Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 19:40:14 -0400
Subject: Re: BHA: path dependence, critical realism and marxism


Hi Mervyn,

At 04:23 PM 04/30/2002 +0100, you wrote:
>Hi Dick,
>
> >There is no dishonor in trying to convert others to a faith one believes
> >will save the world or emancipate humanity.  I have serious doubts,
> >however, that Marxism, CR, or *any* philosophy can save us.
>
>Who says CR is a faith? It offers a general conceptual schema or
>approach or philsophical, social theoretical and methodological paradigm
>for emancipatory science, i.e. science that makes genuine discoveries
>and so could be used for emancipatory purposes. It doesn't take anything
>on faith, arguing for and critiquing its position at every stage and
>holding that while it is arguably currently the best paradigm going for
>undertanding and changing the world it will itself one day be superseded
>(epistemic relativism).

This sounds suspiciously like the Cartesian program of universal doubt -- 
accept only what can be proven "at every stage."  Polanyi, among others, 
has convinced me that the Cartesian enterprise is futile, that any explicit 
criticism I make has to be conducted with the tacit, and hence uncritical, 
affirmation of a huge context of background knowledge.  It is true that I 
can focus critically upon different components of my tacitly held 
knowledge, but only serially, one component at a time.  And each critical 
effort depends upon a tacitly held context.

So I would argue that each of us can affirm the explicitly formulated 
conceptual schema of CR only in terms of our tacitly held background 
knowledge, and it is this larger context that is a faith that makes it 
possible for us to make our explicit arguments for the explicit 
propositions of CR.

>  It doesn't claim that it can save us, only that
>the struggle for emancipation - for global social justice, peace,
>democracy and ecological sustainability - goes on at the level of
>philosophy and social theory too, and that CR can both constructively
>feed into and be fed into by social movements for emancipation of which
>it is an integral part. Come to our conference in Bradford in August and
>you'll see something of all this exemplified in our strand on Social
>Change.

I wish I could come to the conference.  I have a conflicting obligation.

Best regards,

Dick




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