Date: Wed, 30 Jul 1997 19:06:13
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: Louis Irwin <lirwin1-AT-ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: BHA: Non-experimental science (was "What must the ...")


At 09:52 AM 7/30/97 -0400, Marshall wrote:

>Instead, I accept Louis' reading that RTS attacks positivism in the area it
>thinks it's strongest: experimental natural science.  From this, RB
>justifies different, non-positivist meanings for "science," "cause,"
>"explanation," etc.  These MEANINGS then transfer over to the domain of the
>non-experimenatal sciences, where we may then have to add some other
>justifications to warrant their applicability.  The latter is what I take
>as the purpose of PON.
>
>So this is not a matter of re-demonstrating CR's applicability.  In
>general, it's first a matter of establishing what science is and then
>asking on what basis we think a particular realm is susceptable to
>scientific inquiry.
>

Although Marshal, Doug and I are in agreement on CR not being a general, a
priori theory and requiring at least support in the various domains outside
natural science, as I said in a response to Doug's post I disagree with
his, and now Marshall's, way of putting it in terms of the meanings of
"science", "cause" and "explanation."  I don't think it is right to say
that the meanings of those terms are fixed by a CR analysis of natural
science, especially the last two.  On their understanding, having fixed
those meanings we go on to ask if social studies are capable of causal
explanation, and if they are, whether those explanations are scientific in
character.  I would prefer to say that first we establish what natural
science is in CR terms and then ask whether causal explanations in other
domains conform to the same kind of depth analysis.  If the answer were to
turn out negative in some domain, I don't know that we should declare that
there are no causal explanations in that domain simply because they do not
conform to the CR account gleaned from natural science.  I wonder how
others feel about this matter.

Louis Irwin




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