Subject: Re: BHA: rts ch3 s4
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 1998 09:55:18 +0000


Hi Howard,

I'm afraid I don't have the time to give your post the attentions it
deserves. however, one point requires making. You suggest: 

>Now I assume a bare power
>would constitute an efficient cause of phenomenal events.  

I think the assumption is perhaps unwarranted. According to my understanding
bare powers can be either the efficient cause, or part of the causal complex
(the background). Certain structures may possess "bare powers" that "tend"
to produce certain outcomes, but we have to remember that regularity
determinism is to be rejected. Bare powers can come into contact with one
another and cause events to happen, neither of which _alone_ can be said to
be the cause, this is what my friend Heikki would call a 'causal complex'. 

Also, I think we have to be wary of making to many leaps from the analysis
conducted in RTS straight into the social world. This is why PON is so
important to understanding RB's approach. My point, which you raised, about
the necessity of individuals is derived from an examination of the ontology
of the social world - no agents acting in structural vacuums, no structures
acting without agents. But this is a point about the peculiar ontological
makeup of the social world and not one, I think, that can be adequately
addressed by too many analogies with the natural world.

Also it has just struck me, and I haven't read RTS for some time, but isn't
the bare powers argument an attempt to validate the existence of some things
simply and only in terms of a "bare power". And by this I mean that the bare
power itself is what exists, it is not something which has a bare power?

Anyway, besides all this. I just wondered what list memebers thought was
RB's most telling argument against the covering law model of explanation? I
have a course to teach on the philosophy of social science next week and I
wanted to address the covering law model. RB just has so many arguments
against the model (regularity determinism, actualism, implies closure,
tendentially subjectivist and so on) and time is limited, I was wondering
what list members thought was the killer blow. If there is one that is?

Thanks,





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Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Tel: (01970) 621769

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