Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 00:49:04 -0600
From: Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar-AT-marx.econ.utah.edu>
Subject: insignificant experiences and plausibility of positivism



>>>>> Here are some reactios to Ian's latest posting.  Not because I
>>>>> have great disagreements.  It is mostly a matter of emphasis.
>>>>> Regarding insignificant conjunctions of events, Ian wrote:

Ian> There might be some confusion here. There certainly is in my
Ian> mind.  My intuition is that it would be a mistake to define
Ian> `significance' and `insignificance' subjectively, which the
Ian> examples of household objects and umbrellas suggest: they are
Ian> obviously subjectively `trivial' domains.

Ian> Hypothetically, I may have evolved in a niche of umbrellas and
Ian> household objects, and my goals involve the need to discover laws
Ian> about such a domain.  Isn't it the case that I would _still_ need
Ian> to distinguish significant and insignificant events within such a
Ian> domain, and that the difference between the two kind of events
Ian> would be constituted by a relation between my goals and the
Ian> ontology of the domain?


The significance of insignificance of conjunctions of events has
nothing to do with how trivial they are compared to your goals, but
only with whether there is a systematic mechanism behind them.  You
say that yourself later in the same message.  The direction in which
the water rotates when you open the bathtub drain is a significant
event because due to the rotation of the earth, it tends to be
counterclockwise on the northern hemisphere and clockwise on the
southern hemisphere.  (I have never tried it out though.)  The fact
that it turns dark when the sun sinks below the horizon is a
significant event because it tells us about the expansion of the
universe.  Although it is doubtful that a passive empiricist observer
would get to the point of recognizing this without acquiring some
theory first with the help of active experiments rather than passive
observation.

Now you quote Bhaskar:

>> [Bhaskar]: 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.

Ian> Here Bhaskar is saying that a _subset_ of patterns of events
Ian> within a particular domain reveal the workings of a `causal law'.
Ian> And it is the scientific experimenter, with a theory in mind, who
Ian> attempts to identify the `significant' subset of patterns of
Ian> events in a domain, and who systematically explores the precise
Ian> configurations of such events by acting in the domain, i.e.
Ian> setting up and running experiments.

I think you have one aspect right: the scientist needs training in
order to be able to sift through the many insignificant events.  But
on the other hand, Bhaskar does not say that the experimenter
*chooses* the few significant constant conjunctions among a plethora
of "insignificant" constant conjunctions.  Rather, Bhaskar stresses
that it is very hard work to generate such "significant" constant
conjunctions.  As a rule, every experiment first fails.  It is very
difficult to screen out the disturbing influences and isolate one
mechanism, in order to be able to study it.  Experimental activity is
very much a process of absenting, as Bhaskar remarks in Dialectic,
p. 5:

> "Experimental activity involves a real demediation of nature,
> preventing or absenting a state of affairs that would otherwise have
> occurred, so as to enable us to identify a generative mechanism or
> complex free from outside influence or with such intererence held
> constant."

Perhaps this will resolve the questions you have in the last paragraph
of your posting: (now I am omitting some paragraphs of yours
with which I very much agree):

Ian> I am still unsure as to what Bhaskar means by `experience'. Does
Ian> he mean immediate experience, i.e. experience without
Ian> sense-extending equipment?  If so, is he implying that positivism
Ian> was plausible because Newton wandered around his garden and
Ian> noticed that apples fell to the ground? -- Whereas now we have to
Ian> search for significant `experiences' through theory-driven
Ian> projects, such as smashing electrons and positrons together in
Ian> mile-long accelerators?  This can't be right, and I still do not
Ian> understand.

Again it is a matter of emphasis.  I don't think Bhaskar means that
our raw senses are not good enough; he means that there are simply not
many spontaneously occurring events which give us insight about the
inner working of the world.  Experimental activity is not the
extension of our senses but the artificial creation of conditions under
which constant conjunctions can occur.  This is somewhat a paradox:
in order to understand every-day events we need expreiments which
generate very exceptional conditions.  This fact tells us about the
ontological "depth" of the world.

At the end, I want to draw your attention to the last two sentences in
the paragraph you quoted (the second paragraph on p. 12):

>> 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.

A theory is right if the mechanism it postulates is not merely a
"model", a manner of thinking about something that helps us to act
and/or make predictions, but if this theory describes a mechanism that
is really active.


Pedantically yours,

Hans Ehrbar.