From: shmage-AT-pipeline.com
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 03:24:56 GMT
Subject: Causal law and the silent dog


In RTS 2-1.4, Bhaskar writes: 
 
 
"Moreover, it is not true, 
even from the point of view of the immanent logic of a 
science, that what we can know to exist is just a part of 
what we can know.  For a law may exist and be known to 
exist without our knowing the law.  Much scientific 
research has in fact the same logical character as 
detection.  In a piece of criminal detection, the 
detective knows that a crime has been committed and some 
facts about it but he does not know, or at least cannot 
yet prove, the identity of the criminal." 
 
I fail to see how a law can be *known* to exist while itself remaining
unknown. 
The detection analogy seems to suggest the opposite.  In one of the most
famous 
Sherlock Holmes stories, "Silver Blaze," the consulting detective was asked
to solve  
the murder of a man who had been found beaten to death at the same time
that a  
prize race horse in his keeping had been discovered to have been stolen. 
However, 
>from a single fact--that a dog did not bark--Sherlock was able to deduce
that the case was that indeed no crime had taken place, and he was able to
prove his conclusion    by pointing out where the missing horse was to be
found.   
 
Of course, scientists can, and usually do, assume a priori that any
phenomenon 
subject to study is capable of subsumption under a causal law (or, rather,
a set of     causal laws).  But how can this assumption be transformed into
knowledge of a 
concrete case?   Doyle's (medical) scientific model seems to suggest that
it is accomplished by first critically evaluating the actual phenomenon and
stripping    away all preconceived notions of its nature, and then by
successfully acting in     practice to affect material reality in a
determinate way that would be possible only 
if the lawful nature of the phenomenon as deduced corresponded in some 
isomorphic way with the lawful reality underlying the phenomenon.  Is this,
or 
is it not, problematic for Bhaskarian Critical Realism? 
 
Shane Mage