Lectorky on dialectical materialism and negativism

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Lectorsky on dialectical materialism and enativism

Tom Rockmore

Abstract

lektorsky philosophy materialism realism

The article analyses V.A. Lektorsky's views on the debate on constructivism and realism. On the one hand, it considers the history of development of constructivism and realism as philosophical positions embedded in the evolution of European philosophical tradition. On the other hand, the changes in V.A. Lectorsky's views on constructivism and realism are traced from dialectical materialism to post-Marxist variant of realism. The latter is built on the basis of analysis of cognitive science and recognition of limitations of the so-called computational model of cognition, as well as on the explication of epistemological consequences of enactivism, a concept emphasizing significance that the physical body of a knowing subject actively inscribed in the cognizing environment, i.e. interacting with it, has for cognitive processes. The article discusses the two distinguished stages in Lec - torsky's work on epistemological realism, reconstructs its genesis, discusses and evaluate the arguments that Lectorsky presents in support of his conception so-called «constructive» or «activity» realism.

Keywords: V.A. Lectorsky, realism, anti-realism, constructivism, enactivism, dialectical materialism, Marxism, constructive realism, activity realism

Аннотация

Лекторский о диалектическом материализме и энактивизме

Том Рокмор

В статье анализируются взгляды В.А. Лекторского в рамках дискуссии относительно конструктивизма и реализма. Рассматривается, с одной стороны, история развития конструктивизма и реализма как философских позиций, вписанных в эволюцию европейской философской традиции, с другой - изменения, которые претерпевали взгляды В.А. Лекторского, - от диалектического материализма к постмарксистскому варианту реализма. Последний строится с опорой на анализ результатов исследования познания в когнитивной науке и признании ограниченности так называемой вычислительной модели познания, а также на экспликации эпистемологических следствий энактивизма - концепции, акцентирующей значение для когнитивных процессов физического тела познающего субъекта, активно вписанного в познаваемого среду, т.е. взаимодействующего с ней. Проводится обсуждение выделенных двух этапов в разработке Лекторским проблемы эпистемологического реализма, реконструируется их генезис, разбираются приводимые Лекторским аргументы в поддержку занимаемой им позиции, дается их оценка.

Ключевые слова: В.А. Лекторский, реализм, антиреализм, конструктивизм, энактивизм, диалектический материализм, марксизм

Main part

I have admired the work of Prof. V.A. Lektorsky over many years. He is doubly distinguished as an important philosopher of science, and as a central figure in the transformation of Soviet Marxism into Russian philosophy. He has contributed over many years to a constructivist approach to cognitionin two main ways: earlier as a Marxist, more specifically as a dialectical materialist, and later through enactivism. He has also been a central figure in the post-Soviet transformation of the Soviet form of Marxism into Russian philosophy in his role as the editor of Voprosyfilosofii as well as in his contributions to the Institute of Philosophy. In these and other ways, he has helped Russian philosophy and Russian philosophers to undo the political ties that, roughly since Lenin's rise to power, over decades linked Soviet philosophy to Soviet Marxism.

Lektorsky's constructivism is linked to his realism. Over time, Lektorsky has defended different kinds of realism. In his early period, he defended dialectical materialism while arguing in favor of the direct grasp of the mind-independent real. More recently, while still broadly defending realism, he has defended forms of post - Marxist realism that are currently under attack by Russian and non-Russian post - Marxist philosophers and philosophers of science.

What is constructivism?

«Constructivism» means different things to different observers. As understood here, it refers to a series of solutions to the cognitive problem in all its many forms and throughout the Western philosophical tradition. In many writings over roughly a half century, Lektorsky has concentrated on related forms of constructivism, earlier on the relation of thought and being, and more recently on varieties of enactivism. This latter term refers to a related cluster of currently emerging approaches important in Russian cognitive science broadly understood.

Problems are linked to possible solutions. The constructivist problem and, hence, its proposed solution both arose early in the tradition. Constructivism can be described informally as well as more formally. Einstein's informal cognitive model is a simple example. In an informal statement, Einstein writes:

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality, we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious, he may form some picture of a mechanism, which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could capture his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison [Einstein, Infeld, 1961, p. 3].

Einstein depicts the cognitive problem as knowing the mind-independent world. Through the interaction of the knower with the world, the human observer formulates theories about it. According to Einstein, the world can be modeled in different ways. Later models build on, in correcting, earlier models. Later models of the real will be increasingly simpler as well as have greater explanatory power than their predecessors. Einstein thinks that progress in physics consists in explaining more ideas with simpler, more accurate, more powerful conceptual tools. Yet it is not obvious, but needs to be demonstrated that, say, the Copernican planetary model is simpler, more accurate, or even more powerful than its Ptolemaic predecessor.

Parmenidean variations on thought and being

In the cited passages, Einstein is working with an informal model. For a more formal model, it will be useful to turn to Parmenides. His view is thought by a number of important observers, including Plato, Hegel, Heidegger and others to mark the beginning of Western philosophy. Its central thrust turns on the influential claim that echoes throughout the entire tradition until today and that is routinely cited: «Thought and being are the same» [Coxon, 2009, p. 58]. The Parmenidean view as we know it combines both ontological and epistemic claims. The ontological claim refers being, or roughly the claim that to know is to know what is and what is being. The epistemic claim is the claim to think being, hence to know it. If this is correct, then philosophy turns on the solution to the problem of knowledge, namely the claim that being that is and being that we only think are the same. It follows that there are two and only two main approaches to the cognitive problem. One solution lies in grasping mind-independent being as it is, and the second solution, which is sometimes called constructivism, consists in constructing thought that is the same as being.

In short, the Parmenidean view of cognition turns on the identity of thought and being. This suggests that Western philosophy consists in a series of variations on a small number of possible solutions to the cognitive problem running throughout the Western tradition. These solutions are restated in similar but different ways by a long series of observers, including Parmenides himself.

Lektorsky on dialectical materialism

Parmenides suggests that thinking and being are the same [see, for discussion: Rockmore, 2021]. His view that when we know, we know the mind-independent real became much later a Marxist article of cognitive faith. Lektorsky's early view loosely follows Lenin's form of Marxist materialism. According to Marxist materialism, we can and in fact do know being as it is. According to Lenin, «Materialism is the recognition of `objects in themselves' or objects outside the mind; the ideas and sensations are copies or images of these objects. <…> The opposite doctrine (idealism) says: the objects do not exist, outside the mind; they are `connections of sensations'» [Lenin, 1947, p. 14].

In rough terms, materialism is an ontological doctrine central to Marxism of many different stripes that, unlike other approaches, successfully grasps the real. Marxist materialists believe there is a way the world is, that it is possible to know the world as it is, and that only Marxism successfully grasps the mind-independent world. Lenin writes: «Materialism is the recognition of `objects in themselves' or objects outside the mind; the ideas and sensations are copies or images of these objects. The opposite doctrine (idealism) says: the objects do not exist, outside the mind; they are `connections of sensations'» [Ibid.]. Lenin's view of materialism calls to mind Engels's view of cognition, or the view that there is a basic difference between idealism, or the Copernican cognitive approach worked out by Kant, and materialism, or the view that Marxism differs from other approaches in claiming to know, hence to solve or resolve the philosophical problem of the thing in itself.

In its most sophisticated form, this claim is formulated by the young Lukacs. In «History and Class Consciousness», he claims that Marxism, which he understands mainly as Marx's view, solves the problem of knowledge on a materialist basis [Lukacs, 1971].

Lektorsky on constructivism and materialism

Lektorsky's commitment to different forms of constructivism is central to his work beginning early in his career and right up to the present day. Constructivism came into the debate more than two and a half millennia ago where it has always been and remains a central theme linking together philosophy, science and philosophy of science. But times have changed. The continued interest of a Marxist approach to science and philosophy of science is now often accompanied by a waning interest in Marxist materialism as well as a waning interest in Marxism, hence mainly understood through Engels and Lenin rather than Marx. After many efforts to make out a materialist approach to cognition, materialism, which is in its senescence, no longer appears promising and arguably cannot be saved. But, after two and a half millennia, constructivism is still in its relative infancy where it arguably now appears as the most plausible among contemporary cognitive approaches.

In his early work, Lektorsky featured a modern form of Marxism in order to approach problems in epistemology and philosophy of science. In his important book, «Subject Object Cognition» (1980), he was already concerned with the problem of the development of knowledge, of the socio-cultural conditions for scientific cognition, including the realistic interpretation of scientific knowledge. At the time, Lektorski believed that this approach expressed the most significant traits of the Marxist approach to cognition. He was aware that Marxism takes many different shapes, but concerned to point out what he understood as the increasing interest of Soviet research within the context of the special sciences as well as a broad worldview embracing the dialectic of subject and object.

Lektorsky on knowing the real

Lektorsky's book initially appeared in 1980. He was still supporting a Marxist approach to cognition when his book was translated into English in 1984. But he had already abandoned it nearly a half century later. Lektorski's approach to scientific cognition is consistent with constructivism but inconsistent with materialism. In remarks on Marxism and non-Marxism, Lektorsky suggests that Marxism does not consist in the «absolute» substantiation of knowledge. It rather consists in «the process of actual development of cognition itself in its union with practical activity» [Lektorsky, 1984, p. 1].

The theme of the reproduction of social reality comes into the debate very early in Parmenides. Parmenides, a pre-Socratic, is an enigmatic but influential figure. He is regarded by a number of observers (e.g. Plato, Hegel, Heidegger and Russell) as having invented Western philosophy. Many observers think he begins its tradition that later continues as a series of reactions to other thinkers.

It sometimes seems as if, in Parmenides's wake, there are as many or almost as many approaches to cognition as there are philosophers interested in this theme. After some two and a half millennia of debate, apparently no approach to knowledge is uncontroversial. The history of philosophy consists of often inconsistent efforts over the centuries to solve, resolve, or overcome the problem of knowledge as it emerged early in the Western tradition, where it has been continually scrutinized from an apparently endless series of perspectives ever since.

Parmenides, a late pre-Socratic, is one of the first or perhaps even the first to raise the cognitive problem in a recognizably modern sense. «On Nature», a poem that is his only extant text, includes fragments of the poem preserved by later thinkers, as well as direct and indirect reactions to it spread widely throughout the contemporary as well as later tradition. In the poem, Parmenides advances the striking claim that thought and being are the same. In Fragment 2, he famously but enigmatically writes, «…in fact it is the same to think and to be» [Coxon, 2009, p. 58]. I will call this claim the Parmenidean thesis.

On the Parmenidean thesis

Philosophy crucially depends on interpretation. The Parmenidean thesis lends itself to two main types of interpretation. On the one hand, there is ontological realism, or the view that to know is to know what is, not merely as it appears, but as it is. On the other hand, there is epistemic constructivism that denies we can grasp what is while limiting knowledge to the grasp of what appears because we construct

it. «Realism» refers to the ontological view that there is a mind-independent world that we in fact know as it is or at least appears to be. Constructivism, which distinguishes between the mind-independent world as it is and its mere appearance, denies we can know that we can know the mind-independent real, hence denies that we can know it as it is. For different reasons - including the fragmentary state of our access to Parmenides's view - we do not know and can only guess at the correct interpretation of Parmenides's view of cognition.

From Parmenides right up to the present a formidable roster of observers - they include Descartes the rationalist, Locke the empiricist, and Marxists of various kinds - have argued more often with skill but not always with insight that we know that we in fact know the way the world is. If this claim could be demonstrated, it would at long last demonstrate the approach to cognition as not only aiming at but also in fact knowing the real. Then there is the skeptical suggestion that for different reasons we do not and cannot demonstrate knowledge of the mind-independent real. If this is correct, the outcome of the epistemic debate is some version of the quasi - Socratic claim that we know we do not know.

The difference between these two interpretations lies in the difference between the normative theoretical claim that to know is, as Parmenides claims, to know the real, and the constative claim that in practice we cannot know the real. Third, there is the modern view sometimes known as constructivism or epistemic constructivism. Epistemic constructivism is a second-best cognitive approach. It suggests that, though we do not know we know the mind-independent real, we at least know what we construct. Unlike Parmenides, this cognitive approach turns away from the ongoing effort to know the real; but it remains Parmenidean in arguing for knowledge of the «real for us» - that is, for a recognizable version of the Parmenidean thesis that thought and being are the same.

Plato refutes Parmenides

Directly or indirectly Parmenides influences a long list of later thinkers up to the present, crucially including Plato, Kant and Hegel as well as many others. Plato, who thinks Parmenides is an important figure, since we owe to him the beginning of philosophy, also thinks Western philosophy begins incorrectly.

Plato, who long ago was influenced by Parmenides, is a post-Parmenidean. He suggests we know that we do not and cannot know the mind-independent real several places, including the «Meno» and the «Republic». In the «Meno», Plato briefly sketches a simple but effective geometrical argument as follows. Socrates asks the slave if he knows what a square is (82b). He answers in defining a square as having four equal sides, each of which measures two feet (82e) and then examines that claim. Now twice 4 feet is 8 feet (83e). A line double that length is four times bigger (83e). And a line twice this length is four times as long (83c). Now putting together four four-foot squares yields 16 square feet. The slave goes on to agree with Socrates that the diagonal that bisects the 8 foot-line yields a square with an area of 8 square feet (85c).

In the «Meno», Plato believes that we do not know what we do not make since we know only what we make. The mature Plato later seems to have second thoughts about endorsing the constructivist doctrine. In the «Republic», when he has already worked out one and possibly more versions of the notorious theory of forms (or ideas), he understands it as any of a limitless number of types of imitation, more specifically a single form that applies to many things which have the same name. In the last book of the dialogue, Plato describes the relation between a single form which is not and cannot be made by a human being and the many things that human beings can and do make. Socrates differentiates three kinds of cognitive object, including one that cannot be made by a human being but that is made by the gods, another that is made by a carpenter who imitates what he makes, and a final one made by a painter who imitates what the carpenter makes.

In the «Republic», Plato maintains that the Parmenidean view, or the identity of thinking and being can be stated both positively and negatively, positively as the suggestion that we know what we make and negatively as the suggestion that we do not know what we do not make. Left unclear is the point Plato is trying to bring out. If thinking and being are the same, then an individual, who knows only what he makes, cannot know what he did not make. For we can only know if we can grasp directly the mind-independent object made, for instance, by a god or nature. It follows that a carpenter cannot know a bed he makes nor a painter know the bed he paints. Knowledge is necessarily reserved for the god, who according to Plato alone makes the world. It follows that for the mature Plato the view that we know only what we make that applies in the early Plato no longer applies in the later Plato.

The difficulty which arises is that the identity of the original object and what appears in its instantiation can be asserted but cannot be demonstrated. According to Plato we can only know that the object resembles its instantiation, but not that it imitates correctly. In other words, Parmenides suggests that we do not and cannot know that an object made by a person correctly imitates the form or idea since, as Plato shows, we cannot know a mind-independent object but can only know a mind - dependent object. This leaves unresolved the problem of the identity of the imitation and what it imitates that is Kant's problem.

Vico and constructivism

Parmenides long ago identified realism and constructivism. Other than sheer ingenuity, in which later thinkers build on the views of earlier thinkers, there is no basic difference between ancient and modern forms of realism and constructivism, between ancient claims that we can or cannot grasp the mind-independent real as it is in meeting the criterion of cognition.

Realism was already well developed in the ancient tradition. Modern realism does not differ basically from ancient realism. Modern constructivism has become more popular roughly since Vico, an important critic of Descartes as well as an early modern proponent of constructivism. Vico is best known for his verum factum principle, initially formulated in 1710, which states that truth is verified through creation or invention and not, as Descartes thinks, through observation. In «The New Science», he claims that «The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it» [Vico, 1948, p. 331]. Though Vico was not known in Europe before Marx, he clearly influenced the latter, whom he cites, in working out a constructivist cognitive approach. One way to put the point is to say that for related reasons both thinkers oppose the Cartesian effort to infer from the subject to the object in seeking to reverse the inference as a condition of knowledge.

Kant on representationalism and constructivism

Representation, which prevails in Kant's pre-Copernican period, presupposes the cognitive grasp of the mind-independent real. Constructivism, which denies representation, and which prevails in Kant's post-representational period, is the converse approach leading to the so-called Copernican (philosophical) revolution. The Copernican (astronomical) revolution dominates Kant's philosophical development during the mature period after his so-called Inaugural Dissertation. Kant distantly follows Plato. He accepts the difference between appearance and reality but, like the latter, rejects the backward causal inference from what appears to what is real. Further, like Plato, he rejects any claim to direct intuition of the mind-independent real as it is.

…we have no concepts of the understanding and hence no elements for the cognition of things except insofar as an intuition can be given corresponding to these concepts, consequently that we can have cognition of no object as a thing in itself, but only insofar as it is an object of sensible intuition, i.e. as an appearance; from which follows the limitation of all even possible speculative cognition of reason to mere objects of experience. Yet the reservation must also be well noted, that even if we cannot cognize these same objects as things in themselves, we at least must be able to think them as things in themselves. For otherwise there would follow the absurd proposition that there is an appearance without anything that appears [Kant, 1998, p. 115].

In the «Prolegomena», Kant pointedly draws attention to his mature position as an answer to Hume, whom at the time, he takes as his main philosophical opponent. Kant draws attention to a new distinction between cognizing the real, or things in themselves, which, since he denies cognitive intuition, hence denies cognition of the real, he rejects. Kant quickly points out that, though we cannot know things in themselves, we must at least be able to think them since otherwise there would be, as he writes, an appearance without anything that appears. Since the real cannot appear, this suggestion seems to commit Kant to the view that we mistakenly take as an appearance a false appearance, for instance, say, as if there were direct intuition of the real. Kant goes on to consider a further possibility in the distinction between the same things as objects of experience as distinguished from the real, and as things in themselves or as the real. Kant here points out that if the distinction between what is given in experience, or the appearance, and what is not given in experience, is not made, then it would not be possible to say that the same object, in this case the soul, is both determined as well as free. Yet Kant does not show through experience, through intuition or in any other way that we can grasp the real.

In short, the mature Kant rejects representationalism, or the capacity to represent the real as a cognitive source, hence to know the mind-independent world. He suggests on the one hand that efforts to base metaphysics on the object's conformity to our cognition, that is a priori, have failed and further suggests this whole endeavor is not promising. He examines the possibility of a priori cognition of objects through intuition. According to Kant, if intuition must conform to the constitution of objects, it is unclear that we can know them a priori, a posteriori, or in any other way.

Kant's solution to the Parmenidean problem is routinely and widely known, but not necessarily understood, as his Copernican revolution in philosophy. According to Kant, knowing cannot depend on being since a priori cognition fails. In its place, Kant suggests in his famous Herz letter that we assume that being depends on knowing. In other words, we get further if we assume that objects, or being, must conform to a priori cognition, or knowing. This strategy resembles the Copernican strategy that gives up the idea that the stars revolve around the subject in favor of the alternative strategy in which the subject moves around the motionless stars. Kant restates his similar suggestion that we can paraphrase as the view that thought depends on being, in which case we cannot have a priori cognition, which is, however, only possible if being depends on thought. Kant concludes that either thought represents being, in which case the same problem arises, or experience depends on the understanding, whose rules as the so-called categories are presupposed a priori as the necessary condition of all cognitive objects.

Lektorsky, the human subject and Marxist philosophy

Kant's and Lektorsky's mature cognitive views both feature constructivism in different ways. The former relies on an abstract concept, or the notorious «I think», whereas the latter relies on a social subject. Lektorsky's philosophical development turns on the development of his constructivism in two stages: the initial phase in which he argues in favor of a Leninist form of dialectical materialism, or Marxist realism, which is followed by an enactivist phase, in which he developed non-Marxist forms of realism. The difference, which is important, first insists on the grasp of the mind-independent real as it is, and, second, on the construction of a view of the real, not as it is, but rather as it appears to be from within the social context.

Lektorsky's non-Marxist, enactivist phase is based on several factors, including the post - Kantian concern to respond to Hume. In his enactivist phase Lektorsky insists on the difference between Marxist and non-Marxist forms of constructivism. In his Marxist phase Lektorsky insists that the dialectical materialist approach was appropriate for all forms of cognition. In his post-Marxist phase, he now links the specific form of the subject to specific kind of science and philosophy of science.

Hume, like the other British empiricists, links his view of human nature to the science of man. In his reply to Hume, Kant bases his view on the possibility of metaphysics in a quasi-Leibnizian conception of the subject consistent with his view of the future science of metaphysics. Hume, who stresses the «science of man», claims it is far more valuable than Newton's natural philosophy. Hume ends the «Introduction» to the «Treatise» with the claim that we may hope to establish a science of man, which will not be inferior in certainty, and will be much superior in utility to any other of human comprehension. Following Descartes, Kant in introduces an abstract view of the subject.

In the post-Kantian reaction, the pre-Kantian, Humean conception of the subject returns in a more concrete guise in the social context in three main ways: first from the pre-Humean, historicist perspective of Vico and on the other hand from the perspective of post-Kantian idealism; second, independently through Vico's form of constructivist view of the subject in the historical context; and, third, again independently through the development of a conception of the finite human subject in the views of Fichte, Hegel, Marx and other German idealists.

Enactivism, to which I will now shortly turn, consists in a series of related efforts to work out different human sciences on the basis of different but related formulations of a conception of the particular form of the finite human science.

What is enactivism?

The limits of knowledge follow from the principle that there is not now and never has been a theory that enables us to demonstrate the Parmenidean view that thinking and being are the same. The result, as Lektorsky says, is anti-realism, the same view, which long ago was favored by Plato, who denies we can know the real since we know only what we construct. In distantly following Plato, Kant agrees we cannot know the real. This general claim seems to be central for enac - tivism. In simple terms, this epistemic approach which is still in its early stage, consists in a general claim for a wide and disparate series of approaches to social cognition.

There is currently no agreement about «enactivism», a term that refers broadly to various forms of embodied cognition, for instance a conception of mind linked to so-called computationalism. This wide research program is related to such fields as psychology, neuroscience, ethology, philosophy, linguistics, robotics, artificial intelligence and so on. The program emphasizes the agent's physical body in respect to its cognitive ability. It is preceded by computational cognitive science and ecological psychology. Enactivist research presupposes that what is happening in the mind is not entirely determined by the brain. Enactivism about the mind includes externalism about mental content as well as about the bearers of such content in the so-called extended mind. Enactivism is linked to the feeling tradition and is anti-representational. It is further externalist with respect to the content of mental states or acts.

Enactivism relates widely to different sub-fields. In the philosophy of psychiatry, it relates to philosophical discussion of mental illness, a context in which it treats psychiatry as a special science. Understood in this way, it includes mental illness in its ethical and experiential dimensions. It also includes the interaction between psychopathology and philosophy of mind. And, if it is understood as eliminative materialism, it includes the radical claim that our commonsense view of the mind is deeply wrong. Here it challenges various mental states that Descartes took for granted.

Lektorsky and enactivism

Lektorsky turns directly to enactivism in an important recent paper devoted to presuppositions in the cognitive sciences cognitive science understood as situated, embodied and inacted (or enacted). In the paper, he criticizes the views of Fodor, Varela and Gibson in the context of remarks on naive vs scientific realism, with the emphasis on the latter. Unlike many Russian scholars, Lektorskydefendsphilo - sophical realism, in his case in attacking Cartesian realism [Lektorsky, 2017].

The paper begins with remarks on the Cartesian view that consciousness is the only certainty before turning rapidly to the psychological justification of anti-realism. According to Lektorsky, scientific psychology seeks to combine two positions, the view that cognition and consciousness presuppose the mind-independent real world, or commonsense, as well as science, and the view that the person being studied is self-aware as well as aware of the world which is the content of consciousness. In detailed remarks, Lektorsky examines the Cartesian view that only the contents of consciousness are certain or even known. In this context, in reference to G.E. Moore and D. Gibson, Lektorsky points out Gibson's view that so - called empirical sensualism and intellectualism share the impossibility of grasping how a cognitive subject can come to grips with the external world. The main point seems to be that through their interaction human subjects construct different worlds on the basis of their own specificity.

The paper ends with further remarks on the distinction between reality and the artificial world. According to Lektorsky, the embodied and enacted approach help us to understand the relations between illusion and reality. In referring to the infamous duck/rabbit, he insists that illusions are real. In other words, as Parmenides already thought long ago, we do not and cannot grasp the mind-independent real, but rather only construct a cognitive model on its basis. Lektorsky now finally returns to his defense of realism as a strategy of cognitive research. What he earlier called «constructive realism,» which he now calls «activity realism,» includes «the embodied, situated, inacted [sic] approach of contemporary cognitive science» [Lektorsky, 2017].

Conclusion: Lektorski on dialectical materialism and enactivism

I come now to my conclusion. According to Parmenides, thinking and being are the same. If it is possible to grasp the mind-independent real, then constructivism is superfluous. Yet it becomes useful, in fact crucial if it is not possible to grasp the mind-independent real.

Lektorsky has been concerned with constructivism over many years. In his early work, during the Soviet period, he defended an approach to cognition through dialectical materialism, which rests on the indemonstrable claim to grasp the mind-independent real as it is. In more recent writings he has abandoned his initial approach in favor of defending a constructivist approach to the social sciences. In giving up the claim to know the real as it is, his initial approach, he now features enactivism, or a cognitive approach based on the particular social sciences. The enormous difference lies in abandoning the claim to know the mind-independent real as it is, which cannot be demonstrated, in favor of a view of the real for us, for a human subject, which can be demonstrated.

Since it is not possible to know the mind-independent real as it is, it is implausible to defend dialectical materialism. It is obviously incorrect to claim that through Marxism or in some other way we can grasp the mind-independent real as it is. That amounts to a political solution for a philosophical problem. It is rather correct to defend the rival view that Lektorsky now supports in his recent turn to an enactivist approach in the context of constructivist realism.

References

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