Date: Sun, 03 Oct 1999 00:55:16 +0800
From: nicola taylor <nmtaylor-AT-carmen.murdoch.edu.au>
Subject: BHA: epistemic fallacy


A piece on 'Marxism and Critical Realism' on Hans Ehrbar's homepage states
that Bhaskar's critical realist approach overcomes the epistemic fallacy in
Western philosophy by demonstrating that it is an error to conflate 'being'
with 'our knowledge about being'.  Bhaskar's dialectic is said to overcome
this epistemic fallacy by emphasising the importance of absences in our
knowledge of the world;  absences must exist in order that there can be
change.

I am not entirely convinced by the reasoning here.  On the one hand
Bhaskar's dialectic allows an understanding of our 'categories' of thinking
as potentially fluid in meaning - and therefore, historically contingent.
This seems a very useful approach to understanding structures of nature and
society, both seen as open systems that are continuously changing, and
regularities are therefore tendential.  On the other hand the theory of
absences - indeed the whole foundation of CR - appears to be based on the
transcendental question:  what must the world be like in order that we know
such and such about it?

Is this not a conflation of the world with our knowledge about it?  The
presence of absences, derived by implication from the argument that the
world would not be capable of change without absences, does not entirely
escape the epistemic fallace,  but maintains it, albeit in a different form.

Nicky Taylor   



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