File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1999/bhaskar.9910, message 95


From: "Marshall Feldman" <marsh-AT-uri.edu>
Subject: RE: BHA: Roy Bhaskar Interviewed
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 11:02:43 -0400


Dear Howard, you wrote:

>I was intrigued by the following excerpt from the interview quoted by
>Charles Brown:
>
>	"And science was seen as a process in motion attempting to
>capture ever deeper and more 	basic strata of a reality at any moment
>of time unknown to us and perhaps not even 	empirically manifest."
>
>Does anyone else have trouble with this?  What can be said about the
>empirically unmanifest?  Aren't we back to a new version of the
>unknowable thing in itself?  I mean that's okay.  There may be all kinds
>of things in the universe we know nothing about and will never know
>anything about.  That's part of fallibility.  But what in the world can
>be said scientifically or philosophically about the empirically
>unmanifest?
>

I think you're putting "empirical" in too rigid a box. First, there are many
things that science accepts, and I presume you do too, that are not
empirical in and of themselves. Magnetic fields are perhaps the best
example. Humans can't observe magnetic fields directly but only through
their effects. Second, and I think more to his point, Bhaskar sees science
as a retroductive process. At one point science's most bedrock beliefs hold
that certain things exist in the world. Then, using these beliefs, science
provisionally proposes the existence of other entities. Through a process
involving a wide range of independent corroborative activities, some of
these provisional entities come to be accepted as actually existing and make
their way into the bedrock beliefs. Bhaskar also allows for scientific
revolutions in which a contradiction between understandings of newly
discovered phenomena may lead to radical revisions in the preexisting
bedrock.

Ian Hacking has a good example that illustrates some of this. He describes a
physics experiment in which physicists "spray" one sub-nuclear particle with
a stream of another kind of particle and then observe the results. Hacking
is concerned about the reality of unobserved entities that science takes to
exist and coins the slogan, "If you can spray them, they are real." However,
Bhaskar's retroductive process is also at work in that the physicists must
believe the stream of particles and the target are real. If through the
experiment they "observe" something that can best be explained by the
existence of other, "new" particles these discoveries will be treated as
provisional entities. Then, through a host of other, independent experiments
(not replications, but entirely different experiments that would in some way
depend on the existence of the "new" particles and the causal powers
attributed to them) the understanding of the "new" particles either will or
will not be corroborated. If it is corroborated, eventually the physicists
will come to believe in the existence of the new particle and it will take
its place alongside the particles in the stream and target in the bedrock
beliefs of physics.


Marsh Feldman



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