From: MSPRINKER-AT-ccmail.sunysb.edu Date: Tue, 12 Nov 1996 00:53:08 -0500 (EST) Subject: BHA: Triangles, etc. State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 117777 Michael Sprinker Professor of English & Comp Lit Comparative Studies 516 632-9634 12-Nov-1996 00:19am EST FROM: MSPRINKER TO: Remote Addressee ( _bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu ) Subject: Triangles, etc. Tobin has made many of the relevant points that I would like to have urged in response to Howard, but there are two small differences I wish to note between what I think is a sustainable realist view and things mentioned by Howard and Doug. Howard wrote that society exists (his word) only in its effects. Doug helpfully drew a comparison with a magnetic field, arguing that neither it nor society "exists" only in its effects. I take it that Howard had something like the Althusserian slogan that "the structure [of society] is visible only its effects." I don't have my copy of READING CAPITAL readily available, but I think Althusser may go on to say something more akin to what Howard wrote. If so, Althusser is quite wrong, >from a realist point of view. It may be that like the magnetic field, social structures can only be observed in their effects (we can't observe surplus value directly from the prices of commodities, but we can, through complex calculations, determine the surplus value extraction from prices and costs), but their existence is not contingent on our capacity to observe these effects--a point Bhaskar makes about real mechanisms over and over again. That was in part Marx's point against classical economy: the latter could not recognize that surplus value was being extracted at the point of production, which did not mean that value was not being produced through all the prior decades of capitalist social relations. Contra Doug, I would not say that the entities projected in non-Euclidean geometries aren't real, just because we can't "see" them, viz., observe figures that correspond to what are demonstrated in the proof. Those figures are every bit as real as the standard figures one learns to recognize in Euclidean geometry, although they are often difficult to envision (as mathematics textbooks demonstrate: the figures they put on the page are often laughably confusing). At least some of these entities express real relations of physical objects, e.g., the paths of sub-atomic particles. To revert to the original topic of this discussion, the real and the observable (which I take to be what the experiential designates) are distinct domains. All of which leads me to conclude: Santa Claus exists with or without the red suit, although unlike sub-atomic particles, he didn't always exist, and it's just possible that, given a sufficiently radical transformation in the socialization of very many members of the human species, he will cease to exist one day--just as acceptance of feudal relations of service have been pretty well eradicated from extensive areas of the globe. But neither feudalism nor Santa Claus was ever a Platonic form, which latter, per definition (in Plato at least), was unobservable. Michael Sprinker --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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