas or if you want a logic of reasoning which will enable you to figure out what this Marxism is all about. The reason then, reason is the standard of truth in the second way that's rationalism. Just where the word comes from, rationalism, reason is the standard of truth in the second way. So we have two different standards of truth with which and by which we can figure out what is this conceptual object. So I want to critically examine now these two different ways of gaining knowledge, these two different epistemologies and compare and contrast them with this Marxist way, which I said last time, this notion of dialectical materialism or over-determination. Suppose someone produces then a knowledge of Marxism in a book or an article or in these lectures, whatever the form it arrives in front of you, you have a conceptual object. In general, let's extend that. Someone can produce a knowledge of anything in life, a knowledge of the planet earth, a knowledge of the stars, a knowledge of the universe, a knowledge of this lecturing comprised of particles, a knowledge of two people dancing in a dance hall. That's not an epistemological problem. The production of knowledge is not the problem. The epistemological problem arrives when the individual or the collectivities of individuals assert that their produced knowledge of Marxism or the planet earth or whatever is the truth for all potential knowers. When that happens, with that particular moment, when the knower or the community of knowers asserts that that particular conceptual object is the truth for everyone, then by virtue of what the truth is in terms of what we talked about before, then truth has to be independent of that particular knower who's made that assertion and everybody else who hears it thinks about it. So the independence is another way of saying that that particular knowledge has a prior existence. If it's the truth, it doesn't depend upon anybody else's production of it, but it had an independent existence prior to that particular knower or anybody else's knowledge of it, and hence that's what given to us means. So that crucial first step of independence that which is given to us, can only be given if it's independent of us, is what the rationalists and the empiricists are doing in order to transform their particular claim about the world or their particular truth claim into the world itself. So if you assert that your particular knowledge of Marxism is the truth, then it can't be relative to that truth, can't be relative to your production of it or anyone else. Rather, it was always out there to be discovered or revealed to you and to other people in the question, because how was it discovered and how was revealed? Then we go back to what we said before. Rationalism discovers it via thought, the empiricists discovers it via experience. So if it has a prior existence, let me back up, if it's the truth or a claim to be the truth, it has a prior existence, like I said before, like a mountain or a continent. And then the way you discover the mountain or continent, according to the rationalists is via reason, according to the empiricists, according to experience, the reading experience. And those are the two standards that these two different kinds of epistemologies have offered us. Well, what have they done? They have taken these two, although they do it in different ways, but they take the rationalists and the empiricists, they take in common their particular ideas of the world and transform them into the world. Then they compare everybody else's thinking about the world against their particular thoughts, which they've turned into the world, to see if everybody else's ideas are correct. So they have transformed their particular theory about the world into the world, and that's a kind of epistemological labeling which enables their ideas about the world to become the world. So their conceptual object, in this case Marxism, has been transformed into the true discourse, the true theory of the world, and the privileged Marxism, then all of the Marxisms are compared and contrasted against it to see if they measure up.