Date: Fri, 2 Aug 1996 21:46:23 -0600 From: Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar-AT-marx.econ.utah.edu> Subject: sokal's hoax The "setting up of the basic premises" seems simple, perhaps deceptively so, Chris called it "uncontroversial." But we learn to appreciate the power of Bhaskar's framework if we can witness how easy it is to get lost if one does not have this framework. This is why Howard's critique of Steven Weinberg is so valuable. When I tried to tell friends enthusiastically about Bhaskar, their reply has often been: "Oh that is nothing new." Bhaskar himself says somewhere that his findings are comfortably close to common intuition. But without Bhaskar's guidance, this intuition can very easily get stuck. It seems to me that the critique of Steven Weinberg can be pushed further. (1) he constantly confuses the epistemology and ontology, as in the sentence: WEINBERG ... question, whether scientific knowledge in general and the laws of physics in particular are real. . . . What I mean when I say that the laws of physics are real is that they are real in pretty much the same sense (whatever that is) as the rocks in the fields, and not in the same sense . . . as the rules of baseball. If he says the laws of physics are like rocks in a field, he concurs with Bhaskar's depth realism. But then he should not at the same time call them "scientific knowledge." These "laws" (or perhaps better generative mechanisms) are the *objects* of scientific knowledge, are only accessible to us through science, but they should not be identified with scientific knowledge itself. (Epistemic fallacy?) (2) The other error Weinberg might have avoided by reading Bhaskar is his unawareness of second-order conclusions. In an attempt to explain how he came to consider the laws of physics as real, Weinberg wrote: WEINBERG: For those who have not lived with the laws of physics, I can offer the obvious argument that the laws of physics as we know them work, and there is no other known way of looking at nature that works in anything like the same sense. I would try to interpret that to mean: he as a physicist has been guided successfully in his work by the conception that the laws of physics are real. The reality of the laws of physics is a condition for the ability of scientific activity as Weinberg engages in to yield knowledge about the world. In other words: if Weinberg says that the laws of physics "work", I would try guess that he does not want to say: they are real because they are true, but he really wants to say: his conception of the reality of the laws of physics allows him to successfully do science. It is a second-order, not a first-order argument. As a postscript: I do not remember where Bhaskar said that his findings are close to common intuition. Perhaps it was Reclaiming Reality. In any case it was pre-Dialectic. It seems to me that his Dialectic is the perfect refutation of the common "Bhaskar is common sense" critique. Suddenly the world which he describes no longer looks familiar at all, and it takes some rubbing of eyes before we realize that it may indeed be the world we live in.
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