File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/97-04-21.144, message 61


From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-gwi.net>
Subject: BHA: bhaskar: 0, ruth: 1 (corrected!)
Date: Sat, 12 Apr 1997 08:32:44 -0400


Ruth, since I think your complaint is justified and that there are serious
political concerns to be raised about arcane writing styles--and because I
can read your writing quite easily--I've changed the score.

I don't think CR is to blame here.  Margaret Archer, for example, is pretty
straightforward reading, is never arch, and tells no jokes (darn).  In fact,
her writing seems rather stodgy to me at times.

I read a few chapters of Andrew Sayer recently, and stopped, but not for
complaints about his style (the book isn't right for the class I'm planning);
he does indeed wink at times, but that didn't bother me.

I'm currently finishing Collier's *Critical Realism*, which is pretty easy
going, but I may not use it for this class because 1) somehow I don't feel it
delivers the "punch" of reading Bhaskar (that is, where Roy Boy is
comprehensible), and 2) Collier uses a lot of colloquialisms, which I enjoy
but they may cause unnecessary difficulties for my Finnish students (perhaps
the one or two Finns on the list can advise me here).

Keat & Urry reads well (and holy cow, it seems still to be in print!), though
I'm not sure they want to be lumped too quickly with Bhaskar.

(The book I'd like to use is PON, but that seems to have gone out of print. 
Interlibrary Loan just got me Outhwaite's book, but the U.S. distributor
can't seem to tell me if it's in print.)

I'm not sure how I managed to get through *Dialectic*; I took it 3-5 pp at a
time, usually before I went to bed; not a bad way to go.  Later some of its
ideas started floating up at me while working on various issues, and after a
while I took to rereading bits by way of the index.  I'd like it to come out
on CD-ROM so I can just search it to death!

Anyway, in my experience it's the poststructuralists who think they have the
drop on everyone, and it's very evident in their writing.  Critical realists
at least have the notion of fallibility to help keep us in line.

But here's another possible explanation: RTS, and PON even more, are fairly
clear reading.  They are also somewhat polemical.  *Dialectic*, however, is
much less so; it's more expository, or even exploratory.  I find my own
theoretical writing tends to be clearer in my more polemical pieces, and
maybe that's the case for Bhaskar.

Carroll:  I think CR and materialism does hold that paraphrase (and
translation) is both necessary and possible (this accords with its arguments
about the comparability of theories), but undoubtedly there's a lot of
variety about what counts as accuracy or even adequacy.  Also, there's no a
priori limit to the number of possible paraphrases, since there is (in
principle anyway) an infinite number of ways to refer to something
(practically, that may be limited by convenience, intelligibility, etc: think
of all the arcane ways one can say "I").  This is hopeful news, since it
means that perhaps someday *Dialectic* may be translated into English!

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


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