Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2000 17:59:09 +0100
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: DPF C 2.10


Hi Howard,

>The point is this:  You can never argue that x event causes y response in a
>human person if the whole thing gets processed by the understanding, ie
>becomes a matter of signs.  If I come up behind you and without you seeing
>me I push you over, then I pushed and you fell and that is a causal
>relation.  But if I pull my hand back as if to throw or swing and you duck,
>those are signs mediated by the understanding.  When you act, *you* act and
>it is impossible to say, simpliciter, that my hand pulled back caused your
>response.
You seem to be espousing a kind of dualism here.
'I fell over because I was pushed'.
'I fell over because I intended to - I wanted the referee to think I had
been pushed'.
In both cases the event was caused. I don't have time to elaborate, but
CR holds that there are not two completely different kinds of things in
the world - mind/body, reasons/causes, culture/nature - rather, just one
albeit stratified and emergent. So reasons are causes, of a special
(emergent) kind.
I'm not sure though that Roy doesn't relapse into dualism in EW, with
the eternal reincarnating soul...

>
>I go to an apple orchard.  I am aware that my mother, who is dead, would
>have loved it.  The orchard is a sign of my mother's absence.  I may go to
>the orchard to invoke her memory.  But *I* do this, not her absence.  When
>fictional people influence our lives, they are not generative mechanisms
>but signs.  Cause is mediated by meaning.
I leave the question of whether signs are GMs to the semioticians (but
Tobin's position makes a lot of sense to me). My point here would be
that the absence of your mother makes a difference to the field of
possibilities of your world - and her absence is not just semiotic!

>Ockham's razor.  With chalk the ball would have gone elsewhere.  But
>invocation of absence makes no additional contribution to scientific
>understanding.  The ball was struck and went according to the forces
>imparted to it.  With chalk it would have moved according to a different
>conjuncture of forces.  You can learn nothing from the analysis of absence
>unless you already know what the ball would have done with chalk.

The case in which chalk is absent can only be anlysed in an apparently
purely positive way if you absent human action (putting the chalk on,
not putting it on). But as Roy argues, the very 'identification of a
positive existent [the presence of chalk] is a human act. So it involves
the absenting of a pre-existent state of affairs, be it only a state of
existential doubt.' DPF44. So bivalence wins. Knowing what the ball
would have done with chalk depends on it.

Mervyn


-- 
Mervyn Hartwig
13 Spenser Road
Herne Hill
London SE24 ONS
United Kingdom
Tel: 020 7 737 2892
Email: mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk


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