Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 08:34:47 -0400
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Re: BHA: Science and witchcraft


Louis,

I think the point people have been trying to make is the following:

>At the most general level, scientific practice is used to argue for a
>critical realist ontology.  It is important to see that adoption of CR does
>not of itself rule out witchcraft as unscientific.  Witchcraft is a
>specific causal theory which may well be consonent with a CR viewpoint.  CR
>only rules out, e.g., a positivist witchcraft based on empirical
>regularities.  What refutes witchcraft is science, not philosophy of
>science, and CR is a philosophy of science, it is not itself science.
>

CR is a philosophy of science that justifies itself with an account that
starts with certain widely accepted characteristics of science.  Formally,
if we switch the labels and changed "witchcraft" to "science" and vice
versa, CR's argument would still work.  Only now, the widely accepted
characteristics might be rubbing bones together or saying incantations.
We'd then ask, "What must the world be like for witchcraft (what we'd be
calling "science") to be possible?"

Now the problem comes because people are looking to this form of argument
to help them with a practical problem: how to judge the relative merits of
competing causal accounts (e.g., of witchcraft vs science).  Your point is
well taken, CR really can't help with such disputes.  But I think there are
two reasons for this.  One is the one you mentioned: competing accounts of
the world are intra-scientific disputes and must be resolved within
science.  Unfortunately, this only works when the accounts share enough in
common to belong to a common, wider conception of a particular science.  RB
does touch on this, but only in the sense of pointing out that if things
are too dissimilar there would be no dispute.

The other reason is internal to CR itself.  It's of most help when the
competing accounts share a concern with what we commonly call science.
Thus, CR is an effective critique of positivism precisely because
positivism is interested in experimental science and agrees that this is
what science is.  Starting from this shared conception, CR shows positivism
is wrong.  CR is far less useful in disputes with witchcraft or
non-scientific idealism precisely because the different discourses do not
share the common ground I've called the lynchpin of RB's argument (i.e.,
the practice of experimental science).

I do, however, think this points to how disputes with non-science
approaches might be resolved.  The key would be to find the common ground
of belief, A, and then ask how consistent this is with other beliefs, B.
While doing the latter we could ask, "What must B be like for A to be
possible (or intelligible, true, successful, etc.)?"  This, incidentally,
is a special case of what's commonly called "wide reflective equilibrium."

Now the tricky part for most of us is that we're involved in debates with
approaches that don't view themselves as alternatives to "science," but
nonetheless see themselves as distinct in some important way.  To explicate
this point, I'll use lower case letters for "reality" and upper case for
accounts of that reality.  Thus, for example, in my field my opponents
claim planning as they portray it (X) is not "science" but don't dispute
the fact that planning occurs in the world, y, that science knows (a world
that basically conforms to science's account, Y).  The problem I face is
that I want to ask, "What must the world, y, be like for planning, as
described under account X, to be possible?"  I then want to show that since
the world is not like this (i.e., ~y), then X is impossible; in fact,
planning really conforms to a different account, X'.  Unfortunately, one
only knows what y is like through Y.  My opponents and I do not share the
same conception of Y.  Moreover, to resolve THIS dispute, we need to agree
on what should count as an adequate account of y.  This, in turn, involves
the dispute between CR and positivism.  But, you see, because of the
complexity of the dispute, it becomes very hard to resolve and even keep
straight what we're talking about.  When I use CR, opponents often think
I'm applying it to the relation (1) between y and X (which I am), but they
miss the fact that I'm also applying it to the relation (2) between y and Y
in order to undermine their version of Y so that I can then use this as
ammunition in my argument about (1).

So what's really involved is a whole web of arguments and meanings:

	a. science's (S) relation to its object (s), S -> s

	b. philosophy (P) of science's account of science, P -> S

	c. (social) science's and lay knowledge's various accounts {Y} of the
		social world (y), {Y} -> y

	d. philosopy of science's account of science as a guide to filter the
various elements of {Y}, {Y'} < {Y} where the operator < is a
		function of P -> S

	e. various accounts of planning, {X'} < {X}, using < the same way.

	f. as further discrimination among competing elements in {X}, using 		the
results of d; thus {X"} # {Y'} where the operator # is a 		function of {Y'}
< {Y}, itself a function of P -> S.

	g. the implicit argument that legitimate accounts of planning belong
		to {X*} = {X'} ^ {X"}.

It would be real nice to have a shortcut that just lets one focus on the
relation, X -> x.  I think CR doesn't help too much with this, but it's not
entirely useless in the structure of the whole argument a-g.

	

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