Date: Tue, 05 Feb 2002 11:00:47 -0500
From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: BHA: ps. re: totality, etc.


Hi again Andy,

Sorry to sound like a 4 yr old ("But *why* are there cows?), but ... okay, "change one thing and everything else might change" -- that's not unique to open *social* systems, though.  I mean, the natural world is the same way, which is why, according to Bhaskar, laws are normic, expressive tendencies.  

It seems like what is significant about social relations so often being internal ones is not that it makes the operation of causal powers be unpredictable in open systems (since, again, strictly speaking, the same is true in the natural sciences), but rather that it's all or nothing in terms of what you can investigate.  There is no way to isolate one section of an internally related whole.  

I haven't thought about this in quite this way before.  This interpretation implies that the natural world is NOT an *internally* related whole (and that for this reason closures can be artificially constructed).  Do you think that this is consistent with Bhaskar's ontology in RTS?

r.



At 10:36 AM 05/02/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi Andy,
>
>This is really helpful.  Thanks.
>
>I actually had "Is it because it's a totality?"  written in my margin.
>
>Here's a related point.  It seems to me that insofar as in PON social structures *are* thought to "depend," as you put it, on human agency for their reproduction, the sharp demarcation between social and psychological science is not really sustainable.  The only way to bracket the study of individual agency, it seems to me, is to limit social science to the synchronic analysis of the effects of given structures.  I've always thought the sharp disciplinary divide to be an odd conclusion to draw from the TMSA, if you see what I mean.
>
>r.
>
>   
>    At 03:01 PM 05/02/2002 +0000, you wrote:
> >I totally agree with your interpretation of Bhaskar, Ruth.
> >
> >On this list and elsewhere, it has often been suggested that 
> >Bhaskar's treatment of 'experiment' in RTS and PON focuses rather 
> >to much on 'hard sciences' like physics. Indeed, Bhaskar 
> >concedes as much in the Postscript to the 1989 edition, where he 
> >relpies to some critics. However if you *remove* Bhaskar's 
> >discussion, in RTS and PON, of the 'closed system' created in a 
> >'scientific experiment', on the ground that Bhaskar is mistakenly 
> >generalising from the hard sciences of physics and chemistry, you 
> >are in fact removing a part of the very *essence* of Bhaskar's RTS 
> >and PON (i.e of Bhaskar's critical realism). It is simply not clear 
> >what you are left with!
> >
> >Re your question: I think that, for Bhaskar, social structures are 
> >ineluctably open systems, because they (1) depend on human 
> >agency (which is intrinsically open); (2) are highly internally related 
> >(change one thing and everything else might change).
> >
> >Best wishes,
> >
> >Andy
> >
> >
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>
>
>
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