From: "Doctor Spurt" <SPURRETT-AT-mtb.und.ac.za>
Date:          Thu, 9 Jan 1997 12:36:53 GMT +0200
Subject:       Re: BHA: Re: the possibility of naturalism


Greetings,

> > = Me
>    = Colin

> >Thing two: We need to be careful when we say Doctor F's activity and 
> >theories are intransitive for our thespian sociologist. This is because 
> >these phenomena are not given to us raw as data for study, but as we 
> >all know are partly constituted as objects of thought by our existing 
> >outlook and expectations. We don't "have" the intransitive objects, but 
> >as critical realists we recongise that there are such things even 
> >though we do _not_ have them. All the objects we have are transitive, 
> >otherwise we would be naive realists.

> I agree with everything you say here, but nonetheless, you would have to
> agree, would you not, that what Dr Frank did on August 15 whenever, is not
> determined by, nor changed by, how we now describe it today. In that sense
> his activity is intransitive to our transitive descriptions of it. And
> actually, I probably disagree with your statement that all the objects we
> have are transitive. For, although i accept we can only know the world
> through our descriptions of it, we also have documents and other materials
> about the activities of Dr Frank that we do transitively describe. The
> world, as it were, does talk back to us even if we can't step outside of our
> descriptions to see how they fit. The point about the oven element is
> exactly this, no matter how we try and redesribe it, no amount of mind over
> matter seems to stop it burning us. (notwithstanding those who walk on hot
> ashes :-)) If we push the intransitive realm too far beyond our grasp we
> risk transcendental idealism.

I think we agree, but both have a similar discomfort which is caused 
by the vocabulary of transcendental realism. When we are given a 
distinction between "transitive and intransitive objects of 
knowledge" it may make it seem as though we could start with an 
"object of knowledge", and then have to decide whether it is 
"transitive" or not. (We could all imagine a "20 Questions" scenario 
here.) If we did this we would be being misled by a feature of 
language, since "transitive object of knowledge" and "intransitive 
object of knowledge" are quite different, far more different than 
"same noun, different adjective" seems to suggest.

In fact I would tend to say that _strictly_ the intransitive objects 
are not "objects of knowledge" at all except in the miniaml sense 
that as realists we acknowledge a world independent of our 
descriptions of  it. When I said all our objects are transitive I 
should have said all the objects of our knowledge are transitive, 
since everything which is a part of knowledge is a social product, 
and is hence transitive. I did not mean to say that "our" objects in 
some sense of ownership or possession were all transitive, and take 
Colin's point there.
 
> Any more recipes?

I still haven't had the nerve to try making this one, and am in two 
minds about which of the two products of the process is the "end" 
one. I'd welcome any suggestions.

Cheers,
David

Department of Philosophy, UND
--------------------------------------------------------
Recipe of the week: SPAM extract

Place 2 cans of Spam in 1/2 litre of Vodka for 2-3 weeks
in a cool place (i.e. fridge). Strain off chunks using a
100 micron filter (ie cheese cloth).

serve immediately...


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