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 --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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