Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 11:41:36 -0800 (PST)
Subject: BHA: rts ch3 s4


Hans E.: Could we post section 4?
 
RTS, ch 3, section 4:  "The Social Production of Knowledge By Means
of Knowledge."
 
1.   RB argues that the notion of scientific activity which
underlies critical realism is of science as work, and, "The logical
structure of work is Aristotelian.  It depends, in particular, upon
the co-presence in any given productive episode of both a material
and an efficient cause."  (RTS 185).
 
This poses textually a point that was raised tangentially on the
list a while ago and which deserves a closer look.  In my early
reading of RB's texts I had made no distinction between material
and efficient cause.  As a consequence when I began to wrap my
brain around the idea that social relations were causal I
implicitly assumed they were efficiently causal.  But this, Colin
argued, is unnecessary.  The social relations which organize work
according to an assembly line so that a thing passes from hand to
hand and each does only one small repetitive task is causal in that
this form of organization affects the material world, productivity
is higher than each doing the whole process, etc..  The world is
different than it would otherwise be.  But the form of work's
social organization can be conceived of as a material cause rather
than an efficient cause.  The efficient cause is the individual
worker and without the work of the individual, nothing would happen
at all.  
 
On the next page of RTS, however, RTS 186, RB makes the point that
knowledge of existence cannot be identified with a demonstration of
it.  That is, we cannot know all that is real by techniques of
observation:  "Causal powers, for example, can only be known, not
shown to exist."  He goes on, "Hence if, as I have suggested there
are grounds for supposing, the ultimate entities in any one branch
of science are bare powers, they must necessarily be
undemonstrable." (RTS 186)
 
The point about the ultimate entities of physics being bare powers
is presented in RTS section 3, 180-181.  Now I assume a bare power
would constitute an efficient cause of phenomenal events.  What is
the difference then with respect to social relations, between a
social structure which counts as a material cause and one which is,
as a bare power, an efficient cause?  Or are there no such bare
powers in social relations?
 
2.   RB writes on 186 that "The paradoxical air of talking of the
correction of knowledge vanishes once the demand for extra-
theoretical truth and intertheoretical synonymity is rejected." 
I'm not sure I get the "extra-theoretical" and the
"intertheoretical synonymity," but I understand that implicit in
the sort of positivism we inhale with the air we breathe is the
notion that knowledge must be complete and uncorrectable.  This is
Popper's notion of falsification, as I understand it.  Because we
can't be certain our knowledge is demonstrably the real thing, the
best we can do is say the hypothesis has not been falsified.  But
this also fails to correspond to our common sense insofar as
everyone has the experience of having some knowledge of a thing and
then deepening it, whether it's the operation of a carburetor or
the structure of a film.  The postmodern response to the dilemma,
as I understand it, is to accept the proposition that we can't know
and to place the emphasis as a consequence on standpoint.  Here RB
agrees that all knowledge is from a particular standpoint, but
argues also that there is knowledge and from a specific standpoint
there can be progress in the correction of knowledge.
 
In fact, RB argues, theory "is always there and liable to change,
as part of our socially innate intellectual endowment."(RTS 187). 
For this reason "knowledge can never be seen as a function of
individual sense-experience." (RTS 187).  It always works upon pre-
existing knowledge as a material cause.
 
In this three things must be distinguished:  explanations of
things, the conditions that enable us to identify them, and the
powers or mechanisms of things. (RTS 186).  We have access to the
mechanisms of nature that are expressed in causal laws by facts and
conjunctions that enable us to identify them.  The essential point
insisted upon by critical realism is that these facts and
conjunctions are socially produced.  Conjunctions are social
products insofar as we act on nature to bring them about -- we dip
litmus paper in a liquid.  Facts are social products insofar as
events are always appropriated from "some specific vantage point .
. . in theoretical time."  We distinguish facts from the phenomena
of the actual of which they are the facts.  By contrast, "In
classical empiricism, in a subtle interchange, these ideas are
crossed: so that facts and their conjunctions appear as naturally
given and things and causal structures as experiences of men." RTS
187).  RB adds parenthetically that transcendental idealism sees
facts and their conjunctions as imposed by the inquirer and causal
structures as unknowable, then writes:
 
"Now the identification of the conditions of (knowledge of) being
with the conditions of experience in empirical realism leaves
'theory' with a very uncertain status.  For it must be either
reduced to, or grounded a priori in some necessary condition of,
experience; so that it is either reducible or immutable.  For
transcendental realism theory is both irreducible and mutable."
(RTS 187).
 
While I think I get the drift, I wonder if someone could give a
workable explanatory restatement of this.  Or any other thing from the 
first four sections of RTS chapter 3.
 
Howard
 
     "What is there just now you lack" Hakuin
 
Howard Engelskirchen



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