Date: Wed, 06 Aug 1997 09:21:37 -0400
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Re: BHA: Non-experimental science (was "What must the ...")


Just a brief comment on Louis' latest posting:

>5.
>>I see several problems here.  First, how could we know if the thing
>>under study "causes" the theory without having some theory about the thing
>>to begin with.  In other words, isn't this circular in some sense.
>
>Suppose we are dealing with racism and propose that some set of social
>conditions cause racist ideology to be adopted.  What would be circular
>about that (assuming the social conditions are spelled out)?

Yes, but we were talking about knowing if your hypothetical theory of
racism were itself ideological.  The fact that the theory itself explains
racism by reference to certain causal mechanisms that are in some sense
independent of racism does not say much about circularity in one's
assessment of the theory itself.

Perhaps this would be clearer if we proposed a theory of, say, urbanization
rather than racism.  In this case we are not theorizing something that's
mainly ideational, so we are less likely to think of the theory's object as
ideological (can Mexico City be an ideology?).  The question would be, how
can we tell if this theory is ideology?  If the answer depends on the
theory's causal relation to its object (e.g., to urbanization), how could
we know about that relation without first having the theory?

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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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