From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-gwi.net>
Subject: BHA: Re: Types of determinism
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1997 10:13:13 -0500


Doug wrote:

>         But I remain unsettled about the objections to the intelligibility
> thesis you and Tobin raise.  For example, we construe the diverse effects
> of light as a manifestation of light's simultaneous nature as both particle
> and wave.  The particle/wave nature of light seems to be the cause of the
> phenomena, but is that cause really intelligible?  If not, then what I said
> above in response to you and Tobin is wrong, and I have just offered Tobin
> a concrete example where the cause is known but unintelligible.  I'm not
> sure, myself, what to say about this.

Some of my difficulties in understanding the focus of RB's analysis here
concern why he chose the term "intelligibility" rather than "knowability" (or
somesuch).  "Intelligibility" seems in my mind to involve an understanding
composed in currently-available schemes of representation.  For example, once
I read a science fiction story in which Roger Bacon, way back in the Middle
Ages, had discovered radio waves--and interpreted them as the flight of
angels from the transmitter to the receiver(s).  Similarly, we might wonder
whether the awkwardness we have by trying to understand light as both a
particle and a wave might not someday be supplanted by some other
image-framework.  In short, I have to ask, "intelligible to whom?"  And
doesn't it make a difference who that is--do a child's, a playwright's, a
schizophrenic's, a physicist's, and a priest's interpretations of light all
"count"?  What happens if the child actually has a better image than the
physicist?  With "knowledge," the problems seem less acute, probably because
there can be knowledge without anyone who currently knows it (following
Archer's discussion here, as in her examples of the old and unread book
buried in a library, an ancient recipe, or the Rosetta stone before
translation of Linear B).

But this concern makes me wonder ("backwards," so to speak) if this isn't
what Bhaskar has in mind in the first place: given the "presentism" of both
empiricism and transcendental idealism, then the issue might really be
"knowability in present terms," i.e. present-day intelligibility for those
whom present-day intelligibility assigns the capacity to know (in the example
above, the physicist).  However, this looks rather like a desparate attempt
to rescue Mr B's terminology into something that's intelligible to *me*, so I
remain puzzled.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-gwi.net
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce


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