Date: Sat, 17 Jul 1999 20:38:23 -0600 (MDT)
From: Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar-AT-keynes.econ.utah.edu>
Subject: BHA: Re: Diffraction Post one



Thank you for the reference, John, I have my MEW and MECW in
the office and will look up this place next time when I get
there.  I hope I am not insulting you all by sending my
study questions to the list; I am not trying to be your
teacher, it is more like a confession: this is how I would
be trying to make sense of the text and explain it to the
students if I had to teach it.  If you have to teach
something you don't understand, you have to occasionally
fake it.  I am describing here how I would swindle myself
through the text if I had to teach it right now.  If you see
errors of omissions, please let me know.




Q4:  Describe how both the speculative and the positivistic
illusions involve the "primal squeeze", and how both rule out
empirically controlled critical scientific theory.


A: Here is my take on this, please correct me if I am off:
Empiricism suffers under the primal squeeze because it holds
that the world is flat, the world consists of nothing but a
collection of events, but these events are subject to
empirical regularities.  I am writing here "but" because
there is no room in this flat world for the mechanisms which
make the events regular.  As RB would say, the ontological
counterpart of the laws of nature, which he calls "natural
necessity," has been squeezed out.  To say it in other words:
The physicist knows the equations governing the motion of an
elementary particle, but it remains unexplained how the
particle itself knows how to follow these complex
mathematical equations.  I think RB says this stuff in
SRHE.


The speculative illusion suffers under the primal squeeze in
a different way (and this is now my own "winging it," I am
not aware where RB says this): the self-movement of the idea
is well elaborated, but this movement has no other input
than thought, therefore when this idea precipitates itself
into reality, then there is no explanation how reality can
be so varied if one always starts with only one thing,
thought.  While subjective empiricism squeezes out the input
of theory into reality, objective idealism squeezes out the
input of reality into theory.  (This is very loose language,
perhaps you find a better way to formulate this.)


RB says on p. 90 that empirically controlled critical
scientific theory is ruled out in both cases.  In the
empiricist world view, you either know the formula by which
the world ticks or you don't.  If you don't know it, there
is no way to get to know it, since the stratification of the
world, which makes experimental science possible, is
missing.  This is RB's big discovery in RTS.  It is easier
to see that the speculative illusion rules out empirically
controlled research: all you have to do is close your eyes
and think in order to understand the world.




I have another question, but here I am getting ahead of
Gary's summary of this Section, therefore I will
send my answer to the list after Gary has sent his
next installment:


Q5: In what sense does Marx's critique of Hegel imply a
critique of ontological monovalence?  Or maybe say it this
way: RB claims that Hegel committed the error of ontological
monovalence to a greater degree than Marx.  Give examples
where Marx criticized Hegel for an error which in modern DCR
language would be considered the consequence of ontological
monovalence.


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