Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 14:00:30 +0000 (GMT)
From: Andrew Brown <a.brown-AT-mdx.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Andy, Perhaps we agree on regression


Doug,

Many thanks for your detailed and sympathetic response. We are 
getting closer to agreement but are not there yet.

- you worry I may be restricting CR to one method, retrodUction or 
retrodIction.

First, the terms have slightly different meaning: 'retrodUction' is 
a theoretical move from a description of a phenomena to a 
description of what produces it or is a necessary condition for it. 
'retrodIction' is the applied scientist's move from an event to the 
*already known* mechanisms which co-produce it. (as I have defined 
these it maybe that retrodiction is a species of the genus 
retroduction - I'd have to check this).

Second, I simply follow RB who says that both philosophy and social 
science must employ retroduction. This is not the problem you fear 
since retroduction is not so much a single method, as is, 
say, regression analysis, rather it covers a vast range of methods. 
It is simply an expression of what any valid method must do once we 
accept the real, actual and empirical stratification.

Third, I am interested primarily in understanding RB's texts. This 
is due to the fact that I feel that CR is an excellent philosophy 
but that it needs to be developed fundamentally to 'new dialectics'. 
Bhaskar presents the most systematic and comprehensive version of 
(D)CR so I focus on him. In any case it is surely an intrinsically 
useful thing to establish what RB himself is on about - I agree 
CR is open and developing and it will help development if it is 
possible to see just how near or far any development is from RB's own 
views.

- On your suggestion that we may have been talking past one another. 
It seems that there has always been a great deal of agreement between 
us on regression. However, it may be that I have failed to make clear 
one fundamental point: for RB there can only be an index of a 
mechanism at the level of the actual in the case of the existence of 
a 'strong tendency'. Outside of this, independent variables must be 
theoretically constructed and such constructs will have no actual 
index. The position I adopt on closure essentially relates to the 
question of whether or or not we have an actual index of a non-actual 
mechanism. 
(it seems that RB denies such an index and therefore has recourse to 
'social forms and activites')

- we are very close to agreement on the issue of RB's treatment of 
experiment. The case of biology and the like really highlights 
possible problems for RB here. For it leads us to wonder if RB has 
really sustained an adequate concept of experiment and of the 
relation between social and natural (and so problematizes his 
critique of positivism). It may well be that someone like Benton has 
made all these points already and many years ago. Yet it is not at 
all clear just what sort of 'CR' emerges in response to the points.

Well, many thanks again for your excellent posts Doug - maybe we have 
got as near to agreement as possible without going on to broad issues 
for which there is neither space nor time?

andy.


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