From: MSPRINKER-AT-ccmail.sunysb.edu
Date: Wed, 25 Dec 1996 14:10:05 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: BHA: Transitive & intransitive



               State University of New York at Stony Brook
                       Stony Brook, NY 117777

                                            Michael Sprinker
                                            Professor of English & Comp Lit
                                            Comparative Studies
                                            516 632-9634
                                            25-Dec-1996 01:44pm EST
FROM:  MSPRINKER
TO:    ccw94-AT-aber.ac.uk                     ( _owner-bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU )
 
Subject: Re: BHA: Transitive & intransitive

Colin,

Christmas Day seems an appropriate moment to reflect on the
potential intransitivity of science as a social practice, no?
It reminds me of an argument I once had with a chemist--a
version of which I recounted on this list some months back--
about whether Santa Claus were real or not.  I said yes,
although this may be just a hangover from leaving cookies
out for the lad when I was very young.

Two points very quickly.

1)Bhaskar himself at various points talks about science as
a constantly changing, historically variable thing that has
the status of a transitive object.  If I had all the books
nearby--my library is elsewhere this year, or rather, I'm
elsewhere, not in the vicinity of my library--I could get the
references, but I expect you can supply them yourself.  One
that comes to mind is the review--later expanded into a book--
Bhaskar did of Rorty's book on contingency and irony.

2)The intransitive objects of social science are, I think,
generative mechanisms, not empirically accessible discourses--
which latter is what science is, I believe.  Now, you could
say, I suppose, that underlying scientific practice is a
set of principles or structures that enable any scientific
activity whatsoever--that infamous amor fati of positivism
colloquially known as scientific method.  But isn't it the
burden of virtually the whole of post-empiricist philosophy
of science to show that there is no such thing, that different
sciences are governed by different methods, and that this
is so precisely because different sciences have different
objects of inquiry?  The generative mechanisms studied in
physics are distinct from (occupy a different ontological
level from) those studied in microbiology.  To thinkotherwise
is to open oneself up to the charge of reductionism.  Thus,
I remain skeptical whether "science" can be described as an
intransitive object, as opposed to the second law of thermodynamics,
which does indeed refer to a mechanism--entropy--that underlies
actual physical phenomena.

On this view, science could only be an intransitive object
in the sense that different scientific practices all derived
>from a generative mechanism underlying social life, say,
class relations.  This is of course what Christopher Caudwell
believed, and it is a notion that continues to live on in
some sociology of science.  I think Bhaskar would reject this
construal of scientific activity, but I would confess that he
does not have a good account of why something like science should
exist at all--a point I once urged upon him in a review of
RECLAIMING REALITY in which I suggested he tends to underplay
the role of ideology in the intransitive dimension.  He said
he'd think about that ...

My own view--which Bhaskar would have some trouble accepting,
I feel--is that "science" (meaning the differing practices of
the natural and social sciences) is a contingent phenomenon, that
there is no inherent reason why science should exist, any more
than there is a necessity that capitalism should have come into
existence.  But it does exist, and the task of a materialist
history and philosophy of science (which is itself a sub-set
of the global science of history) is to account for why it came
to exist when and where it did, how the various determinations
inflecting the practice of natural philosophers, as they were
called in Europe, ranging from Christian theology to the need
for better navigational devices (and much more) combined to produce
that revolution in thought we know as the "scientific revolution"
in mechanics during the 17th century.

But then one has to concede that other sciences--geology,
biology, even chemistry--did not just follow suit immediately,
but only began to achieve comparable development to what now know
as physics much, much later.

I hope this makes my skepticism about your formulation a bit more
clear.  "Science" is one of those words that needs to be delimited
and handled with extreme care, I feel.

Michael Sprinker

p.s. I have no idea what to say to folks with a taste for Zizek.
Carnap once posed the following question:  "How does one persuade
a logical idiot?"  To which he offered this answer:  "You can't."
I feel much the same about postmodernists of a certain stripe.



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