File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1996/96-09-09.212, message 17


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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