The concept and relevance of a metatheory

Every theory is the product of a process of theoretical practice. I shall follow Althusser's (2005: 166-7) beautiful elucidation of the notion of practice:

By practice in general I shall mean any process of transformation of a deter­minate given raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means (of ‘pro­duction').

Thus, theoretical practice is a special kind of practice:

It works on a raw material (representations, concepts, facts) which it is given by other practices, whether ‘empirical’, ‘technical’ or ‘ideological’. In its most general form theoretical practice does not only include scientific theo­retical practice, but also pre-scientific theoretical practice, that is, ‘ideologi­cal’ theoretical practice (the forms of ‘knowledge’ that make up the prehistory of a science, and their ‘philosophies’).

(Ibid.: 167)

Althusser calls the raw material upon which scientific theoretical practice works ‘Generality I’, while the product of the process is called ‘Generality III’. The means of production in the theoretical practice of science are called ‘Gener­ality II’, which is “constituted by the corpus of concepts whose more or less con­tradictory unity constitutes the ‘theory’ of the science at the (historical) moment under consideration, the ‘theory’ that defines the field in which all the problems of the science must necessarily be posed” (ibid.: 185). Generality I can be con­stituted by pre-theoretical ideas and beliefs (“Vorstellungen”), or by already scientifically elaborated constructs “which belong nevertheless to an earlier phase of the science (an ex-Generality III).

It is important for the philosophy of science that the unity of what Althusser calls ‘theory’

rarely exists in a science in the reflected form of a unified theoretical system....The explicitly theoretical part proper is very rarely unified in a non-contradictory form. Usually it is made up of regions locally unified in regional theories that coexist in a complex and contradictory whole with a theoretically unreflected unity. This is the extremely complex and contradic­tory unity which is in action, in each case according to a specific mode, in the labour of theoretical production of each science. For example, in the exper­imental sciences, this is what constitutes the ‘phenomena’ into ‘facts’, this is what poses an existing difficulty in the form of problem, and ‘resolves’ this problem by locating the theoretico-technical disposition which makes up the real corpus of what an idealist tradition calls ‘hypotheses’, etc. etc.

(Ibid.: 185, n. 21)

To make explicit the theoretical part and unify it in a non-contradictory form is the task and raison d’etre of the theoretical practice that consists of the rational reconstruction of scientific theories. The means of production required for this

The structuralist view of theories 37 task are clustered in a metatheory, and the result is a unified theoretical system together with explanations as to how this system operates as the main tool of the methodology of the discipline.

Althusser’s main purpose in the text I have been quoting is to show that Marx’s dialectics is essentially different from Hegel’s, and to introduce the idea of a Theory (that he writes with capital T) as the foundation of a general method to transform ‘ideological’ Generalities I into scientific Generalities III. Hence, Theory would be something like an ars inveniendi that can be applied to any dis­cipline in its pre-scientific stage in order to transform it into a scientific one.

Nevertheless, there is in the same text an apparently distinct idea of Theory (also with capital T, something which induces confusion), namely a theory of practices in general, which (Althusser claims) was obtained from Hegel’s dialec­tics by means of an application of the other Theory, the theory of theoretical prac­tices. For he says:

I shall call Theory (with a capital T), general theory, that is, the Theory of practice in general, itself elaborated on the basis of the Theory of existing theoretical practices (of the sciences), which transforms into ‘knowledges’ (scientific truths) the ideological product of existing ‘empirical’ practices (the concrete activity of men). This Theory is the materialist dialectic which is none other than dialectical materialism.

(Ibid.: 168)

Here I am interested in the Theory of theoretical practices, which clearly should be prior to dialectical materialism if it was indeed used by Marx in order to create the latter as a new Generality III. For it is impossible to use T as a tool in order to create T: the tool must be prior to the product obtained by means of its use in a labor process.

The version that Althusser provides of dialectical materialism (I do not dispute here whether this is an accurate reconstruction of Marx’s intentions) is at any rate a substantial ontological theory that many (me included) find less than appealing. Moreover, it looks extremely unsuitable as a theory of science or a theory of the history of science. Clearly, trying to describe in terms of dialectical material­ism, say the rise of the new physics as it is done by Cohen (1992), would turn out to be an extravagant tour de force. It does not seem natural to explain the ratio­nality of the scientific changes that took place from Copernicus’ introduction of the new astronomic system to Newton’s dynamic in terms of concepts like “unity of opposites”, “principal contradiction”, “uneven development”, or “over­determination”. Nevertheless, I think that something important and relevant to nowadays philosophy of science, specifically economic methodology, can be obtained from what Marx calls “method of political economy” in the Grundrisse. But, if this is the method by means of which Marx was able to overcome Hegel’s dialectic and give rise to a radically new theory (as Althusser claimed), then it should be possible to describe the method without resorting to this theory. This I do in Chapter 4.

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