From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-biddeford.com>
Subject: BHA: Bhaskar's domains
Date: Sun, 20 Oct 1996 22:30:53 -0400


I'd like to discuss some serious reservations I have about Bhaskar's
ontological domains.  I certainly do not object to the notion of
domains--that would mean abandoning critical realism--but I think Bhaskar
has identified them incorrectly.

Before I explain this, I should let you know that the following critique is
(in a somewhat different version) part of a book I'm working on; and while
the book is chiefly on other matters, the alternative I arrive at is
fundamental to my larger analysis.  I feel fairly confident about my
conclusions, but not entirely with the arguments I use to get there, or
with some of the specific issues involved (partly because of an analytical
subtext that I probably needn't bother with here).  So please be
forewarned: I'm trying to pick your brains.  If I adopt anyone's
suggestions or comments, I will certainly give due credit.

In the current reading from RTS, Bhaskar identifies three ontological
domains: the real, the actual, and the empirical.  Later, in *Dialectic*
and I think elsewhere, he expands the number of domains, and also broadens
the "uppermost" domain, which he now calls the subjective (which may have
either empirical or conceptual content); but the original three remain the
major ones.

I think Bhaskar's acceptance of experience as a major ontological domain is
an error, and correcting it involves in effect using Bhaskar against
himself.  Basically, to assign experience a special mode of being *because
we experience it* is another form of the epistemic fallacy, and reifies
experience.  Moreover, Bhaskar appears to take experience as inherently
meaningful, which it is not; it is quite possible (even commonplace) to
experience something but not recognize it as significant, and it is
possible for an experience not to reach consciousness at all.  To reduce
experience to its meaning in the conventionalist manner, or to assume that
experiences directly contain their meanings as positivists do, involves the
epistemic fallacy of conflating being into cognition.

Treating the subjective as ontologically distinctive is even more
problematic.  Historically, there are a number of reasons to believe that
"the subjective" is socially conditioned and historically variable (as my
earlier arguments about the classical Greek view of agency indicated). 
Philosophically, this position essentializes or hypostatizes subjectivity. 
Now, the subjective is obviously special to us experientially and
epistemologically, but to give it such ontological primacy threatens to
drag critical realism into conventionalism or social constructivism.  In
addition, privileging the subjective would seem to involve a methodological
individualism that conflicts with the rest of Bhaskar's work.

The problem concerns the criteria for differentiating ontological domains. 
The domains, I believe, should be distinguished by *emergence* (on this
concept, see Bhaskar's *Dialectic*).  Emergence pertains to the generation
of new beings--and, I would add, new modes or domains of being--on the
basis of pre-existing material or logically prior characteristics.  While
the emergent level remains governed by the "lower" order from which it
arose, often it can also act upon that lower order or set boundary
conditions for its operation.  This is clear enough for material entities
(when I eat food, I "determine the fate" of the chemicals it contains) and
social entities (the particular structure and activities of the State
affects the development of capitalism), but I suggest it also holds for
ontological domains.  

The relationship between the domains of the real and the actual, as Bhaskar
has defined them, is one of emergence (as it should be).  The real
encompasses structures and generative mechanisms consisting of or
possessing various powers and susceptibilities (or as Bhaskar puts it in
*Dialectic*, it is a domain of necessities and possibilities).  The
generative mechanisms' interaction produces events and various entities;
but these arise in a new domain, the actual.  Actualities not only are
governed by underlying generative mechanisms, but also may condition the
exercise of certain powers (the table prevents the glass from falling),
alter a generative mechanism (such as a revolution that overturns an
economic system), or even create new ones (the evolution of hominids led to
the formation of human social structures).

So far, so good.  But I don't think the relationship between Bhaskar's
actual and empirical domains is similarly emergent.  An experience occupies
no special mode of being not already accommodated by the actual: it is
simply another event, albeit one that involves human presence and
interactions.  In particular, it is not inherently meaningful, and it
cannot contribute to thought unless it first becomes significant, that is,
it becomes a sign.  For this reason, I think the empirical and the
subjective as a whole are best considered subdomains of the actual
("intrastructures," to adopt another recent Bhaskarism).

But a third ontological domain does exist: it consists of signs
(representations, meanings).  It emerges from the actual because of human
(and other species') biological capacities.  This analysis allows the
critical realist to acknowledge that an experience may be meaningful, or
meaningless, but it is not equivalent to its meanings; and after the
experience event, I may transform my understanding of an experience, but
the experience does not itself change, since it is now part of the past. 
In addition, the "two-way street" in which the underlying level conditions
the emergent level, and the emergent level can control aspects of the
underlying level, obtains in the relation between the actual and the
meaningful.  The experience places limits on the possibilities of
interpretation: its connection to extra-mental realities means that there
is always some element that cannot be "interpreted away" (assuming
honesty), but enforces its presence.  At the same time, however,
representations act on experience and sense-perception before, while, and
after it occurs, and our only access to experience is through
representations of it.  Discourses and ideologies can determine which
events are admitted into consciousness as meaningful experiences; but that
in itself shows the distinction between the two domains.  Thus, there is no
theory-neutral observation language or preinterpretive experience; by the
same token, however, experience only becomes significant through social
activity (such as science).

This adjustment does not, so far as I can tell, have major repercussions on
the remainder of Bhaskar's critical realism.  However, I think it has
ramifications for social and cultural analysis.  Among other things, it
accords with Margaret Archer's arguments for distinguishing between
structure, agency, and culture (for those of you acquainted with her work;
for what it's worth, I arrived at my conclusions well before reading
Archer, so I was please to discover this similarity).  I suspect that it
may also help unravel some of the issues Ruth raised a while ago concerning
the ontological  problems posed by the concept-dependence of social
entities.

I'll appreciate your comments and reactions.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-biddeford.com
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce


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