From: "Howard Engelskirchen" <howarde-AT-twcny.rr.com> Subject: BHA: Re: Richard Boyd on Iraqi resistance fighters getting us past Kant Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 23:32:32 -0500 Hi all and hi Steve, Sorry for the long post. I have been meaning for some time to give an account of Richard Boyd's response to postmodern challenges to realism. As I got into it, it seemed easiest simply to let him speak for himself. Before I start with that, with Tobin I'd like to say that I have never considered Steve's challenges an invasion. Also, this recent post of Ruth's is an extremely clear statement of a CR position. Those of us aligning one way or another and to one degree or another with CR have lots of differences, as Steve has noted. But I honestly don't think there is anything in Ruth's post that we all wouldn't give pretty much complete agreement to. So we can move beyond that issue. There can be no defenses of social constructivism that depend on exposing realism's claim to unmediated appropriation of the real. First I typed 'access to the real', but then withdrew that. I do think we encounter the real with a different kind of mediation in labor -- our engagement is causal. But this is prepared by consciousness and appropriated by consciousness. The duality of that encounter has got to be recognized: on the one hand we appropriate only as mediated by consciousness, but on the other hand, our causal engagement confronts in the world resistance that is no respecter of our socially and historically constructed modes of appropriation. * * * Part of the reason for reviewing (in small part only) one article of Boyd's is to show that arguing that our approach to the world is theory laden is, among scientific realisms, not limited to CR. Boyd, for example, could teach Steve quite a lot about the slavish subservience of establishment science to the existing imperatives of power and wealth. In an article called "Kinds as the 'Workmanship of Men': Realism, Constructivism, and Natural Kinds," Boyd writes [Material in brackets is inserted by me] -- "It is a sad fact that, at least from the middle of the last century on, scientific findings and the authority of scientific experts have been available for the rationalization of oppressive polices and social structures. This phenomenon is, perhaps, clearest in human biology where there has been a systematic tendency for the findings of respectable experts at any given time -- in genetics, say, or the psychological theory of individual and group difference -- to ratify whatever relations of disproportionate power and wealth prevail at that time. Racist justifications of colonial policy or chattel slavery in the 19th century [or medical science's 'proof' why women couldn't go to Oxford] or of social, economic and political inequalities or oppression in the 20th are paradigm cases." He then agrees with Steve, "This phenomenon makes the very notions of scientific objectivity and expertise into weapons of oppression . . . There is, for example, a perfectly good sense in which the epistemology of science is a (partly) political matter . . . The very same scientific institutions (prominent university departments, prominent journals, academies of science, and all that) -- and indeed the very same prominent scientists -- which (who) reliably tended to certify as projectible some approximately true answers to many sorts of questions in human biology and non-human genetics, have reliably and systematically tended to treat as non-projectible -- indeed as unrespectable -- anti-racist (and true) answers to questions about human and individual group differences. . . . No realist naturalism can afford to ignore these cases in which scientific methodology 'error tracks' instead of 'truth tracks.'" Elsewhere he tells the story of the Cambridge scientist who offered the first sustained theoretical 'proofs' establishing the 'reality' of IQ differences based on race. This guy was a leading psychologist who had produced good and respectable work at a leading university in England, a path breaker in the field woldwide, and editor of a leading journal in which his IQ stuff was published and then reviewed favorably in unsigned articles written by himself. His statistical work was accurate down to the decimal points. So accurate in fact that the minute anyone in the field actually bothered to check his work it was obvious that the books were cooked. Boyd goes on, "there is -- in many societies -- a systematic tendency for scientific 'findings' in the human sciences, genetics, animal behavior, etc. to be such as to ratify existing patterns of power and social stratification.. Given the structure of those societies, the relevant findings are almost always systematically and deeply false, because they portray temporary patterns in human society as biologically inevitable." Describing the IQ controversy in general terms he refers to the articles by Block and Dowrkin in 1976 that finally exposed the fraud involved in the earlier theoretical presentations. Boyd asks what had changed to make this possible. He argues that there was "something about the imaginative capacities of many scientists and philosophers: their capacities to imagine and articulate alternatives to the racist explanations for patterns of work and behavior, and for relations of power and wealth." This didn't happen, he observes because of anything done at Cambridge or Berkeley or Ann Arbor. "It was done instead in Dehli and Calcutta, in Dien Bien Phu, Saigon and Hue, in Johannesburg and Pretoria, in Watts and Harlem. it was done, largely, but not exclusively, by militant people of color; most often by disciplined, organized people of color with guns. Their struggles against racism and imperialism made salient important non-racist alternatives to racist explanations of power and stratification." He then argues that because science did not *self correct* on these questions as the given assumptions argue it must, that instead, "Perhaps we should count systematic political struggles against racism and imperialism as part of scientific activity. if, say, Vietnamese peasants in their anti-imperialist struggles contributed to overturning scientific racism, perhaps we should count those struggles as part of the history of science. . . . Not only did the anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles we are considering contribute indirectly to the scientific critique of racism, they typically reflected, on the part of their participants, a more accurate understanding *by far* of the political eocnomy of racism and colonialism than that provided by institutional social sciences. If we should choose to treat the Vietnamese peasants who fought against the French and the U.S. as having done social science, then they surely did better social science than most mainstream social scientists. . . . in roughly the period from 1945 to 1985, the scientifically, politically and morally most important insights about the human sciences came from the work of marginalized people of color and their allies in struggles against racism and imperialism, and from related efforts of other marginalized people inspired by those struggles." Here, and more generally on matters of theory, Boyd is willing to concede the constructivist argument -- scientific methods are not intrinsic nor unchanging, they do not involve exceptionless and eternal laws, and they are instead historically situated and socially and politically constructed. They have a political dimension that cannot be ignored by anyone adhering to realism in science without that person engaging in some form of performative contradiction. Realists can concede every point in the constructivist and postmodern attack on realism's stereotypes. What cannot be conceded, according to Boyd, is the suggestion that by our social, linguistic, philosophical or other conventional practices we 'make the world.' "Causation is not a social construction: we do not make causal relations, except in so far as we ourselves function as ordinary causal phenomena." While our understanding of gravity is certainly a social construction, the force that makes the walk up Mt. Fuji different than the walk down is not a social construction. "Kinds as the Workmanship of Men" can be found in "Rationality, Realism, Revision," edited by Julian Nida-Rumelin, Proceedings of the 3rd International Society for Analytical Philosophy held in Munich in 1997. Given Boyd's argument in the article referred to -- and given Roy Bhaskar's sustained commitment to the struggle for emancipation and against capitalism -- it is a bit much to suggest that scientific realism as a whole is a philosophical counterpart to the intellectually fashionable movements of neo-conservatism, as I think I remember Steve doing a couple of posts ago. Perhaps I overstate the point he made. Howard ----- Original Message ----- From: "Groff, Ruth" <ruth.groff-AT-marquette.edu> To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU> Sent: Monday, December 22, 2003 11:31 AM Subject: BHA: Getting past Kant > Hi Steve, all, > > As an epistemology, critical realism does not involve the idea that knowledge is based on "direct access" to "the Real." On the contrary, from a CR perspective the mistaken idea that knowledge is BASED on direct access to the Real even has a name. It's called the "ontic fallacy." From a CR perspective, knowledge is BASED on two things: interaction with previously held beliefs and interaction with what I will provisionally call "other aspects of the material world." Scientific knowledge is viewed as being a social-historical product that is formed through social, if not collective, interaction with these two "objects" of science. > > As an ontology, critical realism involves the view that there is an existentially independent, material reality. While there are intimations of what most people would call objective or absolute idealism in a few passages of RTS, on the whole Bhaskar's early work equates metaphysical realism with materialism (of a certain sophisitcated sort). > > Steve, it seems to me that your position - like Putnam's - is at base Kant's. There are (at least) two big differences between transcendental idealism and transcendental realism. The first is that Kant, like Hume and Newton both, rejects naturalism about causality. The second is that critical realists (like pragmatists) believe that the fact that knowledge is mediated does not imply that knowledge is knowledge about beliefs rather than about the Real. So for critical realists there is MEDIATED access to the Real. But there is access. The alternate view is that there is no access. Some people who believe that there is no access to things in themselves believe that the very concept is therefore unintelligible; others, like Kant, retain the concept but use it as a kind of limit condition about which nothing more can be said. > > But there is no disagreement between critical realists and Kant about the mediated character of knowledge. As I said, the very idea of unmediated knowledge even has its own name in CR -- the ontic fallacy. So if you want to engage with the critical realist position you need to really understand how this can be. What kind of anti-positivist position is this, that (like Kant) combines an insistence on the mediated character of knowledge with an insistence on ontological realism and (unlike Kant) also insists that theories can give us insight into the character of "the Real" and not just insight into phenomenal experience? > > r. > JÚ¤yfÈž)0jrÛžzjy ɲzfÆ…rj)uiz{ zJ zjYíŸœíº«iz{È¢{ɲԮ*gzqy 0JÛº[hy n쇑jꚉƊy ib뢲 jÉ®X Vz) in --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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