File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/97-01-11.090, message 23


Date: 	Fri, 20 Dec 1996 13:21:47 -0500 (EST)
From: Howie Chodos <howie-AT-magi.com>
Subject: Re: BHA: Transitive & intransitive


I think Colin is largely right that what is ontological changes relative to
the standpoint of the observer, but I think it's worth trying to push the
argument a little further. I'm still not sure how all this relates to the
criticism of postism from a CR perspective, but I can feel in my bones that
there is a connection.

The general point I take from Colin's argument is that *any* body of thought
can constitute an intransitive object of scientific investigation for
suitably positioned observers. In this context I would want to recall what
Bhaskar calls the "ontological peculiarities" of social structures. He
argues that we can study social structures scientifically, and in this sense
they do not pose any epistemological difficulties that are qualitatively
different from those associated with the natural sciences. But the objects
of study of the social sciences are particular entities in that they exist
only in and through the activity of living human beings. What this seems to
me to imply is that, with regard to the study of science itself (as with the
social sciences more generally), any theoretical intervention has the
ability to alter the object of study itself. 

So while 'science' may be an intransitive object for the 'philosophy of
science', it is not identical to the intransitive object 'tree' for the
biological sciences. The very act of studying and debating the nature of
science alters the object of study itself. In the natural sciences, of
course, we acquire the ability to transform the objects of our study through
the knowledge that we develop of them. But these are two separate moments,
with different imperatives (analogous, perhaps, to the distinction between
applied and basic research). In the social sciences the theorisation of the
social is, ipso facto, an intervention in the social which transforms it as
an oject for subsequent study.

The world of ideas is thus never cut off from the material practices of
social life. Ideas acquire materiality because they are constituted as part
of social reality. It seems to me that it is in the understanding of this
dynamic that there is overlap between CR and varieties of postism. CR, and
in particular the TMSA, implies that what is socially real is, in part, a
function of belief, understood in its broadest sense to encompass both true
and false understandings. We do create our world. Not out of nothing, and
not without constraint, but the idea that we necessarily reproduce or
transform pre-existing social relations through our very participation in
social life carries the connotation that we creatively alter social reality
through our individual action.

So where does the difference between CR and postism lie? Colin suggests in
his reply to Tobin that we must defend "the idea of science itself (the
search for context specific, explanatory knowledge)". I don't know that Jack
Amariglio and his colleagues who argue for a Postmodern Marxism would
necessarily object to this, as long as it was not taken to mean that there
is a single version of science that instantiates "the idea of science
itself". Sandra Harding certainly defends an idea of science and scientific
objectivity. In other words, how does defending the idea of science itself
stake out a distinctively CR position?

Howie Chodos



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