Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 03:10:35 -0700 (PDT)
From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: intro


 
 
 
 
Pauses can be a time to digest, to allow space for new voices,
and to accomodate the fact that, as a friend observes (and I have
a hard time accepting), living takes time.  No need to rush ahead
of ourselves.  Things are flagged in the introduction worth
identifying.  On the other hand, sustaining the conversation
seems a clear condition of its existence.  We do need
emancipation from the Humean conception of ourselves as passive
observers watching events occur -- isn't that what we're reading? 
I've gone through the remaining pages of the introduction in an
effort to summarize and to highlight some questions raised for
me.  Here are points I notice.
 
1.   The epistemic fallacy is called on p. 16 "metaphysical
dogma" which generates an implicit ontology generated by the
category of experience and an implicit realism based on the
presumed characteristics of the objects of experience, "atomistic
events, and their relations, viz. constant conjunctions."  So the
concept of relations is impoverished in empiricism also.  (I
wonder what the impact of that has been on contemporary science
or vice versa.)  Anyway, Bhaskar adds a parenthetical
observation:  "These presumptions can, I think, only be explained
in terms of the need felt by philosophers for certain foundations
of knowledge."  What is the argument here?  Why does the felt
need for certain foundations lead to the presumed
characteristics?  Is this because the passive observer can be
existentially certain of what is experienced by the senses and
logically certain of what can be deduced from empirical
invariances?
 
2.   p. 16:  "the very concept of the empirical world involves a
category mistake."  The concept of a category mistake seems to me
crucial in Bhaskar.  I'd like to get a better handle on it.  "The
number five is green" is a category mistake; the number 5 is
even" is false.  Another example I recall reading was of someone
taking a child to see a parade and when the band passed by
identifying it and as the drum corps passed by identifying it and
so on until the child asks, "when will the parade pass by." 
Marx's reference to the price of labor as being as irrational as
a "yellow logarithm" (Bk III, Trinity Formula) would identify a
category mistake.  Labor has no price; instead, labor power is
sold in circulation for its value.  The distinction is between
the value necessary to produce labor power and the value labor
power in action produces.  The value labor power produces is
measured by how long labor acts.  The value necessary to produce
labor power is the equivalent of the time it takes to produce the
food, shelter, etc. necessary to reproduce the laborer.  For the
capitalist this must always be less than the time labor power
will be made to act during the day.  What the category mistake
does is to make this invisible.  All labor appears as paid labor.
The money relation conceals the unpaid part of the day.  The
phenomenonal form makes the actual relations invisible.  
 
Bhaskar will extrapolate this category mistake between a power
and its exercise to the tendencies of the mechanisms of nature
generally.  
 
Commodity fetishism also involves a category mistake, doesn't it,
insofar as we attribute value to the intrinsic character, the use
value properties of a thing, rather than to its social form.  All
of microeconomics is rooted in this category mistake, isn't it? 
We start out with a basket of goods (our entitlement) and we
compare it with another basket and rank our preferences.  And by
the ladder of exchange we reach the heaven of Walras and Pareto
optimality.  But it all depends on the category mistake of
treating the value of things as intrinsic to their existence
rather than as a product of the social form of their production. 
Is this analysis correct?  
 
3.   In any event, Bhaskar says, p. 16, that the category mistake
embodied in the concept of an empirical world depends on
anthropomorphism within thought and leads to a neglect of the
conditions under which experience is significant in science.  We
have raised that issue before.  Here he seems to mean that
experience is significant in science as a consequence of the
social activity of scientists, ie they must think theories and
fashion experiments to establish significance.  Neglecting this
social activity generates a sociology of epistemological
individualism such that the role of the observer in science is to
passively experience events and record constant conjunctions. 
This is anthropomorphic because it makes everything depend on
human experience.  That seems to be the category mistake.  The
world is made to depend on our experience of it.  This is things
represented in inverted form.  It is human experience, not the
world, which is contingent.  
 
4.   This then connects to the transitive/intransitive
distinction (p. 17).  As I understand it, transitive and
intransitive are used here in the way grammarians use them, not
in the sense that if A is greater than B and B greater than C,
then A is greater than C.  Instead it is the idea that a
transitive verb takes an object, but an intransitive one does
not.  S loves O is transitive; S smiles, is not.  S knows O is
transitive.  But the world just is and acts.  
 
5.   p. 17.  Two criteria for the adequacy of an account of
science follow from this:  the idea of knowledge as a produced
means of production must be sustained; the independent existence
of the objects of scientific thought must be sustained.  The
independent existence of the objects of scientific thought
extends not only to nature, but to society and psychology, it is
important to recognize.  On this point the concept of referential
detachment developed in Dialectic and Plato, Etc is relevant,
e.g. from the glossary:  "Referential detachment.  The detachment
of the act of reference from that to which it refers.  This
establishes at once its existential intransitivity and the
possibility of another reference to it, a condition of any
intelligible discourse at all.  Referential detachment is
implicit in all language-use and conceptualized praxis, e.g.
playing football.  There are no a priori limits on what can be
referred to -- this is the generalized concept of reference and
referent."
 
Football, I guess, because in order to play you must be guided by
rules?  So referential detachment is a condition of the
possibility of language use and conceptualized praxis?  There is
a wonderful little exercise described in Plato, Etc. at 52-53
which underscores the significance of intransitivity as
characterizing the object of study:  "[Referential detachment]
establishes at one and the same time the existential
intransitivity of a being and the possibility of another
reference to it, which is a condition of any intelligible
discourse at all.  But just ask any modern Cratylus who
enunciates scepticism or neutralism over reality to repeat, or
clarify the meaning of it [their initial statement].  To do so
they must regard their initial statement or its content as an
objectified socially real entity."
 
6.   The distinction between knowledge as an individual
acquisition in sense experience and as a socially produced means
of production connects with Bhaskar's concept of society in PON. 
Our activity always presupposes social forms which we do not
create but confront as given.  Yet since society exists only in
our activity, when we act we either reproduce or transform them. 
Knowledge is one such social form, isn't it?  We always confront
it as given and act to transform it.  This underscores the
decisive importance of critique and self-critique.  There is no
fashioning of knowledge out of wholecloth.  There is always raw
material to start with.  That is why we can be neither passive
observers nor recorders of constant conjunctions.  Producing
knowledge is always an act of transforming given social forms.
 
In Margaret Archer's recent book, Realist Social Theory: the
Morphogenetic Approach, she argues that as persons we can have
"non-social relations with non-social reality."  Has anyone
worked through this?  If we can, wouldn't knowledge as an
individual acquisition be possible, even if not passively Humean
in character?  Isn't that an implication of what she argues?  Are
we talking about different concepts of knowledge here, different
categories?
 
(Continued . . . unless someone else jumps in.)