From: ccw94-AT-aber.ac.uk Date: Wed, 14 Feb 1996 11:15:28 +0000 Subject: Re: technical problems (bhaskar-l*st) Heikki, I didn't receive your original posting vis-a-vis this subject but from the following some things spring to mind. >B.t.w. I think I have lost a message as well. Did >anybody see the message where I tried to start to >discuss the issue along the lines: there is a tendency >towards tautological definition if everything (causally >effective) is supposed to be a mechanism; To say that such and such a 'thing' which 'tipped the balance', as Bhaskar puts it, was the generative structure or causal mechanism is not tautological. Unless of course, the statement that "in reality there are causes" is tautological. Which of course there are. The fact that you placed a sub clause in your sentence - causally effective - stops it from being tatutological. Without the sub-clause in parenthesis the sentence "everything is supposed to be a mechanism" is tautological and nigh on useless (similar to Foucault's notion of power being everywhere), unless criteria are specified about how we might distinguish between what was a mechanism in one instance, yet not in another; in effect, a critical realist account of causation, without being mechanistic and/or subscribing to regularity determinism. In this respect your statement about there: being good >reasons to use human, intersubjective intentionality as a >criterion for distinguishing Seems correct, and it's exactly this allied to the use of model building, creative interventions, conjectures, hypothese etc., which constitute science. But why are: > and causally >efficient reasons & complexes; Not mechanisms? Because of a residual commitment to mechanism=mechanistic perhaps? And a wish to keep this notion out of the social world? It still seems to me that the whole of RTS can be read as one long attempt to show how we can still talk of causal mechanisms without accepting the commitment to regularity determinism, even in the natural world. It just seems strange to me that you view "causally eficient reasons & and complexes" as not being mechanisms but then go on to say that: >there are mechanisms that >are efficient in the social worlds, too (like >unconscious mechanisms and syntactic structures). I just wonder what the "good" reasons are for the distinction? I don't think we should get hung up too much on the notion that talk of mechanisms is alright in the natural world but not, at least so much, in the social world. There are surely generative mechanisms operative in the social world. Even some of the more fashionable poststructuralist work in my own particular field can't help but make causal claims, despite their attempt to collectively purge the notion of cause from their vocabulary. Bradley Kleins, book on 'Strategic Studies and World Order', Heikki, is a classic example. He is trying to show how exsting theories and research in strat studies have helped to shape the world, and this is a straightforward causal claim, with theories and research bieng the postulated mechanisms implicated in the way the world is now. >And even if these distinction as such are not acceptable, >we should take seriously the possibility of a tautological >def. of 'mechanism' and make it possible to distinguish >between mechanisms and non-mechanisms. The absence of a mechanism perhaps? Thanks, Colin -------------------------------------------------------- Colin Wight Department of International Politics University of Wales, Aberystwyth Aberystwyth SY23 3DA -------------------------------------------------------- ------------------
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005