From: rgroff-AT-yorku.ca
Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 13:57:29 -0400
Subject: BHA: transcendental arguments


Mike!

Welcome out of lurker-dom!  (I actually know Mike, who is great, from years back.)

I basically agree with Mike's position -- though for me it's not so much that
Bhaskar has taken a wrong turn, as that I don't have much interest in the later
stuff.

I am maybe a little more sympathetic to Callinicos' point about the so-called
transcendental argument of RTS.  I think that RB responded correctly: that the
argument there is not a transcendental arguement from a necessary feature of
experience (or, as in Kant, the fact of experience), but is instead an immanent
(sp?) critique of regularitiy theory.  

On the claim that these two are in fact the same, I am not convinced. I think
that there is a structural similarity, in that the logic of both is "If x is so,
then what must be so in order for x's being so to be the case?"  But a
transcendental argument is, by definition, one in which x's being so is taken to
be beyond dispute by everyone.  This is because the whole idea, the whole plan
behind that kind of move, is to say that what is established by transcendental
argument is apodictic in epistemic status, absolutely certain.  To EVERYONE. 
Not just to people who buy into a set of contingent premises.  Immanent
critiques, by contrast, don't (supposedly) convey universal validity simply in
virtue of their form.

Now I'm all in favor of someone saying "There's no such thing as a
transcendental argument. (For whatever reasons they want to cite.)  Rather,
there are ONLY immanent critiques -- which will never have the epistemic force
(albeit illusory) that T args are supposed to have."  But I wouldn't then expect
the person to retain the name "transcendental argument" for the immanent
critiques that they offer.

I actually think that RB does, sometimes, offer T args.  But I don't think that
the arg from experimentation is one of them.     

r.


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