Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2000 23:57:07 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: comments on terminology


Hello Ruth, Colin, all

Ruth: Instead of saying 'outside of thought' in the definitions, could
we say 'independent of our knowledge of them' to cover the case of the
social world whose causal mechanisms are not, on a CR account, outside
of thought - i.e. are concept- (thought-) dependent (but not exhausted
by concepts)?

At a meta level RB claims to defeat the internal realist position - we
can't get from mechanisms-in-thought to the mechanisms themselves - by
the argument, of course, that it's a transcendentally necessary
condition of human action that we *do* get to them - when we throw a
ball, e.g., we know that it will behave according to the laws of
aerodynamics etc., and we couldn't throw a ball if we didn't (nor do
anything else). This was in effect Hegel's position as I understand him
(who said that in our ordinary lives we act 'in the firm belief that
thought coincides with the thing' and that 'the business of philosophy
is only to bring into explicit consciousness what the world in all ages
has believed about thought. Philosophy ... advances nothing new'). It is
not surprising therefore that Bhaskar's detailed epistemological account
of how we get from mechanisms-in-thought to the real thing derives from
Hegel - see the sections in DPF on the dialectic of science (already
traversed, so I won't try and rehearse them here, and I'm sure Ruth in
particular must be very familiar with it from her work on alethic
truth). Of course this doesn't mean that Bhaskar is right, though I
myself find it a pretty persuasive position. I do have a problem with
it, but it's not the one Ruth raises: it's how not to slip into identity
thinking, as I think Hegel did eg 'the objective world is in its own
self the same as it is in thought', by which I take him to mean that it
is its intellibility that fundamentally makes it what it is, its
ultimata are in effect thoughts. One of the things I was trying to get
at in my post on 'the real thing' was to at least pose the question of
how Bhaskar's position on this relates to Hegel's. Can one substitute
'intelligibility' for 'causal mechanisms'? If so, how is that compatible
with the emphasis on non-identity, and rejection of anthropism? If not,
is Bhaskar heading in Hegel's direction...? He has a new book coming out
soon (originally - and for all I know still - called *Totality and
Transcendence*) which should address this question among others...

Mervyn

PS. If Colin is saying that Bhaskar's position is what Ruth calls
internal realist, then obviously I disagree with him. I certainly don't
agree that we can *only* know the real world through our descriptions.
That seems to me to take us back to the kind of position Ruth espoused
when she spoke of thougt occurring only within thought, which I thought
Howard and Tobin had rebutted. For myself, I know e.g. an apple through
eating it as well as describing it (see Hegel again!)...

Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca> writes
>Hi guys,
>
>I think we are really running into trouble with language use and
>terminology.  I don't know that I agree with Andrew's reading of RB on the
>point in question, but I'm relatively certain that he is not saying what
>either Tobin or Colin seem to think that he is saying.  Maybe some
>definitions would help.
>
>transcendental realism - 
>RB's term for the view that there are real mechanisms that exist outside of
>thought, and that it makes sense to make claims about them that are separate
>from statements about how we know them.  [Hence: "statements about being can
>be meaningfully distinguished from statements about knowledge (of being)."]
>[NOTE: OBVIOUSLY THIS DOES NOT EXHAUST THE CONTENT OF TRANSCENDENTAL
>REALISM.  PLEASE DON'T CHARGE ME WITH SUGGESTING SO.]
>
>
>transcendent realism - 
>RB's term for the view that there are real things that exist outside of
>thought, but that we in principle cannot know them; rather, e.g., as in
>Kant, we always only know objects as they can only appear to us, given our
>specifically human cognitive capacities.
>
>internal realism -
>Hilary Putnam's now familiar term for roughly the same view.  Only here it's
>not (just?) "given our specifically human capacities," but is instead
>"within some conceptual framework."
>
>metaphysical realism -
>Putnam and others' term for the what is equivalent to the relevant aspects
>of transcendental realism.
>
>empirical realism -
>(a) Kant's term for the idea that objects-as-they-appear-to-us are
>nonetheless real.  As opposed to the "subjective idealist" position that
>they are merely products of thought.  What Kant calls "subjective idealism,"
>RB calls "subjective conceptual realism," "super-idealism," or "irrealism,"
>depending on his mood.
>
>(b) RB's term for the idea that only that which we experience directly is
>knowable or real.  It is broader than the term 'empiricism', which, strictly
>speaking, is a theory of how we come to know things.     
>
>The discussion that we've been having, as I understand it, has involved us
>in trying to figure out what distinguishes transcendental, or metaphysical,
>realism from transcendent, or internal, realism.  Again, internal realists
>believe that there are real things out there, but that what *we* know about,
>when we know about them, is always only things-under-some-description (or
>"thought-objects" as Althusser puts it).  Transcendental realism, if it is
>different IN KIND, epistemologically, from this position, can only (I think)
>be the view that we know the things (viz., causal mechanisms, a.k.a. alethic
>truth), not the things-under-some-description.  If not, and it is merely a
>persuasive case for the *existence* of real things, and not for knowledge of
>them (as opposed to knowledge of
>things-for-us/things-under-some-description, etc.), then it is less
>remarkable ON THIS ONE POINT.  Because the serious interlocutor ON THIS
>POINT is not, actually, the "super-idealist" but rather the internal
>realist.     
>
>Whew.
>
>r.
>
>
>
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-- 
Mervyn Hartwig


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