Date: Mon, 9 Sep 1996 23:47:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: retrotranscendental


 
 
Ruth, 
 
You didn't go on long enough.  
 
The cut-off point between philosophy and science is the point at
which arguments become a priori and do not depend on experience for
confirmation.  RB seems clear on that, doesn't he?  PON, Ch 1, is
one place he draws that line.
 
So does that answer my transcendental/retroductive question?
 
But what does it mean?
 
When I notice that scientists participate in causing the pattern of
events they produce in the laboratory, but notice also that they do
not cause the mechanisms that cause those events, why is this an a
priori argument?
 
Knowledge a priori is independent of experience; knowledge a
posteriori is based on experience.  Our knowledge that an a priori
argument is valid does not depend on experience.  
 
Do these common assertions accurately reflect RB's meaning?  
 
The a priori argument about patterns of events and causal
mechanisms is an argument to the stratification of the world.  We
do not experience layers.  But if scientific experiment is to make
sense, then reflection leads us to the conclusion that the world
must be stratified.  It is a condition for the intelligibility of
science.  
 
In a piece I am preparing I find myself confronted with the need to
explain briefly the difference between transcendental argument and
retroductive argument.  I use brief references from the wonderful
article by McMullin in the Leplin book, SCIENTIFIC REALISM, to
explain retroduction.  Then I refer to Bhaskar's use of
transcendental argument in the form of 'what must the world be like
in order for scientific experiement to be possible' as comparable. 
Then I explain in a footnote:  
 
"Both retroductive and transcendental argument interrogate the
conditions of the possibility of a thing.  Transcendental argument
asks what can be established a priori; retroductive argument moves
>from the phenomena to be explained backward in the causal chain to
the best explanation for their occurrence."
 
Does anyone see any problems with this?
 
Legal relations offer themselves as the object of substantive
social science.  Yet they are part of society and so understanding
them requires tracing the transcendental arguments of PON, ch 2, in
order to know what society must be like (what properties it must
possess) if it is to be an object of study for us.  Legal relations
are necessarily coercive.  Is that a transcendental or a
retroductive assertion?   
 
* * * * * 
 
Thanks to John and Derek and Ruth for taking up the problem of
induction.  This is why am in this group!  I think my understanding
of John's explanation was more or less consistent with Ruth's
elaborations.   The idea is that events cannot be broken down.  In
this sense they are atomistic, the ultimate units of experience. 
What needs to be explained is why it should be presupposed that
events are indivisible ultimate units of experience.  This does not
correspond to the actual practice of science which always seeks to
discover what the components of a thing are.  It does correspond to
a model of knowledge which presupposes that knowledge must be
certain.  Events which we experience are assumed to be certain
because of our palpable experience of them and assumed to be
atomistic because to be certain of them they must not be capable of
being further deconstructed.  
 
Also certain knowledge can be established by deduction to
particular instances from conjunctions of events which are
constantly repeated.  Induction is then a problem because you can
never exclude the possibility that the next instance will be
contradictory.  As a consequence there can be no necessity to
causal laws except that which we establish a priori.  Our knowledge
is certain because of our immediate sense experience of events, but
connection can never be certain because of the problem of induction
Therefore we can never have certain knowledge of the processes of
nature.  By contrast what the practice of science shows is that the
concept of a world independent of our knowledge of it is a
necessary presupposition of the intelligibility of that practice. 
 
This is as much certainty as we get:  that as far as we now
understand, a coherent account of a particular practice presupposes
the certain existence of a world independent of our thinking about
it.
  
Thus, "the problem of induction is a consequence of the atomicity
of the events conjoined, which is a function of the necessity for
an epistemically certain base" means:  The search for certainty
secretes an ontology of atomistic events certain to us because of
our experience of them and an epistemology of isomorphic
correspondence between the world and our knowledge of it.  The
house of cards collapses because of the problem of induction
insofar as the constant conjunctions needed to establish our
knowledge of natural necessity cannot be given conclusive empirical
confirmation.  They remain a conceptual connection established a
prioi.  The most we can do is falsify, never know.
 
Tell me what is wrong or missed in this recapitulation.
 
* * * * *
Hans --
 
I wonder whether we do not have a difference of views that would be
productive to explore on the question of value.  You argue that
value consists of labor.  I would argue that value is a form for,
or expressing, the distribution of aggregate social labor.  But the
value relation which is the root, the social relation, is expressed
by the couple private autonomy/social division of labor.  This
couple expresses a distribution of the agents of production with
respect to the means of production:  each is formally autonomous,
each produces a product useless to them.  From this foundation I
get the positioned practices which mediate between an individual's
intentional action and the social structures existent in those
intentional actions and being reproduced and transformed.  As for
tangible reality, the reality of the couple constituting the value
relation can be established by causal criteria -- it can be known
by what it does.  For example, because needs are general and each
produces a specialized item useless to them, each is driven to
exchange.  This establishes the reality of the social relation. 
Why is a more tangible reality needed?   What is the tangible
reality of meaning, say, saying hello?  
 
Incidentally for Amit, social structure exists in the ring a
married person wears, doesn't it?   Again, its reality insofar as
it embodies social structure can be known by its effects.  Margaret
Archer in her book REALIST SOCIAL THEORY has a provocative
discussion of the reality of social relations embodied in the
Rosetta stone during the centuries it lay buried.  
 
* * * * *
 
 
On the question of ideology raised by Tobin and Hans, has anyone
looked at Collier's discussion of the distinction between ideology
and science in SCIENTIFIC REALISM AND SOCIALIST THOUGHT?
 
* * * * *
 
 
Doug -- I was fascinated by what you said and especially by your
reference to ownership, which, in all its forms, is a focus of
interest for me.  (For the same reason I was tantalized by Derek's
reference to intellectual property.)  But Ruth reminds me that one
can go on too long. 
 
Howard