From: "Colin Wight" <Colin.Wight-AT-aber.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: BHA: Re: More on TD/ID
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2000 15:26:41 -0000


Hi All,

I've been away in Amerstdam (which was a real object as well as in thought)
over the weekend, so apologies if the discussion has moved on.


>
> But I don't think "existence" will suffice.  Because then what of the
> distinction between intransitive and transitive objects (of science)?  I
> don't read RB as suggesting that transitive objects, in contrast to
> intransitive objects, are ones that don't exist!

No, but the premise about existence does not imply this. Along with others I
have repeadtely stressed the context and relational nature of the TD/ID
distinctions. Intransitive/transitive marks a distinction relative to an
observer.  My explanation of the football's trajectory is not the footballs
trajectory. My explanation of my joy is not my joy. My fear of losing face
is not my description of why I refuse to admit you are right (which you are
not but I am trying to make a point), becuse I don't know that I am scared
of losing face, I just think I am right. But the fact that I don't know this
does not mean that I can't know this. I can come to know that my
unwillingness to concede is a function of my desire to maintain face (or
some other as yet unknown factor). That's why we have science, to bring as
objects of study that which is not an object of science in relations to some
problem or other.

>
> So whatever it is that makes something be an intransitive object
> of science
> it's not (a) that it exists [this may be necessary, but it's not
> sufficient
> I don't think], or (b) that it is (under some description of the world) an
> object of study.
>
> I'm inclined to agree with those (and I'm not sure if you're in
> this corner or not) who have suggested that the term signifies that the
things that
> scientists properly investigate (viz., structures, natural and
> social) have > a certain ontological status, beyond that of existing.

And of being known. That's the important point they exist indpendentally of
knowledge of them. But yes, basically that being has a mode of being
independent of any oberserver comment on it (dare I say it's alethia?). But
this doesn't mean that we can't ever come to know them (transcendant
realism).

>
> But here, depending on what you meant by it, I would disagree with your
> comment: "But the intransitive object is not the object of
> study."  Again, I
> read RB as insisting that the intransitive object is precisely
> the object of
> study.

NO, he thinks intransitive objects can be objects of study, but this doesn't
exhaust what they are. They are that which needs to be discovered, and may
not yet be objects of study. DNA was not an object of study in 5 BC, but it
still existed (we think). As he puts it in RTS,

""knowledge is 'of' things which are not produced by men at all...None of
these 'objects of knowledge' [and he is using scare quotes here very
specifically] depend upon human activity. If men ceased to exist sound would
continue to travel and heavy bodies would still fall to earth in exactly the
same way, though ex-hypothesi there would be no-one to know it." (p.21)

A
>
> If not, and there are real objects out there but they are not what
> scientists study, then what would differentiate transcendental
> realism from > transcendent realism, to use RB's old terms?

No you have misunderstood. The fact that an intransitive object can exist
and not yet be an object of study does not mean that it can never be known.
Quite the reverse in fact, RB sees part of the aim of science to bring these
unknown objects under scientific descriptions.

IN your reply to Tobin, you ask whether RB really gets us past our
subjectivity. The answer is yes and no. Yes because transcendental realism
strongly advocates a world beyond our subjective experiences of it, no
because he doesn't try to, and acknowledges that we can only comne to know
that world through our descriptions of it. This of course raises the
question Andy is concerned with namely:

>We all agree that there are real mechanisms out there; that debate >seems
to have been settled without a lot of fuss. Instead we >implicitly get the
question: given that all thought occurs within >thought, how, within our
conceptual practices, do we get from real- >mechanisms-in-thought to the
real mechanisms themselves? Doesn't it all occur "within knowledge," as you
put it?

First, I'm not so sure that we all do agree so easily that there are real
mechanisms out there, but that's a different story. However, you turn it
round to an epistemological question about our knowledge of the things in
themselves. I'm afraid that no schema Ruth, or Andy is gonna help you here.
You will find no formula, or foundation to answer the question, what it will
take is practice, but then Marx told us all that. But just beacuse we can
only decribe things out there through language does not mean that the things
that go bump in the night are nothing other than our descriptions of them.
And the fcat that we can't ever "know" with absolute certainty that we know
it was a cat and not a fairy, doesn't mean that we don't know, or that there
is nothing to know. I thought CR should make us wary of drawing ontological
arguments from epistemological ones.

The epistemological problem of how we come to know non-observables is a
different question from the ontological one of the status of them. If you
are looking for a metatheoretical specification of criteria for epistemic
judgements then you are on the wrong bus; Bhaskar doesn't go there.

Cheers,



Cheers,



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