File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1999/bhaskar.9903, message 59


Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 10:27:04 -0500 (EST)
From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: BHA: On an unrelated note...


Hi all,

Gary, I'm so sorry to hear about your mom.  I'm sure that the thoughts of
all of us are with you and your family.  

A short bit of news:  It turned out that Bhaskar decided not to attend the
conference in NY.  This, coupled with the fact that a number of the people
who had thought that they could participate in a discussion about Bhaskar's
work turned out not to be sure that they could attend, decided us, in the
end, to hold off on doing a panel at this year's Socialist Scholars
Conference.  We are apparently quite welcome to organize something for next
year.  Sorry no article for Alethia, Mervyn!

Now to my out of the blue question.  
I've been trying to re-think the very basics of Bhaskar's claim to have got
around Kant.  This, obviously, has taken me back to RTS and to the concept
of the epistemic fallacy.  Here's the thing:  although I love the idea of
the epistemic fallacy, I feel less certain than ever that the *ARGUMENT* for
it is conclusive.  I'm trying to figure out how to see that it is.

Now that I'm a little bit more knowledgeable about Kant than I used to be,
it seems to me that one could in fact formulate a reasonable account of what
natural scientists do, from a Kantian perspective.  That is, even if (if
Kant is right) the *relationship* of cause and effect is a necessary, a
priori, synthetic operation of the understanding, it doesn't follow that
scientists wouldn't need to engage in experimentation to determine which
concrete x's (which "empirical" x's, in Kant's terminology) cause which
concrete y's.  

So the argument that science is unintelligible from a Kantian perspective
(i.e., would be unintelligible if Kant or Hume were right) seems less
iron-clad than it used to.  Let alone the argument that science would be
*impossible* if Kant or Hume were right.

So I'm wondering if anyone out there, especially anyone who really knows
their Kant, can help me to be able to see more clearly why a Kantian
transcendental idealist (*not* a subjective idealist) ought to be persuaded
by Bhaskar's argument for transcendental realism.  I'm happy to go off-line
with this, and I promise I'll credit you in my dissertation, too!

Warmly,
Ruth   



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