File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/bhaskar.9711, message 132


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


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