File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/bhaskar.9710, message 94


From: "Marshall Feldman" <marsh-AT-URIACC.URI.EDU>
To: <bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU>
Subject: Re: BHA: theorya/theoryb
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 05:07:19 -0400


 I understand Bhaskar's "empirical" domain to consist of observables but not
necessarily "observeds." A tree falling in the forest with no one there is
empirical. The magnetic field in my computer monitor is actual but not
(directly) empirical. It therefore seems the conflation below, between
subjective and empirical, contradicts Bhaskar's own opening thrusts in RTS.
Before there was human life on earth, was there an empirical realm? I'd say,
"Yes." Was there a subjective realm? I'd say, "No." So how does RB equate
empirical and subjective without doing violence to his earlier arguments of
this sort?


>Hi Colin--
>
>Bhaskar's original formulation (in RTS) did indeed identify the "third
>level" as the empirical.  But in *Dialectic* (and maybe earlier) he
>expanded that to the empirical and the subjective.  Unfortunately, he
>doesn't explain this shift anywhere (at least not to my knowledge),
>although he makes use of it at several points in *Dialectic*, particularly
>when discussing the similarities and differences between empiricism and
>rationalism (or whichever terms he uses there).  In the present discussion,
>I've assumed that Howie's been using D(s) as shorthand for RB's expanded
>notion.
>
>(For my own part, I think it's better to consider the whole domain as one
>of semiosis, which encompasses experience, subjective states, cognition,
>and various other goodies that require signs.  An argument I made back in
>January or something, and is soon to be a major motion picture.)
>
>Cheers.
>
>---
>Tobin Nellhaus
>nellhaus-AT-gwi.net *or* tobin.nellhaus-AT-helsinki.fi
>"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce
>
>
>
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