File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1999/bhaskar.9910, message 96


Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 11:42:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: BHA: recent threads


Hiya all,

On Howard's question, I agree w/Marsh:  I think that passage from the
interview refers to nothing more mysterious than a distinction between the
ontological categories of the real, the actual and the empirical.  

What say you to this proposal, Engelskirchen? 

Meanwhile, on the now-past exchange between Colin and Andrew (sorry I'm such
a slow-poke), I was reading over chapter 1 of PON this morning and there was
a fair amount there, actually, relevant to the question of whether the
"premises" of the critical realist transcendental deduction are practices,
as Colin argued, or the *conceptualization* of practices, or of a given
practice, as I took Andrew to be arguing.  This was the crux of you guys'
disagreement, yes?  

While there's some stuff that might support Colin's position (and while,
clearly, the point of the whole exercise is to get at the conditions of
possibility of certain activities in the world), I think I have to weigh in
with Andrew.  The admittedly ambiguous passage that decided it for me was
the following:

"What activities can furnish the premises for such a philosophical
investigation? [Yes, this sounds like Colin's formulation, but wait]
Traditionally, epistemology has been dominated by the dispute between the
contending claims of experience and reason ... [ Both play a part, he goes
on to say, but neither are "sufficiently differentiated" for our purposes]
So let us attempt their substitution by the more specific concepts of
experimental activity and scientific development, in the context of which
the real epistemic significace of experience and reason respectively will be
found to lie." [PON 3rd ed., pp. 8-9]

"The more specific *concepts* of experimental activity and scientific
development" sounds like we're talking about conceptualizations of
(conceptual) activity being the starting point of the deduction.  

There's another telling passage on p. 5, too, where he talks about
philosophy being the exercise of reason "on the basis of prior
conceptualizations of historical practice."  I don't personally think that
*all* that much, other than a certain super-duper degree of precision,
really hangs on this argument, though.

O well.  Back to work.

r.    






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