File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2000/bhaskar.0006, message 113


Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2000 14:13:10 +0200
From: Hans Puehretmayer <hans.puehretmayer-AT-univie.ac.at>
Subject: Re: BHA: one last try compr/prod


Dear Marsh Feldman,

I agree with most of your explanations, but I would like to question two
distinctions / separations you made:

a: political activism vs. (political) science

Marshall Feldman wrote:
> 
> Political activism -- clearly this is influenced by human thoughts.
> Nonetheless, for the political scientist it's intransitive (if political
> activism really exists in the world).

isn't political theory always an intervention into a specific discourse
and in this sense necessarily a kind of political action (intended or
unintended)?

b: comprehension vs. creation (or production)

> "Transitive" refers to the act of comprehension, not to the act of creation.
> "Intransitive" does not mean uninfluenced by humans. Instead, consider a
> real object, R, that we seek to understand with theory, T. "T" may contain
> one or more concepts, t sub 1, t sub 2, etc. that it claims allow us to know
> R. It may even claim that a specific concept, t*, is a complete and accurate
> description of R, and hence that t* is indistinguishable from r, the latter
> being a "true" apprehension of R in thought. Here T, the various t's, and r
> are all transitive, since they are all thought-dependent. But don't let this
> confuse you. Their thought-dependence is only in the sense that they are all
> being used to help us develop knowledge of R. R itself could be dinosaurs or
> political demonstrations. How we theorize such things does not affect the
> things themselves, at least not in the instant we do the theorizing. Now
> while our theories won't affect dinosaurs, they may influence political
> activism. But this is not a matter of transitive/intransitive since RB
> provides these terms to help us understand science. The latter is concerned
> with understanding the world -- perhaps in order to change it, but it is not
> the intentional change itself.

I think, Gaston Bachelard (may be a Bhaskarian before Bhaskar?) has
shown us that it is necessary to create (better: to produce) a new
'problematique' in order to be able to understand/ comprehend a certain
object. Of course this production happens in the realm of thinking.
This would lead to the question of the status (within the configuration
of CR) of (social) science as performative action.

hans puehretmayer


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