File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2002/bhaskar.0204, message 10


Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2002 14:10:56 +0100
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Emergence


Hi Martti, Tobin,

Thanks Martti. I agree with nearly everything I think you're saying, but
I'm not sure I've understood it fully, especially the last paragraph and
within that the last sentence.

1. I don't know about Tobin, but I was trying to think ontologically,
not just epistemologically. In particular, a valid perspectival switch
for me is only valid in virtue of the way aspects of the Real are - e.g.
to switch from seeing the polity as setting boundary conditions for the
economy to seeing the economy as setting boundary conditions for the
polity is only valid if both processes really do occur i.e. are
existentially intransitive in relation to my thought about them.

2. I agree with the Bhaskarian analysis of change (causation) in terms
of absence, hence that the philosophical analysis of the process of
emergence and 'reacting back' would have to proceed in terms of
absenting, or modes of negation. Change can't be analysed in terms of
identity and difference.

3. Relatedly, because the Bhaskarian, like the Hegelian, dialectic seeks
to grasp in thought the world as process, the discussion of emergence
needs to proceed in terms of content in addition to form. Our focus was
on form, but I don't see why the discussion couldn't be dynamised.

4. In the last para, you seem to be saying that, while there are valid
perspectival switches, there is a danger that the processes they
presuppose ontologically - in the present case, superstructuration/
intrastructuration - are reified and frozen, treated as products rather
than products-in-process, such that 'reacting back' is viewed
mechanically; and that this is not consistent with a transcendental
realist analysis of human action. I agree - the analysis must be
dynamised. 

5. Your last sentence, with its emphasis on the personal pronoun 'my',
seems to want to subjectivise both perspectival switching in the TD with
ontology in the ID to the particular individual. If so, I don't of
course agree both because knowledge is a social product and because the
way things are in the ID is existentially or causally (or both)
independent of our knowledge of it. But I rather suspect that's not what
you're trying to say.

Mervyn


Martti Puttonen <pop-AT-saunalahti.fi> writes
>
>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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-- 
Mervyn Hartwig
Editor, Journal of Critical Realism (incorporating 'Alethia')
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