Date: Mon, 21 Jul 1997 08:54:50 +0100
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: ccw94-AT-aber.ac.uk (COLIN WIGHT)
Subject: Re: Re[2]: BHA: What must the world be like for facism?


Just some passing remarks on this debate.

First of all Howie. I have real trouble accepting the link between Giddens
and Bhaskar. First of all, Giddens, to me, seems to reduce the social to
intersubjectivity. This is really problematic for a critical realist. I
basically accept the arguments of all of those, Doug Porpora, Margaret
Archer, Callinicos, Layder, for example, who argue that Giddens solution to
the agent-structure problem is subjectivist. Also, on the issue of
predicability, is this even the goal of the natural sciences?

Equally, and I know this comes from 1977 so Giddens may have moved somewhat,
but the statement:

The circumstances of application of laws in natural
>science can be altered by the manipulation of their limiting conditions.

Seems to betray a residual commitment to a Humean account of cause. Also
Giddens account of the relation between social science and its object, seems
to imply that social scientific concepts must always be translatable into
lay concepts. Derek layder is good on this in his book 'The Realist Image in
Social Science'. For example, when Giddens argues:

>[...] knowledge produced by the social sciences, especially in so far as it
>is of a generalizing character, can be reflexively incorporated into the
>rationalization of action. 

Well yes, this may be the case and I don't doubt for a minute that Marxism
shaped the 20th century, but is this always the case? I simply don't meet
many people going about their everyday activities talking about 'liquidity
preferences', or the 'distanciation of social practices across time'. Maybe
I'm simply meeting the wrong sort of people? Or for that matter many people
who believe that the world really is a human construct (an idea most social
scientists have held onto since their inception).

Marshall raises  a lot of interesting points, but I have varying levels of
disagreement. Marshall argues:

 RB's critique of empiricism in sciences like physics leverages his analysis of
>experiment.  In other words, experiments are taken as valid scientific
>practices, and then he uses them to answer the metaphysical questions via
>transcendental argument. 

You see I don't read him in this manner at all. For one thing, Bhaskar does
not ask the question of why, or how, experiments are possible, but 'how is
science possible, what must the world be like for science to be possible?'
And science, remember, is not an activity that only takes place in the lab.
The laws that science discovers are transfactual. The experimental process
is an important part of Bhaskars analysis only insofar as its necessity is
used to establish a philosophical ontology: basically a differentiated open
world, characterised by stratification and depth. 

He also then uses this ontology in a somewhat
>imperial way to make comments (rather tentatively in RTS) about what good
>science is in sciences whose objects do not lend themselves to closure.

Sorry I don't see on what basis you are making this claim. Bhaskar develops
an ontology as a result of asking what must the world be like for science to
be possible, he discovers, what he claims, are some general features of the
world and thus develops a contingent (contingent, because science is a
social practice of knowledge production, which may one day be superceded by
a better mode) philosophical ontology.

 "What must the world be like for systematic empiricist science to
>be possible?"  

Well yes of course they could ask this, but put this way empiricist science
appears in the premises. If Bhaskar had asked 'what must the world be like
for transcendental realism to be possible?' then your critique would have
some force, but this is not his question. Also RB does not claim that his
account of the sciences is the definitive one, but simply advances the more
modest claim that to his knowledge it is the best account currently
available. It may not be in twenty years time though.

>
>Now if we ask the second question and ignore experiment (i.e., "What must
>the world be like for social science to be possible?"), 

Again, this is not RB's question, rather RB asks 'what must the world be
like for social action to be possible?' Social action is, and was, certainly
possible prior to the social sciences. Hence Bhaskar is not trying to
validate the social sciences by adducing arguments from the activities of
the social sciences (although as a form of social action this could have
been possible) but through establishing some general features necessary for
social action per se; that is that social objects are (relatively)
intransitive and there are a group of people capable of constructing a set
of transitive objects of these (relatively) intransitive objects. It is for
this reason that Bhaskar argues social science is possible _in virtue of_,
not in spite of, the nature of the social world. Hence Bhaskar's account of
the social world is not susceptible to Marshall's following points because
the social sciences are not part of the premises (rememeber, he only comes
to really discuss the social sciences in his chapter on Philosophies, which
is the last chapter of PON).

remember we cannot
>without circularity use our results to critique social science.  The
>question presumes the scientific validity of social science in order to
>develop an ontology that makes social science intelligible.  We might take
>an undisputed piece of social science to ask the question, but what part of
>social science is uncontested?

>
>I really don't think this issue depends on the self-reflexivity of the
>human sciences.  We could, for instance, ask, "What must the world be like
>for science to be possible?" and use astronomy or paleontology as our
>fulcrum.  While RB says, "science," he really uses "experiment" for his.

Of course I disagree, if it was only experiments he was concerned with why
all the creative reconstruction of transfactual laws. After all if it was,
not science, but experiment he was concerned with, he could possibly have
derived a positivist account, but it is the fact that experiment is only one
part of the scientific picture that bars this answer. Laws endure beyond the
conditions of their identification.


>This tactic is not innocent, and I agree with his results.  Still, I worry
>about the tacit assumption that the implicit ontology in the experimental
>sciences readily spills across the boundaries of other sciences.

See, in the postscript to RTS (2nd. edition), I think, his comments on this.
Also, of course in Plato etc. he argues that he could have deduced plausible
arguments for transcendental realism from activities such as playing
football, making coffee etc.

  THIS knowledge is RB's fulcrum to
>argue for the possiblity of science in the human realm.

Again, I disagree, it is only a necessary starting point for RB, not the
fulcrum. The social for RB does not reduce to intersubjectivity, there is,
as it were, stuff going on behind the backs of our agents. Again see the
last chapter of PON for a comprehensive critique of hermeneutic fundamentalism.

Anyway, thanks for you input its got me thinking and writing again after two
weeks off doing the job interview round.


Thanks,




------------------------------------------------------------------------

Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth
SY23 3DA

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