From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-gwi.net>
Subject: BHA: Re: Domain debate
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 1996 20:56:35 -0500


Ruth--

"By heavens, Watson, I think you've got it!"

Yup: 1) the real; 2) the actual; and 3) the semiotic.  (Oh, okay, I should be
precise: the semiosic.  Anyway, signs and sign-processes.  The name isn't
crucial.)  Each "higher" ontological level has the character of the "lower"
one(s), but also adds a new quality.

>From my perspective, it's easiest to think of the sign domain as including
all sorts of signs and semioses, some of which are direct human experiences,
some of which aren't.  You can think of the whole lot as a bunch of subsets:
real > actual > semiosic > empirical (although the empirical is not emergent
>from the semiotic, I don't think; or if it is, not in the same sense that the
actual is emergent from the real, or the semiosic from the actual).

By the way, I think your description of the real as the potential was fine. 
For one thing, Bhaskar writes that "the necessary and the possible [are]
constitutive of the domain of the real" (glossary entry on "actualism").  One
major sense of "potential" is "possible."  Another major sense is "capacity"
or "capability," and the fact that a certain mechanism is overridden does not
remove that capacity or capability, and the manifestation of that potential
remains ... potential.  Frankly, I think it's both useful and correct to
think of the domain of the real as a domain of possibilities (or conditions
of possibility), since the necessary is just a type of possibility (or a
condition of possibility), and what is no longer merely possible and has
become manifest or a "fact" is in the domain of the actual.

Re "society exists only in its effects": perhaps this is a slip for Bhaskar's
"Social structures ... do not exist independently of the activities they
govern" (PON 38).  I think Bhaskar is indeed drawing off of Althusser here. 
In any case, "to not exist independently of effects" and "to exist only in
effects" are not identical concepts, since in the former statement structures
are not, or are not reducible to, the effects which they're connected to.  If
Bhaskar does actually say "society exists only in its effects," that would
demand some serious scrutiny--this statement seems to deny the existence of
underlying social structures.

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



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