Date: Sat, 2 Aug 1997 20:16:25 -0600
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: BHA: rts2-31


===========================================Chapter 3. The Logic of Scientific Discovery
===========================================
1. INTRODUCTION: ON THE CONTINGENCY OF THE CAUSAL CONNECTION

In Chapter 2 I assumed the existence of a body of
knowledge and asked how it could be applicable to the world.
My particular concern was to establish its universality
(transfactuality).  I now want to turn to the question of
how such knowledge, given that it is transfactually
applicable to the world, comes to be produced; and in
particular to the question of how law-like statements
come to be established as necessary.  My concern shifts
here then from the synchronic to the diachronic aspects
of science, and in particular to the question of how, in
the social activity of science, natural necessity comes
to be ascribed.  In the course of this chapter I will
consider to what universality and necessity is properly
ascribed, and what must be the case for these ascriptions
to be possible.

     In order to show how the concept of natural
necessity is possible I will need to turn from a critique
of the ontology of closed systems to a critique of the
ontology of atomistic events that implies it; and hence
from a critique of the idea of the actuality of the
causal connection to a critique of the idea of its
contingency.  In Chapter 4 I will ask what accounts for
the assumption of the atomicity of the events conjoined
that entails a closed system and generates, in its wake,
a host of philosophical problems.

     The connection between my concerns in this and the
preceding chapter is clear.  For once an ontology of
atomistic events is constituted, it follows that, for
general knowledge to be possible, events must be always
conjoined (under appropriate descriptions) and never
connected.1  That is, order in the world must consist


 1 This is the ontological form of Hume's doctrine that
events `seem conjoined, but never connected'.  See
D. Hume, *An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding*,
p. 74.



144 A Realist Theory of Science

of an unfailing or invariant order of the co-existence of
events in space and their succession in time.  Conversely
once it is appreciated that events, though caused (and
consisting in transformations), are very rarely
conjoined, it can be seen why order in the world must be
pitched at a level categorically distinct from
events.  Now I have argued in effect that we produce
conjunctions to discover connections and apply
connections in a world of non-conjunctions; so that
events, though rarely conjoined, are sometimes
connected.  In this chapter I want to consider the nature
of the connection that holds between events (when it
does) and the nature of the necessity implicit in the
concept of law.  I will thus be shifting my attention from
the differentiation of the world as such to the nature of
the stratification that, if we are to render intelligible
the experimental establishment and practical application
of our knowledge, it implies.  Science attempts, I will
argue, in its essential movement, to capture the
stratification of the world.  In order to describe this
movement I will need to reconstitute the other dimension
of the Copernican Revolution in the philosophy of
science, viz. the transitive (or sociological) dimension
in which men come, in their social activity, to acquire
knowledge of the enduring and transfactually acting
mechanisms of nature, in virtue of which some but not
other sequences of events are necessarily connected and
some but not other statements are universally
applicable.  The idea that there are no necessary
connections between matters of fact occupies an analogous
position in underpinning the doctrine of the contingency
of the causal connection, as the idea that there are
always descriptions for events such that the formula
`whenever this, then that' applies does in underpinning
the doctrine of its actuality.  And I will argue that just
as for science to be possible the world must be open; so
there must be necessary connections between matters of
fact, if science is to be possible.

In Chapters 1 and 2 I have shown how the intelligibility
of the activities of the experimental establishment and
the practical application of our knowledge presupposes
the categorical independence of causal laws from the
patterns of events, and how causal laws must be given an
ontological basis in the enduring and transfactually
active mechanisms of nature.  Modern transcendental
idealist philosophies of science, which



The Logic of Scientific Discovery 145


are perhaps more influenced by Wittgenstein than Kant,
stop at what is in effect the second stage of a dialectic or
process of discovery in science, by refusing to allow (or
inadequately interpreting) the possibility of a realist
interpretation of theory.

     Thus there is in science a characteristic kind of
dialectic in which a regularity is identified, a
plausible explanation for it s invented and the reality
of the entities and processes postulated in the
explanation is then checked.  This is the logic of
scientific discovery, illustrated in Diagram 3-1 below.
If the classical



                                Result/regularity
events; sequences; invariances       (1) *classical empiricism*
          |                           |
          |
     generative                       |
     mechanisms                       v model-building
     in models
          |                           |
       +--+-----------------------+
     /                              \ |    
    (3)- - <- - - - - - - - - - - - -(2) *transcendental idealism*
   real  empirical-testing    imagined/imaginary   
   *transcendental realism*


     Diagram 3.1. The Logic of Scientific Discovery


empiricist tradition stops at the first step, the
neo-Kantian tradition sees the need for the second.
But it either denies or does not draw the full
(transcendental realist) implications of the third step.
If and only if the third step is taken can there be an
adequate rationale for the use of laws to explain
phenomena in open systems (where no constant conjunctions
prevail) or for the experimental establishment of that
knowledge in the first place.


     Just as transcendental realism differentiates
itself from empiricism by interpreting the first stage
of the dialectic as the invariance of a *result* rather
than that of a *regularity*, so it differentiates itself
from transcendental idealism in its interpretation of
the second stage.  Both transcendental realism and
idealism see the move from (1) to (2) as involving
creative model-building, in which plausible generative
mechanisms are *imagined*



146 A Realist Theory of Science


to produce the phenomena in question.  But whereas for
transcendental idealism the imagined mechanism is
*imaginary*, for realism it may be *real*, and come to be
established as such.  What is imagined may be real; but
what is imaginary cannot.  `Imaginary/real' marks an
ontological watershed; `imagined/ known to be real' an
epistemic one.  Now what is imagined at t_1 may come at t_2
to be known to be real.  And for transcendental realism
the move from (2) to (3) involves experimental production
and control, in which the reality of the mechanisms
postulated in the model are subjected to empirical
scrutiny.  For transcendental realism that some real
things and generative mechanisms *must* exist can be
established by philosophical argument (their existence,
and transfactual activity, is a condition of the
possibility of science).  But it is contingent and the
job of substantive science to discover which ones
actually do.  That is, it is the task of science to
discover which hypothetical or imagined mechanisms are
not imaginary but real; or, to put it the other way
round, to discover what the real mechanisms are i.e. to
produce an adequate account of them.

     Science is a process-in-motion.  It involves three
distinct stages, which cannot be omitted or collapsed
into one another without doing tremendous violence to our
understanding of science.  But these stages cannot be
identified with moments of chronological time; they are
phases of science.  It should be noted that the move from
(1) to (2) just because it involves the postulation of
novel entities and processes cannot be given a deductive
interpretation.  But given this it can only be justified
in a non-pragmatic way if we hold out the possibility of
a realist interpretation of some of the hypothetical
entities etc. invoked to explain the behaviour.  Such an
interpretation can in turn only be justified empirically
if it is set in the context of the ongoing social
activity of science.  Thus it is in the planning of
future experiences rather than in the ordering of present
ones or the memory of past ones that our rational and
empirical `faculties', `whose unkind and ill-starred
divorce' Bacon saw as responsible for all the confusion
in `the affairs of the human family',2 are most
productively combined.

     It is only, I shall argue, if we allow the
possibility of the move from (2) to (3) that we can, in
the end, uphold the legitimacy of


 2 F. Bacon, *Novum Organum*.


 The Logic of Scientific Discovery 147


the move from (1) to (2).  Moreover it is only if we
begin to see science in terms of *moves* and are not
mesmerized by terminals that we can give an adequate
account of science.  In this respect much philosophy is
still in the same position as a Martian trying to
discover what trams are but able only to observe them in
open-air museums with children scrambling over them.  It
is the task of the philosophy of science to capture
science's essential movement, not to guess its eventual
destination.

     Recent work in the philosophy of science has
established (i) the fact of scientific change and (ii)
the poverty of a purely deductivist analysis of
explanation.  In this way it has done much towards the
establishment of a conception of science as a critical
social activity.  The case for transcendental realism
can, however, be strengthened by considering the
limitations of this work.  For unless these two insights
are taken together and a new ingredient is added to the
existing philosophical mix they are, I think, vulnerable
to positivist counter-attack.  This new ingredient must
be in the field of ontology.  The argument of Chapter 1
enables us to see why this is so.  For the logical
empiricism against which recent philosophy of science has
reacted contained not only an account of science, but
(implicitly) an account of reality, of the world known by
science.  And it is in this unacknowledged ontological
legacy that the weaknesses of both developments lie.  My
aim in this chapter and the next is to pinpoint these
weaknesses.  And to show in particular why and how an
adequate non-empiricist account of science, capable of
accommodating the facts of scientific change and
structure, requires an ontology of the kind outlined in
Chapter 1 and elaborated in Chapter 2.  Indeed, recent
philosophy of science illustrates very well the kind of
`ontological tension' that can occur when a fundamental
objection is made to a philosophical theory without
simultaneously questioning that theory's ontology.  The
general difference between recent philosophy of science
and transcendental realism could be summed up by saying
that whereas recent philosophy has asked merely what are
the conditions of the possibility of individual
experience and found an answer in the intersubjective
world of science, transcendental realism asks in addition
for the conditions of the possibility of the social
activity of science, finding an answer in the
intransitive world of things.



 148 A Realist Theory of Science


I will need in this chapter not only to show the
necessity for the philosophical ontology of
transcendental realism, but also to begin the development
of the philosophical sociology that I argued in 1.6 is
presupposed by any theory of science.  Scientific
development, I have argued so far, consists in the
transformation of social products, antecedently
established items of knowledge, which may be regarded as
Aristotelian material causes.  Certain implications flow
from this conception.  First, that men never construct
their knowledge from scratch.  It stands to them always
as a given product, a social transmit;3 which they must
themselves reproduce or partially transform.  The
Copernican Revolution in the transitive dimension of the
philosophy of science thus has the profound implication
that man never *creates*, but only *changes*, his knowledge,
with the cognitive tools at his disposal.  Secondly, what
is to be changed, has first to be acquired.  And what is
acquired consists always of an *ensemble* of theoretical
and empirical ideas, so that knowledge can never be
analysed out as a function of individual
sense-experience.  Once this is grasped the grounds for
the atomistic ontology that generates the idea of the
contingency of the causal connection collapse.

     Science then is an ongoing social activity which
pre-exists any particular generation of scientists and
any particular moment of consciousness.  Its aim is the
production of the knowledge of the independently existing
and transfactually active mechanisms of nature.
Corresponding to the criterion developed in the
intransitive dimension of the philosophy of science,
viz. the conceivability of a world without men, we thus
have a criterion in the transitive dimension, namely the
inconceivability of knowledge without antecedents.


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