Date: Wed, 02 Jul 1997 09:56:40 -0400
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: Marshall Feldman <marsh-AT-URIACC.URI.EDU>
Subject: Re: BHA: metaphysical refutation


At 04:08 PM 7/1/97 -0700, Louis Irwin wrote:
>But suppose the world only seems open (and correlatively scientific
>experiment only seems possible)?  Suppose really that strong actualism
>holds and it is only our defective or limited knowledge that blocks us
>from being able to subsume phenomena under complete atomistic state
>descriptions?  On p. 116 strong actualism is transcendentally refuted
>by again being argued to make science impossible, but the argument is
>obscure.

Wouldn't this imply that the what scientific experiments we do, and their
outcomes, are predetermined?  This seems to be a form of the argument that
Bhaskar (p. 106) says "we can never refute" because we could never know if
experimental activity were totally predetermined.  However, if it were,
then science (as well as this discussion) would be pointless.  We'd have no
choice.

>
>There seems to be a major flaw in this line of reasoning.  A Laplacean
>only has to claim that our future knowledge is implicit in the current
>state of the world, which includes facts outside of our knowledge.  Put
>differently, the Laplacean only needs to say that the present contains
>the seeds of the future, NOT that present knowledge alone contains
>seeds of future knowledge.  So if the oak of our knowledge is implicit
>in the Laplacean acorn, that acorn can include many things outside of
>our knowledge.  So it seems wrong to claim "in an actualist world there
>would be no way of discovering laws which did not already presuppose a
>knowledge of them." There is no reason to assume the Laplacean requires
>all knowledge to grow from knowledge alone without joint determination
>by other things.  Besides, the Laplacean reduces everything to the
>lowest level of atoms anyway and claims everything else in the future
>is determinate, so he does not have a theoretical need to distinguish
>knowledge as a specific cause of future knowledge.

This would include making knowledge determinate.  I think Popper attacked
historicism along these lines.  Would indeterminate knowledge open the
system up, or does this not alos imply that knowledge must be determinate?
If the latter, then the acorn outside knowledge seems irrelevant.
Eventually it will make us know what we will know.  Since OUR starting
point (as opposed to the world's) is our own knowledge, there is not
practical difference between saying future knowledge is immanent in current
knowledge vs the current state of the world.

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Marshall Feldman, Associate Professor		                marsh-AT-uriacc.uri.edu
Graduate Curriculum in Community Planning and Area Development	401/874-5953
The University of Rhode Island					401/874-5511 (FAX)
94 West Alumni Avenue, Suite 1; Kingston, RI 02881-0806


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