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 --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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