Notes for Later: Typologies

I am hesitant to cite mass media science journalism, lest I point toward a green jelly bean, but I found a wonderful quote in an article in today's New York Times. In an article about the identification of 3 different human "enterotypes" (ecosystems of digestive flora). For what it's worth, to my non-specialist eye the NYT does not appear to contradict the Nature article on which it is based. (I have full text access to Nature at work, but not at home, and I write this blog from home, so any quotes will be from the NYT.)

The quote that caught my attention comes from the lead investigator, Peer Bork of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg: "We didn't have any hypothesis. Anything that came out would be new."

It reminded me of a key set of steps in scientific discovery, which often get short shrift by philosophers of science because they do not seem to bring us any closer to capital-T "Truth," concerned as they are with disparate and seemingly contingent phenomena. These are steps that often, though not always, arise when a science is relatively young and still in the process of being formalized. They are:

• observation
• description
• classification

At these stages, hypotheses are not necessary. In some cases, they can be a hindrance, as they predispose the investigator to confirmation bias.

Nonetheless, an observational, descriptive, and/or classificatory study can provide the basis for further hypothetical investigation. From the findings of Dr. Bork and his colleagues, one can now formulate several testable hypotheses, for example, that human digestive microbiomes can be classified into a relatively low number of distinct "enterotypes," whose distinguishing characteristics can be clearly defined. Further investigation will either refute or tend to confirm that hypothesis, or possibly tend to confirm it while introducing new enterotypes, or other as yet unforeseen variations.

There will be controversy along the way. There are several possible objections to the study, some of which Dr. Bork himself anticipates: "Researchers will need to search for enterotypes in people from African, Chinese and other ethnic origins. He also notes that so far, all the subjects come from industrial nations, and thus eat similar foods." One can also note the relatively small number of human beings whom the researchers have enterotyped thus far: An initial study of 22 Europeans, confirmatory analysis of 13 Japanese and 4 Americans, and now an expanded study of 400 people. The point is that the observation and classification of previous unnoticed phenomena can form the basis for a research program.

So how does this relate to the basic program of this blog? One of my basic contentions, currently being developed in the polemic against Badiou (of which you can expect the next installment over the weekend), is that the basis for communist militancy is the commitment to test the following interlinked hypotheses:

1. That capitalism necessarily develops the preconditions for a classless, communist society;
2. That the proletariat, through its struggles against the capitalists, necessarily develops consciousness of its revolutionary tasks and capacity to bring about such a transformation;
3. That the necessary expression of such consciousness is a revolutionary vanguard party of the working class.

There is a fourth hypothesis, that forms the (necessarily temporary) justification for the existence of this blog. This hypothesis, for the time being, takes a negative form: That the forms of organization previously considered to be necessary precursors to such a party have outlived their usefulness, been superseded by developments in the technical basis for human social relations that will necessarily give rise to new organizational forms. Negative, because it negates what has been without indicating what is to take its place. And this is the place of "observation, description, classification." One of the ongoing tasks of this blog--and, I hope, of any readers/commenters who see value in such an endeavor and take it to heart--will be find, observe, describe and classify emergent forms of organization in the proletarian class struggle. And only then, to begin to formalize the investigation of them, to show how they have lawfully developed from the substrate of today's capitalist social relations.