From: "Wallace Polsom" <wallace-AT-raggedclaws.com>
Subject: BHA: Re: Empirical evidence revisited
Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2000 14:24:43 -0600


I would be interested to know what those list members who downplay the
importance of empirical evidence in science make of the following quotations
from the second edition of Bhaskar's A Realist Theory of Science (RTS).

"Thus there is in science a characteristic kind of dialectic in which a
regularity is identified, a plausible explanation for it is invented and the
reality of the entities and processes postulated in the explanation is then
checked. This is the logic of scientific discovery, illustrated in Diagram
3.1 below. If the classical empiricist tradition stops at the first step,
the neo-Kantian tradition sees the need for the second [which, according to
the diagram, involves 'model-building']. But it either denies the
possibility, or does not draw the full (transcendental realist) implications
of the third step [which, again according to the diagram, involves
'empirical-testing']. If and only if the third step is taken can there be an
adequate rationale for the use of laws to explain phenomena in open systems
(where no constant conjunctions prevail) or for the experimental
establishment of that knowledge in the first place" (RTS 145).

"Either explanation is arbitrary or it is not. . . . If it is non-arbitrary
the ground for the explanation is either imposed by men or it exists in the
world. If it is imposed by men we are left without any rationale for
experimental activity, the process of testing human constructions against
the world" (RTS 227).

"The central argument of this study, establishing an ontological distinction
between causal laws and patterns of events (the independence of the domains
of the real and the actual, the irreducibility of structures to events), has
turned on the possibility of experimental activity. Now as it is clear that
experimental activity is impossible in the social sciences and at the very
least devoid of the same significance in psychology as it possesses in
physics and chemistry, I want to round off my argument by considering
whether something analogous to the controlled investigation of nature,
making possible the experimental confirmation and falsification of theories,
might be possible in the social sciences and psychology and other fields
where experimental activity is impossible or more or less seriously
circumscribed" (RTS 244).

"Now if I am right that the significance of experimental activity in natural
science is that it gives us access to enduring and transfactually active
structures and that it is only under closed conditions that confirmation and
falsification of theory is possible, then we are in a better position to see
that the central problem of the psychological and social (and other
non-experimental) sciences is that of devising (or reconstructing) an
analogous procedure of inquiry and selectively empirical confirmation (and
falsification) and to appreciate the great gulf that must separate them, in
the absence of such a procedure, from the sciences of nature" (RTS 245).

Sincerely, W.






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