File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/97-01-11.090, message 56


From: MSPRINKER-AT-ccmail.sunysb.edu
Date: Sun, 05 Jan 1997 12:30:32 -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
                                            05-Jan-1997 12:12pm EST
FROM:  MSPRINKER
TO:    ccw94-AT-aber.ac.uk                     ( _owner-bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU )
 
Subject: Re: BHA: Transitive & intransitive

Colin,

Many thanks for your post.  I'm recovering from a cold, and 
doubtless the (physiological) stuffiness in my head will
inflect the clarity of what follows.

I'm still troubled by the notion that science can be an
intransitive object about which it is the task of philosophy
to produce knowledge.  You have the relevant citations--among
others--from Bhaskar, but I wonder if there isn't a certain
confusion or contradiction in Bhaskar himself on this point.

Apropose of ideology's role--I mistyped what I intended.
I didn't mean to say that Bhaskar underplays to the role of
ideology in INtransitive dimension, but rather that he tends
to underplay it in the transitive dimension, viz., he has
a tendency towards rationalism that I think is not compatible
with CR.

That said, I think it's a nice question whether discursive
objects (e.g., this or that scientific theory) can rightly be
termed intransitive.  Pace Bhaskar himself in the passage
you cite from PON, it seems to me that beliefs and meanings
are of the same order as the phenomena observable in empirical
investigations in the natural sciences.  But for CR, I think,
the truly intransitive objects are not phenomena, but the
generative mechanisms that produce them.  That's why I would
contend that cause of scientific theories is not the theories
themselves--in any but a trivial sense--but the social forces
that make science in general possible, and particular sciences
what they are at any given moment in time.

All of this leads me to say something that may at first sound
peculiar:  CR itself is what Bhaskar calls a "philosophical
ideology."  That does not entail its inability to give a true
account of the sciences, merely that its own knowledge claims
cannot be cashed in the way that typically scientific theories
(in the long run) can be, i.e., in experimental practice.  To 
take CR as "the science of 
science" is precisely to commit to the rationalism of which
I once accused Bhaskar, and that is something that CR cannot
do, on pain of self-contradiction (because, ex hypothesi,
CR itself must always be changing in response to changes in
the transitive theories of the sciences themselves; under-
laboring on behalf of classical mechanics is not the same
thing as underlaboring on behalf historical materialism).

Michael



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