Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2002 12:15:02 +0200
Subject: Re: BHA: Emergence



Hi Mervyn, Tobin, all,

Here I'll try to apply some Bhaskar's untouched issues in your very 
interesting discussions. Sorry about my attempts to elaborate my 
thoughts in many different philosophical paths and directions;  this 
means that I have many points. 

Below, I agree with the general notion about the internal and 
'external'. But this does not bring ontological open world back to 
one's thinking, nor is it enough for the thinker to go beyond 
epistemological relativism. 

I can see, that it may be necessary to use scare quotes, 'external', 
here in delineating the general philosophical path of knowing open 
totality as real in critical realism. However, 'reacting back' as a 
general notion is in need for more accurate elaborations in one's 
thoughts and in that way (modes of negation, and expecially of 
having transformation and thus mediations and contents here) we 
can have absence which is the prequisite for having emergence if 
there is real world as a totality not only as identity and or 
differentiation. 

(By the way, in this discussion about wolfes and coyotes and the 
development of human society, I can't see how Tobin sees the 
concept of negation  and its more accurate philosophical 
elaborations along the lines of Bhaskar. So I have thought (wrongly, 
sorry if so) its being as radical negation which saves the idea of 
causal mechanism and process in a positivist sense, but not in 
Bhaskar's sense.)  

If only these two latter ontological cases apply, as it is in using in 
ontological sense the notions of external and internal with the 
general idea of 'reacting back', it is nonsense to speak about 
superstructuration and intrastructuration because there is no 
possibility of having causal mechanisms as real. Also Adorno's 
identity thinking can have the idea of structurations as forms, but it 
can't have contents, although I am not sure in what sense here is 
the discussion about wolfs and coyotes, contents and or forms?  

I am not sure if the discussion here about superstructuration and 
intrastructuration was mainly (or only) carried from a  
epistemological stance, as it seems to be as a dialogue between 
Mevyn and Tobin. If so, my point about negations is not worth 
noticing.   

Merwyn> 
> I actually don't think we differ a lot, except in what we are choosing
> to emphasise. You are seeing the 'reacting back' Bhaskar stresses as
> internal to the emergent configuration of mechanisms (coy-wolf), with
> the superstructure reacting on the base (I think this should be
> superstructure/ instrastructure); whereas I am seeing it as also
> 'external' - the emergent configuration as such can now react back on
> coyote and wolf and other causal mechanisms. I think we should be
> emphasising both.
> 
> Cf the 'meta' diagram in PE 74 which envisages the practical and social
> orders as emergent from the natural order - there are feedback loops
> running both ways. I rather think that a close study of Bhaskar's
> brilliant unpacking and defense of functionalist explanation in
> *Reclaiming Reality* would shed some light on this. (A commitment to
> functionalist explanation is not of course the same as being a
> functional*ist*, which Bhaskar clearly is not.)
> 
> I put 'external' in scare quotes above because there is of course a
> sense in which all reacting back is internal - i.e. it occurs within the
> world as  a whole, as an expanding multiply stratified system. Within
> that, what is 'external' and what internal will depend on which totality
> is the focus of your explanatory interest - there are innumerable valid
> perspectival switches that could be made!

Yes, there are valid perspectival swithes, but what are the 
necessary (philosophical) prequisites for that that someone also can 
have arguments in the sense of dialectical universalizability with its 
four aspects of judgement form (as I see necessary in valid judement 
form as Bhaskar has explicated)? How to elaborate this human action 
as problem solving (for me Adorno's unsuccessful attempts to have 
real context for individual being, not in  social world,  was very 
instructive), as human living in a tensed rhythmics, because 
thoughts of irreal inductions (as products) and their abstractions can 
comprise the idea of the necessary perspectival switches which 
arise in thoughts with their general ontological possibility of 
superstructures and intrastructures? Reacting back, hm, hm... 
negations their modes in my perspectival switches and 
or in my ontological world....intransitive, transitive world(?)... .
  
> Mervyn


With best regards, 

Martti Puttonen 
 


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