Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 04:52:44 -0600 From: Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar-AT-marx.econ.utah.edu> Subject: Unexercised laws Ian Wright: > I believe Bhaskar later uses the example of an aeorplane flying > through the sky to show that a law (the law of gravity) may express > `its' causal powers without being manifest, as counteracting > tendencies can prevent its manifestation, such as the uplift of air > pressure on the plane's wings. So even a familiar Newtonian law is > a tendency in this sense: the law of gravity does not specify a > constant conjunction of events, e.g. if a body is freely suspended > above the earth it will fall to the ground. If the law were > understood in this way it would be falsified every day. Hans Ehrbar: I am glad that you bring some examples from physics instead of my examples from economics (which, as a social science, is beyond the scope of RTS). Now to a physicist the airplane example may seem trivial: it is just much ado about the parallelogram of forces. No physicist would say that the law of gravity has ceased fo work in the case of an airplane. He will say that gravity generates a force pointing down, the uplift generates a force pointing up, and the acceleration of the airplane is its mass times the sum of these two forces. Everything remains predictable and within the framework of "constant conjunctions". Can we therefore say that physicists have discovered "transfactual" laws long ago, and they have developed the concept of "force" to deal with them? They do not formulate the law of gravity as: "all bodies must fall to the ground," but they formulate it as: "there is a force pulling the object down" (but there may be other forces pulling in other directions too). Why do economists not also use a concept of force? Can't they say: technical change is a force pulling the rate of profit down, but the capitalists' control over the production process is a force pulling it up? They don't do it because the activity of these forces is not as uniform as in classical physics, and their interaction cannot be modeled as an addition. Ergo: the fact that all laws are tendencies cannot be seen in classical physics because the interaction of these tendencies is linear and predictable. Elsewhere, the outcome of contending forces cannot be predicted. Now a mind trained in physics may say: it cannot be predicted because we do not have enough information about it. But Bhaskar, based on a transcendental argument, says that it cannot be predicted because it is indeterminate. The world is not packed with laws but there are gaps. The process of creating the world has not ended. Becoming. Hans Ehrbar.
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