File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2002/bhaskar.0203, message 93


From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-gis.net>
Subject: Re: BHA: Emergence
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 22:02:36 -0500


Mervyn--

>              All societies are at
> the same ontological level in that they belong to the kind, 'society';
> but that doesn't preclude emergent levels and evolution within that
> kind. All life-forms are of the same broad kind, but there are emergent
> life-forms within that kind...

Read my post again: I made this observation myself, in the paragraph you
skipped.  This relates to your most recent post:

> Tobin says that explanatory power can't be used to indicate ontological
> difference among ideas *because* explanations concern referents. I take
> this to be Ruth's point about content. He seems to want to say that
> where there are emergent levels it is in the intransitive objects of
> ideas, not at the level of ideas themselves. My point to Tobin is that
> this seems to reduce ideas to their referents or content (the ontic
> fallacy, I think), and is at odds with his insistence on the social
> production of knowledge by means of knowledge via the transformation of
> pre-existing materials.

My argument doesn't in the least reduce ideas to their referents; I can't
see at all where you get that.  And yes, the social production of knowledge
is indeed a form of "intrastructural" emergence.  But the question I was
answering wasn't about emergence -- it was about ontological *levels* among
ideas.  And on that point my view is that while Theory A and Theory B may
have different degrees of explanatory power, that is a question of our
*assessment* of their ideas in relation to their referents, not their status
*as* ideas (which is what the notion of ontological levels among ideas
suggests).  A wrong idea is not a different sort of entity or at a different
ontological level than a correct idea: it has a different relationship to
its referent (its referent may even be found not to exist, e.g. phlogiston).
Likewise, the fact that one person has a food allergy while another doesn't
is no reason, as far as I can see, to think the two digestive systems are at
different ontological levels or have some other sort of ontological
difference.  They just interact with food differently.  Come to think of it,
I suspect the only way one could claim that degrees of explanatory power
differentiate ontological levels among ideas is *precisely* by reducing
ideas to their referents.  The shoe is on the other foot.

> Now you've made me sigh. Marko *means* by social construction the view
> that everything is within the paradigm, when the paradigm changes the
> world changes.

What is this, Humpty-Dumptyism?  That's ridiculous (by which, obviously, I
mean "perspicacious.")  It seems to me that Marko's command of English is
excellent.  After all the discussion we've had in the past couple of weeks,
if he gave a damn that there are differing interpretations or complex issues
regarding the meaning of social construction, then he would say something
like "science is not a just social construction," or "science is not a
social construction (in the sense I've been using the phrase)."  But in fact
he wrote "science is not a social construction."  Period.  Frankly don't
recall him ever saying *anything* affirming any role for social activity in
the production of knowledge.  Nor has he said "Thanks Mervyn for making my
meaning clearer for others."  I'm not sure why you're at such pains to act
as Marko's translator and to provide apologias for his posts, but to me he
seems quite able to speak for himself.

Besides, see what Bhaskar wrote: "The objects from, and by, which knowledge
is generated are thus always themselves social products (as is the knowledge
generated).  Thus science as a process is always entirely intrinsic to
thought" (RTS 185).  He immediately observes that perception and experiment
give us access to non-mental objects, such that knowledge of those objects
is possible -- but the knowledge itself, knowledge as such, remains
*entirely* social.

Regarding the silly notion of the social construction of the universe, Marsh
wrote, and you replied:

> >Yeah, but I don't think anyone on this list buys into this kind of
> >irrealism. It's a straw man.
>
> Well, Marko has got the impression that they do, and this is what I'm
> trying to correct. If people keep intoning that knowledge is a social
> production (in the transitive dimension) without pointing out that it
> does *not* produce the objects of knowledge in the intransitive
> dimension, of which genuine knowledge is possible, it's not going to be
> corrected and we pretty inevitably come across as social
> constructionists in the above sense.

Again you have the shoe on the wrong foot.  No-one in this debate has ever
implied, much less asserted, the straw man that you and Marko keep
imagining.  So why is it vital to point out what probably everyone on this
list already knows -- that knowledge doesn't invent its objects -- against
someone who denies another point that nearly all of us accept, that
knowledge is a social product?  I can't figure out why you keep defending
Marko's declared reductive materialism (which *does* need to be corrected)
and requiring the argument for the social production of knowledge to
constantly justify itself.  The fact that you and Marko keep seeing a
bogeyman doesn't mean I ought to be on the defensive against it.  I do get
tired have having this bogeyman foisted upon me, however.  Your readings
have been oddly biased in their excessive forgiveness of Marko and
distortions of me.  For all your close reading of Bhaskar, it would be nice
if you read what I actually wrote, not imputed to me things I have never
said, and focused on the real problem, which is Marko's outright denial of
the social production of knowledge.

T.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-mail.com
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce




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