Date: Mon,  5 Jan 2004 05:00:19 -0600
Subject: RE: BHA: Analytic philosophy


Dear Tobin, Dick, Ruth and all:

I sympathize with your attempt to affirm point 1 without conceding that 
inquiry into a particular dog Shlomit would be meaningless.  However, there 
may be certain senses in which 2 follows from 1.  If one accepts point one, 
than one must concede that whether or not a certain question or even a certain 
concept is meaningful depends on our beliefs and projects.  From this 
perspective, Putnam could argue that if someone inquired into the essence of 
Shlomit, he or she would fail to understand the nature of Putnam^Òs relation to 
his pet.  If a biologist of some sort were to examine Shlomit in hopes of 
trying to find out about the essence of dogs in general, she would not be 
inquiring about the essence of Shlomit and would have negated his/its 
particularity, which is of course, crucial in Putnam^Òs relationship to his pet.

This raises another question, which I would like to pose to the list.  If one 
affirms with Putnam that there can be no fixed vocabulary to describe reality, 
that reality is vague, and our interests and projects play an essential role 
in our constructing reality, how much can we separate reality from concepts?  
What is the role of what Bhaskar calls the existentially intransitive realm?  
I do not have my Bhaskar texts at hand, but I recall Bhaskar^Òs lucid 
description of the experiment, in which the scientist creates events to make 
an inference to an independently existing structure.(PON)  Now I wonder, 
how ^Óindependent^Ô is this structure?  For one thing, if we affirm the 
pragmatist conception that the meaning of the object is intimately dependent 
on some project and some conceptual framework, then we would have to conclude 
that the ^Óindependent^Ô structure that the scientist discovered remains wedded 
to an extremely specific framework.  Of course, I think that Bhaskar^Òs point 
is that this structure has effects regardless of one^Òs conceptual framework.  
This idealist still drowns.  But it seems that there can be equally ^Óvalid^Ô 
interpretations of this phenomena, depending on one^Òs perspective, interest or 
project.  Coming back to Mt Fuji, given his above theory, I am unsure how 
Putnam can affirm that Mt Fuji exists independently of the term Mt Fuji.  
After all, he would have to allow that other people may divide the world 
differently for other purposes and for them Fuji would not be a mountain, it 
may not even be called Fuji.  All he could say is that there exists some X 
that exists independently, but what the boundaries of that X are he can say 
little about. (Ruth do you know how Putnam would respond to this?)

This emphasis on the subjective dimension of knowledge is perhapsconsistent 
Marx^Òs internal critique of neo-classical economics and liberalism.  After 
all, one could say that in a broad sense, Marx accepts the project human 
freedom, which he shared with liberals. He then affirmed that the project of 
human emancipation required overcoming the quasi-independent structure^×
capitalism.  However, I am not sure I would accept that a another description 
of modern society, one that left out capitalism, would be equally valid, even 
if the proponent of this theory explained that his or her project was not 
human emancipation.  Perhaps at this point, one must ask whether that there 
are some projects to which people of the modern world are already committed.  
Hence objectivity is perhaps dependent on some type of subjective imperative 
as well.  Perhaps this is why Bhaskar became increasingly involved in ethics.



Viren



Quoting "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu>:

> Hi Viren and Tobin,
>  
> Putnam goes from the fact that people who use different criteria for
> classification disagree about where to put the dingo to conclude:
>  
>  (1)  "All of these classifications are legitimate, and useful in the
> contexts for which they are
> designed," and
>  
> (2) "To ask what the "real" essence of my last dog, Shlomit was, would
> be to ask a meaningless question.(Pragmatism Conference proceedings 6)"
>  
> I can't speak for CR, but I personally agree with #1, but disagree with #2. 
> There is a difference between legitimate disagreements about what is
> essential to being a dog (whether or not its name is "Shlomit"}, and claiming
> that asking the question about the essential nature of dogs is "meaningless."
>  I think we use "essence" and "nature" heuristically.  It is the agreement
> that there is something there to be discovered, and not just socially
> constructed, that grounds our disagreements about canine "nature."  To say
> that the question is "meaningless" seems to me to trivialize the work that
> scientists do.  Maybe that's the idea, to discredit science and embarrass
> scientists.
> 
> Again, I won't speak for CR, but just for myself in regard to Putnam's
> statement:
> 
> "The idea of one fixed conceptual vocabulary in which one can once and
> for all describe the structure of reality (as if it had only one fixed
> structure), whether in its traditional or its recent materialist form is
> untenable." (8) 
>  
> This seems to me to be an attack upon an assumption, not of CR, but of
> logical positivism.
>  
> I agree that our conceptual vocabulary is not fixed once and for all, and I
> concede that change is real, and that the structure of reality can thus
> change.  But I don't claim that the essences or natures I seek to discover
> will never change.  I even believe that there are essential differences in
> different processes of change -- some are more like embryonic development,
> some like evolution through environmental selection, some dialectical.  (I
> would accept that there are dialectical aspects to different types of change,
> but do not accept that "dialectic" is the master category for interpreting
> all changes -- that's another argument.)
>  
> Viren observes:  "He [Putnam] then asserts that reality is "vague" and hence
> we reach an ultimate level."  And contrasts this with CR's endorsement of a
> "categorical realism"  "in which certain categories exist in the world."  
>  
> I would want to keep clear the distinction between (1) those aspects of the
> real which are neither actual nor empirical, (2) the conceptions different
> people have of those realities, and (3) the words, written or spoken, we use
> to articulate, express, and communicate these conceptions.   
>  
> I hold that all three of these "exist in the world."  Sayer suggests that it
> might be better to refer to #1 as "generative mechanisms" rather than
> "essences," since "essential" is so tied up with the issue of classification.
>  Members of the same class might not all have the same set of generative
> mechanisms.
>  
> Regards,
>  
> Dick
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