Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 17:45:04 -0700 (PDT)
From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org>
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia
Subject: ecneirepxe


Tobin --
 
I don't have your posts before me, but let me see if I can explain
your point of view, elaborating it my own way, just to see if I
have it right.
 
You accept the idea that experience is a social product, so that is
not your point of difference with Bhaskar.  
 
Now take my experience of a sunrise and Ptolemeus' experience of a
sunrise.  Assume we're close enough in time to be near
contemporaries.  There is the physical event of the sun rising with
two conscious pieces of matter, me and him, together with trees and
rocks, etc., present at the event.  This is the domain of the
actual, including the human interaction present.  One event.  But
there are two different experiences.
 
As I understand you now, you would not challenge this.  You would
not challenge that the experiences are different because of the way
they have been socially produced.  What you would challenge is the
idea that, even if experience is socially produced, it should be
accorded special ontological status.
 
For example, life emerges from inorganic matter.  But we do not
establish a different ontological domain as a consequence.  So
consciousness emerges from life, and with it meaningful social
interaction, including facts and experiences.  But what warrant do
we have for establishing a separate ontological domain?  This is
how I understand your basic argument now.
 
Continuing with my effort to state your position, suppose that we
return to those beings from another planet we discussed a couple of
months ago.  Suppose that they did not have sensory organs, but
apprehended the world in some way unimaginable to us.  Lets say
where we experience the world and have experiences, they ecneirepxe
the world and have ecneirepxes.  Now we observe them.  What we
observe would be phenomena in the domain of actuality and we would
not feel compelled to create a separate ONTOLOGICAL category
because of the special way in which they apprehended the world,
though we would appreciate that ecneirepxe was necessarily emergent
>from their emergence as beings in the universe.  Is that the idea?
 
So you would argue that although you are, with Bhaskar, prepared to
treat society as real, you would not assign it any special
ontological status.  You might say, in fact, that this conclusion
is necessary if we are to be thoroughgoing about the process of
deanthropomorphizing our relationship to the world.
 
On the other hand, just as it isn't wrong to reify things, maybe it
isn't wrong to anthropomorphize human experience.
 
I have used in my explanations of the three Bhaskarian domains (in
a draft I have prepared) the example of a straight straw in a glass
of water.  I realize from this discussion that this can be
mishandled.  The appearance of the straw as bent, is in the
ontological domain of actuality, including the way in which the
image presents itself to the physiology of my vision, ie the light
waves are bent by the different refractive powers of the different
media, air and water.  What characterizes, Bhaskar presumably would
say, a different ontological domain is the fact that I apprehend
the straw as BENT.  That is, the concepts of straight and bent are
concepts of meaning.  These are social products.  You would say
that the fact that the world is meaningfully apprehended does not
entitle it to separate ontological status.
 
As I recall in the passages I excerpted from SRHE in my last post
I left out some stuff about the DISCOVERY of facts.  Because facts
can be discovered, Bhaskar called them potentialities.  Consider
his example of you or I looking through a microscope at a cell as
compared with a trained biologist looking through the same
microscope.  The biologist will see a cell.  I won't.  But, through
a social process of training, I could learn to.  Thus I may
apprehend a world of potential meanings without discerning those
meanings.  It is hard for me to see how it could be a postulate of
science that there are meaningless experiences.  There are
experiences we don't understand.  There are also experiences where
the meaning is only potential.  
 
Anyway I have to rethink what I wrote in a draft I have prepared
about using the straw example to explain the three domains.  It is
not that light is differentially refracted to create an appearance
different from how the straw is that distinguishes domains.  The
differential refraction after all is an actual event.  What
distinguishes the actual from experience is that I apprehend the
straw as BENT.  That is "bent" as distinct from "straight."  These
are meanings.  In that sense my experience of the pen on the table
as STRAIGHT or SOLID is as distinct an ontological domain from the
actuality of the pen lying there.  Maybe I could come to apprehend
it sensorily as I am taught it really is,  filled mainly with empty
space.  
 
Anyway once more, if I have understood you correctly, I am
sympathetic to the fact that from the perspective of yet another
alien being, there wouldn't seem to be much difference
ontologically between my experience and the first alien's
apprehension of the world through ecneirepxe.  But I am not another
alien being, but human, and while I may not anthropomorphize the
trees or the clouds, perhaps I may legitimately give special status
to my own experience.  It seems I need to.  It seems the whole
enterprise of science turns on finding precisely meaning in the
world.  Experience mediates between the intransitive and the
transitive and for that reason has a separate ontological status. 
The actual performs no such function.  Life doesn't. 
 
Howard.


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