From: MSPRINKER-AT-ccmail.sunysb.edu Date: Mon, 08 Jun 1998 10:21:00 -0400 (EDT) Subject: BHA: Santa and his concept State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 11794-3355 Michael Sprinker Professor of English & Comp Lit Comparative Studies 516 632-9634 08-Jun-1998 10:11am EDT FROM: MSPRINKER TO: Remote Addressee ( _bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ) Subject: Santa and his concept Dear Louis, I would not disagree in any fundamental way with your last post. But then what in the realm of social phenomena would or could ever possess intransitivity. Since social phenomena (or, better, social structures) are, according to Bhaskar, always dependent on agents for their realization, it would seem that they are in some sense absolutely concept-dependent--or at least action dependent: you can't have capitalism without capitalists and wage laborers, both of whom assent to the wage form, and so forth. Would that not lead very quickly to saying that capitalism, or any mode of economic production, lacks real intransitivity? I must confess that given my great admiration for A REALIST THEORY OF SCIENCE, I've long been puzzled and dissatisfied with the way in which the Bhaskarean program works in the social sciences. It's there that the ontological questions which seem to me largely unproblematic for the natural sciences become impossibly complex and the solutions unsatisfactory. This is especially true, I think, when Bhaskar tries to describe the history of scientific theory, where his latent rationalism comes to the fore. Cordially, Michael --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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