Date: Sun, 23 Nov 1997 00:17:27 -0800 (PST) From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org> To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU Subject: Re: BHA: Real Def Rakesh writes: "It seems to me that if [we] were to study race, sex or gold, we would find that their constitution does not account for their respective powers: isn't this an argument for a non- naturalistic social science." Several things: First, the distinction Bhaskar makes between the intransitive and transitive dimensions extends to society. Society comes to us ready made. We do not create it or make it (or "invent" it). We transform it. But it exists independent of our thinking about it as part of the intransitive dimension. Because social relations are intransitive, they can be studied as any other scientific object; what is meant by the possibility of naturalism is that social objects can be studied in a way common to the way the natural sciences proceed. In particular like nature, social objects are open, stratified and differentiated. Social relations are what Le Roy calls in section 3 of RTS, "theoretical(2)" -- in principle they cannot be perceived. Society is composed of relations and relations are not an object of perception. But that doesn't mean that social science is non- naturalist because the objects studied by science, whether natural or social, have causal powers to transform the world and make it other than it would be were they not exercised. ("Now it is because we ourselves are material things that our criteria for establishing the reality of things turn on the capacity of the thing whose existence is in doubt to bring about (or suffer) changes in its material constitution or the constitution of some material thing" RTS 182). So, no, I don't think the fact that the chemical structure of gold or the pigmentation of skin does not account for the causal powers captured by money or race argues for a non-naturalistic social science at all. Second, the particular structure or constitution that accounts for a thing's powers which would serve as the ontological basis for a real definition in the social sciences would not be a chemical structure or genetics, but a structure of social relations. To say that women are thus and so because they possess a particular reproductive biology leads to forms of essentialism which have been justly criticized. To say that patriarchy is a social structure which has the causal power to reproduce itself is to open the search for a real definition of that social structure. The quote from Michael Root seems roughly accurate insofar as he wants to distinguish between social relations in the intransitive dimension and the transitive dimension of social science. But critical realism would reject the idea that the criminal law invents (society is not of our making . . . we reproduce or transform it) and also it would reject the idea that the sociologist was a passive observer: "What one institution invents, the other can discover or observe; so, once the law invents the forger and the arsonist, sociology can discover them." The colonial sociologist studies the colonies and "invents" (altogether oblivious of what he does) relations of the oppressor and the oppressed as quickly as the lawmaker does. In the history of the social sciences I am aware of two sustained analyses of "real definition." I'd be interested in other examples. I know in my own field, law, although it can seem like the whole focus of scholarship is taxonomy, this is not connected in any way to an effort to discover generative structures which can give an explanatory account of the classifications. Instead, the classifications are conventionally differentiated, so there is no perception of even the possibility of studying law as a social science other than to study an economics or a sociology (in the narrow disciplinary sense of the modern university) of law. The idea of a social science of law rooted in real definitions of the structures which account for legal phenomena is pretty much perceived as gibberish. The two sustained examples of real definition I am aware of are "value" and "capital" as Marx analyzes them. "Capital" takes three volumes and then some to define, so I am not altogether a master of that, but I have the idea, and I'm confident the argument can be made. "Value" takes 3 chapters and for that reason is a more manageable example. "Value" is a social relation which is characterized by a particular disposition of the agents of production to the process of production, viz: the productive process is autonomous, separate and independent, but it produces use values useless for its own purposes. As a consequence it is driven to exchange. The social relation studied, then, is inherently contradictory: on the one hand it establishes separation, but on the other hand it plays a specific role in the social division of labor and thus establishes connection. People will think I am a broken record on this, but it seems to me a clear example of what social science is meant to accomplish, that is, a "real definition." We know the structure of the thing that accounts for e.g. money's powers (as an embodiment of value) and so we come to define the kind of thing value is by reference to that structure. The commodity is a good produced by a separate process of production useless to its producer. This is a real definition rooted not in the chemical or physical or other material characteristics of a commodity, but in the social structure (a generative mechanism) of value. Given the analysis of social relations as theoretical(2) -- ie entities which are in principle unperceivable and which exist only in virtue of their effects -- I can read through section 3 of RTS and figure that the "logic of scientific discovery" presented there applies in a pretty straightforward way to social relations. The only thing that can account for the surplus element in a causal law in the social sciences, the thing that accounts for the ascription of natural necessity, is a generative mechanism. Natural necessity is derivative of the structure of the mechanism which accounts for its causal powers. Thus "knowledge of natural necessity is expressed in statements of causal laws; knowledge of natural kinds in real definitions." RTS 171. Similarly, the "first step in scientific explanation" is to ascribe a power to the object of study and then to show "why x does phi in virtue of its nature N." We will locate a social structure and explain that "x comes to do phi in vitrtue of its having a certain constitution or intrinsic structure." RTS 172. Legal relations of course are normative. A legal law can always be expressed in the form "if x, then y." During the summer I mentioned that the 20th century jurist Hans Kelsen offered extended arguments designed to show that the notion of causality had its source in early people's notion of retribution. He has a quote from one of the pre-Socratic philosophers he is fond of using: If the sun's chariot doesn't keep its course in the sky, so and so (one of the gods) will tear his eyes out. Or something to that effect. The idea is that here we see the idea of causality beginning to emerge from the norms of retribution. A norm of retribution of course can always be expressed in the "if x, then y" form. But this is also the form in which causal laws are stated in positivist science. So Kelsen thought that the development of modern science consisted in the liberation of the positivist notion of causality from its retributive roots. But then, as a neo- Kantian, he concluded that the natural sciences or social sciences as sciences were causative and deterministic (in the strong LaPlacean sense, ie know completely the present and you know the whole of the past and future), while legal science was normative but grounded in free will and not deterministic. It seems he did not take his argument far enough. Positivism's emphasis on closed systems where constant conjunctions apply can be considered to reflect the persistence of the normative. Because of the phenomenon of social reproduction, a norm of social conduct can often be considered as the paradigm of a closed system. Certainly this is true of retribution. In order to perserve the stability of the social order and the regular reproduction of the form of its essential relations, society develops a normative rule to the effect that if so and so does thus and so the identified consequences will follow. So this offers added significance to critical realism's deanthropomorphizing of the philosophy of science. By insisting on the open character of the world and the existence of natural necessity, modern science can move from law formulations that bear the residue of normative relations still, e.g. "if x, then y," to law formulations that are more nearly adequate to the open, stratified and differentiated character of the world, whether natural or social: "x tends to do phi in virtue of its nature N." * * * Incidentally, aesthetic form would seem to capture the way things are and how they tend to behave in ways that extend beyond the rationalities of science. On the one hand this is pretty obvious; often symbols can capture more of a thing's nature than can scientific logics, at least for a whole range of purposes. On the other hand if the "real aesthetic" counterpart of the "real definition" of a thing gives expression to what it is, that is, to its intrinsic structure and relation to the world, then this raises the stakes in a way I had not appreciated in regards to attention to aesthetic and symbolic form. In fact the scientist or philosopher of science would seem obliged to take interest since this is an absence within which her own inquiry is constellationally contained. I mean the aesthetic of a thing could not be false to its "real definition" if it is to express what the thing is. Howard Howard Engelskirchen "What is there just now you lack" Hakuin --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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