<nettime> Some 1978 Truth Criterion Controversy notes

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

[A couple extra references re Internet Writing, perhaps related to Benjamin's "Critique of Pure Experience" cf. "Walter Benjamin's Concept of Experience and His Literary Practice" (2022) https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6m5322tj]

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Hu Fuming later said in an interview: "The views in the article are not my original ideas. Every philosophy teacher in the university understands them. It was just that I wrote them out at a special 'time point'."[9] In the article Practice is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth, Marx said that "people should prove the truth of their thinking in practice" and Mao Zedong said that "the criterion of truth can only be social practice".[10][11] What was not mentioned in the article was that Hu Shih said in 1921 that one of the core views of John Dewey's experimentalism was that "experiment is the only touchstone of truth".[12] This concept can be traced back to Charles Sanders Peirce.[13] In 1954, when the CCP criticized Hu Shi, it said that this was different from the view of Marxism.[14] Hu Shih's experimentalism was criticized by the CCP as idealism.[15][16]

Legacy
Before his death, Ma Peiwen, former deputy editor-in-chief and director of the theoretical department of Guangming Daily, published A Major Historical Fact That Must Be Clarified, responding to the view among the central party history researchers that the article was completed at the behest of Deng Xiaoping, and pointing out that the creation and publication of the article had no direct relationship with Deng Xiaoping.[17]

In 2019, the "Chinese Language Textbook for Senior High Schools" compiled by the Ministry of Education was officially put into use, and included the full text of Practice is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth.[18]

[Above excerpted from Wikipedia article "Practice is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth"]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_is_the_Sole_Criterion_for_Testing_Truth

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Abductive (or retroductive) phase. Guessing, inference to explanatory hypotheses for selection of those best worth trying. From abduction, Peirce distinguishes induction as inferring, on the basis of tests, the proportion of truth in the hypothesis. Every inquiry, whether into ideas, brute facts, or norms and laws, arises from surprising observations in one or more of those realms (and for example at any stage of an inquiry already underway). All explanatory content of theories comes from abduction, which guesses a new or outside idea so as to account in a simple, economical way for a surprising or complicated phenomenon. The modicum of success in our guesses far exceeds that of random luck, and seems born of attunement to nature by developed or inherent instincts, especially insofar as best guesses are optimally plausible and simple in the sense of the "facile and natural", as by Galileo's natural light of reason and as distinct from "logical simplicity".[130] Abduction is the most 
 fertile but least secure mode of inference. Its general rationale is inductive: it succeeds often enough and it has no substitute in expediting us toward new truths.[131] In 1903, Peirce called pragmatism "the logic of abduction".[132] Coordinative method leads from abducting a plausible hypothesis to judging it for its testability[133] and for how its trial would economize inquiry itself.[134] The hypothesis, being insecure, needs to have practical implications leading at least to mental tests and, in science, lending themselves to scientific tests. A simple but unlikely guess, if not costly to test for falsity, may belong first in line for testing. A guess is intrinsically worth testing if it has plausibility or reasoned objective probability, while subjective likelihood, though reasoned, can be misleadingly seductive. Guesses can be selected for trial strategically, for their caution (for which Peirce gave as example the game of Twenty Questions), breadth, or incomplexity.[135] O
 ne can discover only that which would be revealed through their sufficient experience anyway, and so the point is to expedite it; economy of research demands the leap, so to speak, of abduction and governs its art.[134]

[Above excerpted from Wikipedia article "Charles Sanders Peirce"]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce

See also writings of Peirce at Gutenberg:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/65274/pg65274-images.html

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