File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2003/bhaskar.0312, message 248


From: "Howard Engelskirchen" <howarde-AT-twcny.rr.com>
Subject: BHA: Re: "The Real" and what is point of whacking anti-realists?
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 09:37:50 -0500


Hi Emrah and all,

I have three questions related (roughly) to the all science is ideology
argument:

First, Adorno writes the following:  "Idealism was the first to make clear
that the reality in which men live is not unvarying and independent of them.
Its shape is human and even absolutely extra-human nature is mediated
through consciousness.  Men cannot break through that.  They live in social
being, not in nature."

Wouldn't the last sentence be more accurately expressed if it said "They
live in social being *and also* in nature.  That is, without doubt all
appropriation of nature in thought is mediated by consciousness.  But we
don't only engage nature in thought.  We engage nature as one of its causal
powers interacting with other causal powers and the  resistance we meet in
doing so does not depend on either consciousness or social being.  In other
word our mediation with nature is not only through consciousness but also
through practical causal activity.  Is this obvious to everyone?

Second,  Habermas writes  the following:  "The concept of the objective
world encompasses everything that subjects capable of speech and action do
not 'make themselves' irrespective of their interventions and intentions."
I wondered about this "do not make themselves."  Implicit here is the idea
of causal powers, isn't it?  In other words we could reformulate Habermas
more succinctly as follows:  'The concept of the objective world encompasses
causal powers.'  Has anything been lost in the reformulation?   I mean this
is the point of Bhaskar's distinction between the actual and the real, isn't
it?  That is, there are all sorts of things in the objective world that we
in fact do not make.  But I'm not sure there is a whole lot of what counts
as actual that we could not make.  The one thing that we do not make are the
world's causal powers.  So, the argument goes, to take on the realist
concept of a fully mind independent objective world means to take on the
concept of causally potent structures.  To accept a mind independent
objective world is to be ipso facto anti-Humean.

Third, to come to Steve's defense: I have never understood Steve's
distinction between science and engineering, but Habermas makes a
distinction between discourse and action that may be relevant.  If science
is considered discourse only and all scientific action considered
engineering, then  the distinction Habermas makes between performative
certainty and warranted assertability would apply.  And, yes, Ruth, in his
recent work Habermas explicitly rejects as insufficient the account you
reviewed in your last post -- the idea that truth is based on ideal
warranted assertability in an ideal speech community.  He is very clear that
truth is not epistemic; it is not a matter of how we use language or of
justification only.  Truth depends on the way the world is.  He writes:

"Pragmatism makes us aware that everyday practice rules out suspending
claims to truth in principle."

He means here that when we act we have a naive certainty that the beliefs in
terms of which we act are true -- we don't suspend truth claims when we act.
(The debt to Peirce here, Tobin, is plentifully acknowledged.)  He
continues:

"Everyday routines and habituated communication work on the basis of
certainties that guide our actions.  This 'knowledge' that we draw on
performatively has the Platonic connotation that we are operating with
'truths' -- with sentences whose truth conditions are fulfilled.  As soon as
such certainties are dislodged from the framework of what we take for
granted in the lifeworld [by the resistance it meets in the way the world
actually is, ie by our failures and frustrations -- howard's note] and are
thus no longer naively accepted, they become just so many questionable
assumptions.  In the transition from action to discourse, what is taken to
be true is the first thing to shed its mode of practical certainty and to
take on instead the form of a hypothetical statement whose validity remains
undetermined until it passes or fails the test of argumentation.  Looking
beyond the level of argumentation, we can comprehend the pragmatic role of a
Janus-faced truth that establishes the desired internal connection between
performative certainty and warranted assertability."

That is, he argues that what is true depends on the way the world is, not on
any ideal speech situation or on warranted assertability.  But the minute we
are not acting, but have instead submitted truth claims to discursive
inquiry, then the applicable tests are the tests of argumentation.  So if we
act, and our performative certainties are shaken by failure, then we may
repair through reengaging in discourse, etc.

So, to come back to the distinction between science and engineering, if
engineering is taken to be the domain action (of performative certainty) and
science restricted to the domain of discourse, you could make some such
argument as Steve has hinted at.  But it is a funny use of the word science
in any event.  And, more significantly, it implies, as Habermas argues, a
realism.

Howard





----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Emrah Goker" <emrah_goker-AT-hotmail.com>
To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2003 3:39 AM
Subject: BHA: "The Real" and what is point of whacking anti-realists?


> Positioned as a marxist CR myself, I cannot help but suspect the merits of
> scapegoating/whacking "Steve", or ontological anti-realists in general.
> Bhaskar had a discussion on "commensurability" somewhere, and if I am not
> misremembering, one of the points was the impossibility of certain
> ontologies to speak to each other (despite possible dialogue between their
> epistemologies). Chris Norris, another great basher of anti-realism, tried
> to hear and speak to Jacques Derrida's graphematic ontology tirelessly in
> the past -- I guess he gave up by now -- but as long as CR cannot
assimilate
> deconstructionism or the latter cannot colonize CR, incommensurability
> reigns.
>
> Of course, the point is, my CR comrades would say, a coherent anti-realist
> "grounding", without serious contradictions, is impossible. Hence, I
guess,
> the "merit" of anti-realist whacking -- to challenge the adversary to come
> up with a ground that holds. (In my field, sociology, the whacking is even
> more violent when the challenge is about research design and methodology,
> and the defense is usually more pathetic than a phiolosophical defense of
> anti-realism.) But because of incommensurability such challenges transform
> into domineering assaults, and there is a lot of talking *past* each
other.
> What will satisfy a CRist in an "Ontology Death Match"? The conversion,
> submission or liquidation of the adversary?
>
> "Steve" writes about "the Real" in a recent reply to Jamie, the basic
point
> being "the Real is impossible to grasp or even encounter". Now, rather
than
> Schmittian war-making, Socratic pedagogy might work better. Why not try to
> force a poorly-formed anti-realist position into a more coherent one,
since
> there are obviously more clever anti-foundationalisms out there (as there
> are terrible, not-that-terrible, and intelligent realisms)?
>
> For one thing, Slavoj Zizek would scratch his beard and slap his forehead
> (and then maybe "Steve"s too) if he read him. Zizek's Lacanian split
between
> post- and pre-symbolic inscribes three diachronic moments into the
category
> of "the Real": (1) The thing that comes before symbolization, that causes
> symbolization; (2) The thing that exists in the form of being symbolized;
> (3) The "excess" that cannot be subsumed by the symbolization, that
resists
> the ordering of symbolization.
>
> So you have a richer anti-realist ground, though its concept of the Real
> bulges painfully. At least, we are talking. Perhaps the conversation is
> boring for a lot of CRs. But whacking does not make much conversation,
> except the occasional battle cries.
>
> Emrah Goker
> Department of Sociology
> Columbia University
>
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>
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