File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1999/bhaskar.9910, message 12


Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 11:34:47 -0400 (EDT)
From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: Re: BHA: Critical Realism and Marx's Theory of Value


Hi all,

Unfortunately I have to go prepare to teach and can't read the last few
posts as closely as I should just now, but I wanted to say that I thought
that Nicky's (yes?) initial comment about the transcendental deduction from
experimentation poses a serious and interesting challenge to those of us who
want to "get around Kant," as my advisor puts it.  

I'm not convinced that the problem is solved via Han's corrections (and my
memory is that in relation to *social* science Bhaskar does pose the
question in just the way Nicky says: "What must the world be like in order
for it to be a possible object of knowledge for us?").  

I thought that Nicky's formulation of the issue was interesting.  The way
that I've always thought about it is that even the RTS version is based on
an assumption, rather than an argument, that scientific knowledge is indeed
knowledge.  (That it *is* knowledge is not an unarguable claim, but strictly
speaking the presention in RTS is a dogmatic one.)  So you get "Given that
we do have knowledge (or, more precisely, "Given that we believe that we
must engage in experimentation in order to produce what we take to be
knowledge...), what must the world be like?"  

It is indeed a transcendental deduction from practice, but it is one that
presupposes a particular understanding *of* the practice - viz., that it
does indeed yield something that we want to call knowledge.  I think RB's
argument works fine within a philosophy of science.  Whether it works as
metaphysics, though, is not so obvious.

Still struggling with Kant,
Ruth         



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