File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2002/bhaskar.0205, message 25


From: "howard Engelskirchen" <lhengels-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: BHA: causal bearers in the social world
Date: Sun, 5 May 2002 2:25:41 -0400





I agree with Ruth that social structures/relations are formal causes.  I
guess I understand Bhaskar's point -- he wants to see them transformed like
the bronze of a statute.  But formal causes are transformed too and that is
how we get from one mode of production to another.  Anyway, insofar as he
insists that social structures are material causes, I think he has got to
be wrong.  But I do not agree that either he or Marx is wrong on society as
an ensemble of social relations or in thinking of value as a social
relation. Why not value as a real kind, Hans? 

Anyway, if the argument of my last post about relations and bodies and
putting out fires is right, the point can be extended to meaning.  It is
straight Volosinov to say that meaning is relational:  "Meaning is the
effect of interaction between speaker and listener produced via the
material of a particular sound complex."  Or other material embodiment --
ie meaning could be produced by a sound complex or a shape complex or a
color complex or a bodily movement complex.  Communication is relational.  

Suppose anger is the meaning communicated by an interaction between speaker
and listener via the material of a particular sense complex.  Suppose I
communicate anger by sound and you do so by slamming the door and leaving. 
Meaning can be communicated by what we do as well as by what we say.  

The difference is that in the one instance meaning attaches via sound
arbitrarily in the sense that other sounds in the same or another language
would have done as well, and in the other instance, the slamming, the thing
that does the communicating can do what it refers to.  The slamming example
is not quite direct enough for the point I want to make.  What I mean is
that one way to communicate the meaning "digging," for example, is to dig. 
Another way is for vocal chords to shape the sound of the three letter
word. The relation 'meaning' attaches to something we produce in either
case, in the one instance arbitrarily, in the other by being the thing it
means.

Does anger cause you to slam the door?  Does it cause the vocal chords to
make the sounds they do?  Is wanting a hole the cause of digging?

Here we seem to deal with a relation of a special sort.  Human actions are
characterized by intentionality.   But reasons as intentions concern the
relation between an existing state of affairs and an absence, a state of
affairs projected onto the future.  That is, reasons, like meaning, are
relational.  And, for that reason, we have to extend our understanding of
cause in just the way we have to extend our understanding of cause from
material things to the relations of material things.  That is, reasons
don't move buckets, bodies do.  But just as it matters how those bodies are
organized it matters what they are organized for.  Carrying a bucket to
fetch a drink on a lovely spring day is different from carrying a bucket to
put out a serious fire.

Bhaskar is fond of saying that the fact that meanings and reasons are
causes can be demonstrated by his asking someone listening to raise her
hand; because she does, the point is taken as established.  But this can be
construed in the way Ruth worries about social relations -- does Roy's
intention or meaning cause the other's hand to go up?  Notice that if this
is understood as a sort of mystical Aristotelian efficient cause, it evokes
the ideology of the non-producer.  Who produced the Model T?  Henry Ford. 
But the cause of someone's hand going up is that person lifting it, and
wage workers produced the Model T.  Relations don't move buckets, bodies
do.  In the same sense, relations don't lift arms, muscles do.  Goals don't
lift arms.  Meanings and reasons make a difference to the causal efficacy
of our bodily movement complexes, but they do so as relations that
correspond to muscular actions, not as ghosts inside manipulating the
levers of our movements.

Cause is relational. It expresses a relation between an actual state of
affairs and another material state of affairs, also actual, mediated by a
physical mechanism that is real.  It expresses a relation between a
presence and an absence.  The causal efficacy of physical mechanisms can be
affected by their relations (spin in physics, right or lefthandedness in
chemistry, etc.)  This is especially true of people as causal mechanisms
because we are relationally ordered.  And because human action is
characterized by intentionality, people as causal mechanisms are not only
relationally ordered to each other but are also relationally ordered to the
future.  If you think about it, imagining the future is only possible
because we come to know some of the causal relations of the world and the
mechanisms that underlie them.  So cause is also meaningful for us.  It
presupposes an epistemology.  We can understand and misunderstand.  We act
then as causally transformative agents on a terrain where the physical
intersects with the social intersects with the intentional and meaningful. 
Cause for us in what we do is socially relational and end relational. 
Base/superstructure anyone?

Howard


> [Original Message]
> From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
> To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
 > Date: 5/4/2002 12:56:32 PM
> Subject: Re: BHA: causal bearers in the social world
>
> Hi Howard, Hans and Andy,
> 
> Thanks for responding to my post.  Andy, I agree with you about the
specification of structures as *material* causes -- that is what Bhaskar
does say.  In many ways, though, what is actually being talked about with
social structures is really *formal* cause.
> 
> But I would maintain that there is pressure from the thrust of the
analogy with causal mechanisms in nature (which are in general *efficient*
causes) to ascribe a fair amount of efficacy to material causality here. 
Specifically, material (and/or formal) causality has to be construed as
being efficacious enough to authorize (a) the claim that social structures
are analogous to causal mechanisms in nature, and (b) the claim that
methodological individualism (a position which does not preclude the
acknowledgment of material conditions) is unsatisfactory.
> 
> I guess I think that you can only stretch material and/or formal
causality so far (especially if this is combined with a rejection of m.i.
and a commitment to  naturalism), before what you are saying is that social
structures are, indeed, causal bearers.   
> 
> Thanks again; this is really so helpful.  I will check out the archives
too.  Do you remember any thread(s) in particular, Andy?
> 
> r.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>      --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---


--- howard Engelskirchen
--- lhengels-AT-igc.org
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