Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 09:38:59 -0400 (EDT)
From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: Re: BHA: Back to basics, 2


Hi Nick, Jan, all,

Sorry about posting my response to Jan to the list. I didn't realize that he
had sent it to me directly.  So if you were confused, that's why.  Blame it
on my lack of sleep.

Nick, thanks very much for your response.  Do I understand you correctly
that what you aresaying is that the relationship between the epistemic
fallacy and empiricism is that of the relationship between the epistemic
fallacy and the ontic fallacy? So that it is not that empiricism is an
INSTANCE of the epistemic fallacy (instead it is, if anything, an instance
of the ontic fallacy) but rather that there is a kind of complementary
correlation between the two?

Hmmm.  This seems plausible.  Get ready to be cited, man!

>On what you say about Kant. I'm no expert, but we could say that Kant would 
>be guilty of the epistemic fallacy if he claimed his categories were the 
>world (conceptual idealism). I don't think he does this. 

Yes.  There is, though, one part of what Bhaskar considers to be "the
(material) world" that Kant thinks is instead (the "instead" here has to be
taken with a grain of salt; humans are part of the material world, though
via our capacity for reason, and hence for freedom, we straddle both the
material and the neumenal worlds) a feature of reason itself.  The part of
the world that Bhaskar calls "the powers, or tendencies, of things," i.e.,
causality, Kant regards as an a priori category of reason.  

Now you see, *this* move of Kant's -- that is, his transcendental idealism,
rather than his empirical realism -- is what I always understood to be the
paradigmatic instance of a reduction of being to knowledge (or at least to a
necessary pre-condition of knowledge).  

But in RTS Bhaskar doesn't seem to develop it this way.  He seems rather to
focus on Kant's retention of the empiricist problem of how to demonstrate
that there is a necessary connection between sequences of observations.  As
I wrote in response to Jan, this issue itself has I think 2 components, that
of the presumption of regularity and that of empiricism.  [The distinction
between the two is somewhat obscured, it seems to me, when Bhaskar
introduces the typology of the domains of the empirical, the actual and the
real.]  Rather than charge Kant with having committed the epistemic fallacy
on the grounds that he reduces causality to a feature of reason, RB seems to
charge him with it on the grounds that he, Kant, (a) thinks that regularity
is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of a scientific law and (b)
that he thinks that we can only have knowledge of that which we have
experienced empirically.

That's how I got in to trying to figure out how either (a) or (b) could
actually CONSTITUTE an instance of the epistemic fallacy.

Anyway, regardless of how RB handled Kant in 1975 (!), what you say makes
some sense.

Thanks again,
Ruth         



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