File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1996/96-07-26.024, message 58


Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 13:15:06 +0900
From: Michael Raine <dd66606-AT-kisc.meiji.ac.jp>
Subject: Re: Bhaskar's Preface


This description reminds me that I'm often reminded of Charles Peirce when 
I read Roy Bhaskar (and vice versa). ie. a post-positivist attempt to defend 
the claims of science against idealism, the distinction between real and actual, 
the "ontological" stance that the real is that which is independent of what 
one thinks of it, etc. 

I'm no philosopher, nor have I ever played one, so maybe I don't understand 
some important philosophical distinction between their positions. The only 
references I can find to pragmatism in Bhaskar are quite disparaging, usually 
a critique of the pragmatist definition of truth as justified belief. But this is the 
Rortyian version of pragmatism that Peircians seem to universally detest. So 
does anyone else think that a rapprochement between Peirce and Bhaskar is 
possible? Is this where this introduction is heading? 

Michael Raine
dd66606-AT-kisc.meiji.ac.jp


>         As I will be away the rest of the week, I thought I would offer my
> two cents now.  First, let me add my gratitude to Hans as well for making
> this collective reading possible.  I, too, hope we make it work.
> 
>         Hans, my reaction to the passage you cite was different.  I thought
> Bhaskar was saying that scientific knowledge has been subsumed under the
> larger question of knowledge per se and that progress on that larger
> question has stagnated around such formulations as "knowledge as justified
> true belief."
> 
>         So what Bhaskar is proposing is to begin fresh by examining only
> what knowledge is for science.  That is also a very strategic point of
> entry because scientific knowledge is a paradigmatic form of knowledge.
> Perhaps, all would agree that science is accomplishing at least something
> we might call knowledge.  Thus, what we learn about knowledge from science
> may help us know about knowledge more generally.  That is how I understood
> Bhaskar's philosophical "reversal."
> 
>         Two other points about the preface.  I think Bhaskar makes the
> crucial point that contemporary philosophical or meta-theoretical
> discussion has "privileged" epistemology over ontology.  The focus has been
> almost exclusively on how we know, marginalizing consideration of what has
> to be the case ontologically for us to know at all.
> 
>         The very word "objective" is generally assumed to be an outdated,
> untenable, epistemological category -- as in "there is no objective or
> value-neutral" point of view.  But "objective" is also an ontological
> category:  While all our ideas about the world are our own creation
> (epistemologically), we still make an ontological distinction among our
> ideas between those that refer to what is dependent on our consciousness
> and those that refer to what is  independent of our consciousness.  Today,
> these two senses of "objective" are conflated at the expense of ontology.
> 
>         Bhaskar intends to recover the distinction.  And he is going to do
> so by focusing on how we conceptualize that ontologically objective quality
> we call causality.  Positivism conceptualized causality as
> event-regularities, a conception that presupposes a certain ontology.  By
> examining that ontology, we can determine whether the conception is
> tenable.  Already, Bhaskar is suggesting that this conception will not be
> tenable and that a post-positivist account of causality is needed, which
> presupposes a different, presumably more defensible ontology.  That
> ontology will presumably also make better sense of what science is actually
> doing.
> 
>         "See" you all later.
> 
> doug
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> doug porpora
> dept of psych and sociology
> drexel university
> phila pa 19104
> USA
> 
> poporad-AT-duvm.ocs.drexel.edu
> 
> 





   

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