File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1996/96-07-26.024, message 73


Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 10:28:03 -0600
From: Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar-AT-marx.econ.utah.edu>
Subject: rts2-02



Introduction

The aim of this book is the development of a systematic realist
account of science.  Such an account must provide a comprehensive
alternative to the positivism which since the time of Hume has
fashioned our image of science.  Central to the positivist vision of
science is the Humean theory of causal laws.  It is a principal
concern of this study to develop some new arguments and show how they
relate to more familiar ones against this still widely accepted
theory.  In particular I want to argue that not only is a constant
conjunction of events not a sufficient, it is not even a necessary
condition for a scientific law; and that it is only if we can
establish the latter that we can provide an adequate rationale for the
former.  It has often been contended that a constant conjunction of
events is insufficient but it has not so far been systematically
argued that it is not necessary.  This can, however, be shown by a
transcendental argument from the nature of experimental activity.
     It is a condition of the intelligibility of experimental activity
that in an experiment the experimenter is a causal agent of a sequence
of events but not of the causal law which the sequence of events
enables him to identify.  This suggests that there is a ontological
distinction between scientific laws and patterns of events.  Obviously
this creates a prima facie problem for any theory of science.  I think
that it can be solved along the following lines: To ascribe a law one
needs a theory.  For it is only if it is backed by a theory,
containing a model or conception of a putative causal or explanatory
'link', that a law can be distinguished from a purely accidental
concommitance.  The possibility of saying this clearly depends upon a
non-reductionist conception of theory.  Now at the core of theory is a
conception or picture of a natural mechanism or structure at work.
Under certain conditions some postulated mechanisms can come to be
established as real.  And it is in the working of such mechanisms that
the objective basis of our ascriptions of natural necessity lies.

Introduction 13

     It is only if we make the assumption of the real independence of
such mechanisms from the events they generate that we are justified in
assuming that they endure and go on acting in their normal way outside
the experimentally closed conditions that enable us to empirically
identify them.  But it is only if we are justified in assuming this
that the idea of the universality of a known law can be sustained or
that experimental activity can be rendered intelligible.  Hence one of
the chief objections to positivism is that it cannot show why or the
conditions under which experience is significant in science.  Most
critics have emphasized its depreciation of the role of theory; this
argument shows its inadequacy to experience.  Moreover it is only
because it must be assumed, if experimental activity is to be rendered
intelligible, that natural mechanisms endure and act outside the
conditions that enable us to identify them that the applicability of
known laws in open systems, i.e. in systems where no constant
conjunctions of events prevail, can be sustained.  This has the
corollary that a constant conjunction of events cannot be necessary
for the assumption of the efficacy of a law.
     This argument shows that real structures exist independently of
and are often out of phase with the actual patterns of events.  Indeed
it is only because of the latter that we need to peform experiments
and only because of the former that we can make sense of our
performances of them.  Similarly it can be shown to be a condition of
the intelligibility of perception that events occur independently of
experiences.  And experiences are often (epistemically speaking) 'out
of phase' with events - e.g. when they are misidentified.  It is
partly because of this possibility that the scientist needs a
scientific education or training.  Thus I will argue that what I will
call the domains of the real, the actual and the empirical are
distinct.  This is represented in Table 0.1 below:-

                            Table 0.1
---------------------------------------------------------------------
                    Domain of    Domain of    Domain of  
                    Real           Actual     Empirical
Mechanisms            X
Events                X              X
Experiences           X              X              X
---------------------------------------------------------------------

14 A Realist Theory of Science

     The real basis of causal laws are provided by the generative
mechanisms of nature.  Such generative mechanisms are, it is argued,
nothing other than the ways of acting of things.  And causal laws must
be analyzed as their tendencies.  Tendencies may be regarded as powers
or liabilities of a thing which may be exercised without being
manifest in any particular outcome.  The kind of conditional we are
concerned with here may be characterised as normic.  They are not
counter-factual but transfactual statements.  Nomic universals,
properly understood, are transfactual or normic statements with
factual instances in the laboratory (and perhaps a few other
effectively closed contexts) that constitute their empirical grounds;
they need not, and in general will not, be reflected in an invariant
pattern or regularly recurring sequence of events.
     The weakness of the Humean concept of laws is that it ties laws
to closed systems, viz. systems where a constant conjunction of events
occurs.  This has the consequence that neither the experimental
establishment nor the practical application of our knowledge in open
systems can be sustained.  Once we allow for open systems then laws
can only be universal if they are interpreted in a non-empirical
(trans-factual) way, i.e. as designating the activity of generative
mechanisms and structures independently of any particular sequence or
pattern of events.  But once we do this there is an ontological basis
for a concept of natural necessity, that is necessity in nature quite
independent of men or human activity.
     In science there is a kind of dialectic in which a regularity is
identified, a plausible explanation for it is invented, and the
reality of the entities and processes postulated in the explanation is
then checked.  This dialectic is illustrated in Diagram 0.1 below.  If
a classical empiricist tradition in the philosophy of science stops at
the first stage, a rival neo-Kantian or transcendental idealist
tradition (discernible in the history of the philosophy of science)
stops at the second.  If and only if the third step is taken and
developed in the way indicated above can there be an adequate
rationale for the use of laws to explain phenomena in open systems,
where no constant conjunctions prevail.  It is the unthinking
presupposition of closed systems together with the failure to analyse
experimental activity (which presupposes open systems) that accounts
for the most glaring

Introduction 15

weakness of orthodox philosophy of science: viz. the nonexistence in
science of Humean causal laws, i.e. of universal empirical
generalizations, and hence the inadequacy of the criteria of
explanation, confirmation (or falsification), scientific rationality
etc., that are based on the assumption that a closure is the universal
rule rather than the rare and (for the most part) artificially
generated exception that I contend it is. It is because


                                Result/regularity
events; sequences; invariances       (1) *classical empiricism*
          |                           |
          |                           |
     generative                       V model-building
     mechanisms                       |
     in models                        |
          |                           |
       +--+-----------------------+   |
     /                              \ |    
    (3)------<---------------------- (2) *transcendental idealism*
   real  empirical-testing    imagined/imaginary   
              
      Diagram 0.1.   The Logic of Scientific Discovery
                          

our activity is (normally) a necessary condition of constant conjunctions of
events that the philosophy of science needs an ontology of structures and
transfactually active things.
     The position advanced here is characterized as transcendental
realism, in opposition to the empirical realism common to the other
two traditions.  Both the neo-Kantian or transcendental idealist
tradition and transcendental realism see the step between (1) and (2)
in Diagram 0.1 as involving creative model building, in which
plausible generative mechanisms are imagined to produce the phenomena
in question.  But transcendental realism sees the need for the step
between (2) and (3) also, in which the reality of the mechanisms
postulated are subjected to empirical scrutiny.  Transcendental
realism differs from empirical realism in interpreting (1) as the
invariance of an (experimentally produced) result rather than a
regularity; and from transcendental idealism in allowing the
possibility that what is imagined in (2) need not be imaginary but may
be (and come to be known as) real.  Without such an interpretation it
is impossible to sustain the rationality of scientific growth and
change.
     A conception of science is argued for in which it is seen as a

16 A Realist Theory of Science

process-in-motion, with the dialectic mentioned above in principle
having no foreseable end.  Thus when a new stratum or level of reality
has been discovered and adequately described science moves immediately
to the construction and testing of possible explanations for what
happens at that level.  This will involve drawing on whatever
cognitive equipment is available and perhaps the design of new
experimental techniques and the invention of new sense-extending
equipment.  Once the explanation is discovered science then moves on
to the construction and testing of possible explanations for it.  At
each level of reality law-like behaviour has to be interpreted
normically, i.e. as involving the exercise of tendencies which may not
be realised.
     Emprirical realism is underpinned by a metaphysical dogma, which
I call the epistemic fallacy, that statements about being can always
be transposed into statements about our knowledge of being.  As
ontology cannot, it is argued, be reduced to epistemology this mistake
merely covers the generation of an implicit ontology based on the
category of experience; and an implicit realism based on the presumed
characteristics of the objects of experience, viz. atomistic events,
and their relations, viz.  constant conjunctions. (These presumptions
can, I think, only be explained in terms of the need felt by
philosophers for certain foundations of knowledge.)  This in turn
leads to the generation of a methodology which is either consistent
with epistemology but of no relevance to science; or relevant to
science but more or less radically inconsistent with epistemology.  So
that, in short, philosophy itself tends to be out of joint with
science.



   

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