File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2004/bhaskar.0405, message 1


From: "Howard Engelskirchen" <howarde-AT-twcny.rr.com>
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: BHa: criteria for ascription of reality
Date: Sat, 1 May 2004 02:07:37 -0400


Hi Mervyn, Tobin and all,

Thanks, Tobin, for extending the dimension of the questions.

I do think, Mervyn, the issues still generate confusion worth clearing up.

You seem to say two things that are, as Tobin suggests, at least potentially
inconsistent:  (1) there is no demarcation problem -- its a legacy of the
past and we've left it behind; and (2) besides it's solved by scientific
protocols.

Now, it is simply the case that for any set of observable phenomena, I can
come up with an infinite number of theories to explain them.

First question:  how does CR distinguish the theories worth attending to,
testing, making subsequent use of, from all the others?

Second question:  There are any number of mainstream scientific realists who
take the problem seriously.  They do not think they are positivists and many
have contributed to the ideological struggle against positivism in science.
What is CR's explanation for why all scientific realism that is not critical
realism on this question is in fact not scientific realism at all but
instead a disguised form of positivism (or 'smacks' of positivism')?

You write  "the reality and power of unobservables is attested in practice
all the time both inside and outside of science." This is certainly correct.
I want to know how to distinguish the unobservables that are in fact
causally powerful from those I only think are causally powerful.  I've found
I'm quite capable of confusing what I think to be the case about something
with what is really the case (both inside and outside science!).

Also, to clarify what I wrote, I did not mean to make causal or empirical
criteria stand on their own in the sense of your reference to the context of
a developing system, a totality, in which "nothing stands on its own."  My
formulation was clumsy.  What I meant was that both in the first chapter of
PON (which I had just read -- Ruth quoted the sentence correctly in her post
on this thread) and in my recollection of Bhaskar's other discussions of
cause as grounds for calling something real (say the discussion of meaning
as causal in SRHE) I did not recall the propositions developed being coupled
with an explanation of how you deal with the demarcation problem.

I have gone back to Jaime's post since you have appealed to it.  I agree,
Jaime, that the real is more than is perceived, I agree perception and
causation are not equivalent, and I agree that perception is not the same as
explanation.  Beyond that, Mervyn, I don't see what there is in Jaime's post
that would make "his [Bhaskar's] real position [on this question, ie the
demarcation problem] pretty much the same as Jaime's."

At the end of Tobin's post copied below, Tobin refers to person A and person
B arguing about what the best explanation of a thing is, one invoking God,
the other not.  Now what is true is that the epistemological tradition of
scientific realism has given an answer to the question of what makes an
explanation "best" -- and this is the kind of thing that I take it you must
be referring to as 'the protocols of science.'  But how you study a thing is
determined by the nature of the object of study, so it's not clear to me an
epistemological answer to the question is adequate.  Is there an ontological
explanation offered by CR?

Mervyn's point about foundationalism seems to me to bear more sigificantly
on the somewhat different question I raised about a apriori knowledge, so
I'll break that out into a separate post so this one doesn't become even
more unreadable.

Howard



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-mail.com>
To: "Bhaskar list" <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
Sent: Friday, April 30, 2004 8:39 PM
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: BHa: criteria for ascription of reality


> Hi Mervyn--
>
> There are several strands running through this discussion, I'll try to
> untangle them at least a little....
>
> > All I claim is that there are different ways of knowing (being committed
> > to epistemic relativism, I said nothing about universal truth)
>
> There are three issues here: (1) whether truth is universal, (2) whether
art
> provides knowledge, and (3) how this all fits within epistemic relativism.
> Now perhaps I was mistaken to take your comment about the truth of *A
> Midsummer Nights Dream* as an endorsement of the usual dog-and-pony on the
> universality of Shakespeare's art.  However, since you made the remark in
> the context of a discussion of science, I don't think such a reading is
> entirely misplaced.  Be that as it may, the fundamental question is
whether
> art provides knowledge (universal or not).  I used to believe that it
does,
> but nowadays I'm not nearly so sure.  The claim that there are "different
> ways of knowing" is deeply ambiguous: does it refer to knowlege of
different
> levels of stratified reality, different aspects of one object but at the
> same ontic level, different conceptions of what "the object" is, different
> forms of knowledge (e.g. propositional, "how-to," experiential), or what?
> More precisely, are we really speaking of different ways of *knowing*, or
> different ways of *understanding*?  I don't think these are synonymous,
and
> it bears on the issue of epistemic relativism -- because (I think) that's
> not the issue, instead *judgmental rationality* is what's at stake in
> Howard's question.  I vaguely recall a science fiction story in which
Roger
> Bacon (13th century) discovers radio waves but interprets them not as the
> propagation of electromagnetic particles (as we do), but as the flight of
> angels.  If the equations are the same and the equally unobservable
> "electrons" and "angels" have the same causal effects, why should the
latter
> understanding be wrong?  (From this perspective, medieval scholastic
> questions like "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" aren't
> ridiculous at all.)  I think however we'd be more inclined to describe the
> "angel" view as valid without necessarily being true -- that is, it's
> correct from the standpoint of epistemic relativism, but we may want to
> reserve a decision or even reject its judgemental rationality vis-a-vis
> alethic truth.  So then, the flight of angels may be a viable and even
> illuminating understanding of radio waves, but is it knowledge?
>
> > Wasn't it 'chymistry' or alchemy that Newton spent most of his life
> > studying and was this not a kind of proto-chemistry such that in
> > associating it with witches you yourself are perhaps unconsciously
> > applying a science/ nonsense divide?
>
> I hope it's clear now that to the contrary, I'm saying that a belief in
> witches is *not* inherently nonsense, superstitious, or unscientific.  And
> consequently (to reprise the context in which I raised the issue), denying
> ontology doesn't particularly protect either science or religion (which is
> what you had held), although perhaps 18th century empiricists though it
did
> (I'm doubtful, because then many more of them would have been atheists).
> Dare I add that you seem to be contradicting your assertion that science
has
> strict protocols?
>
> > any attempt to draw a neat dividing line between science and non-science
> > by the application of some fixed criterion (is it observable?) is to
> > detotalize them and illicitly privilege one way of knowing, science,
> > leading historically to such absurdities as the logical positivists
> > claiming that only 'empirical science' is cognitively meaningful by
> > contrast to logic and mathematics which are 'meaningless' and
> > metaphysics which is 'gibberish'.
>
> Sure -- except Howard wasn't proposing that we should or even could use
> observability as our line of demarcation, so unfortunately you're arguing
> with the wrong cat.  However, as you yourself say, "one must be able to
> distinguish science from ideology, true claims from false ones."  I'm sure
> we all agree with the sentiment, but depth explanation and explanatory
> critique only go so far.  Person A says that the best explanation for
> certain aspects of reality is the existence of God; person B says that
> there's no need to invoke a God in order to propose an equally coherent
> explanation, albeit one that also hinges on an unobservable.  So which
> unobservable is the correct one?  This, at least as I understood it, is
the
> question Howard is raising.
>
> Thanks,
>
> T.
>
> ---
> Tobin Nellhaus
> nellhaus-AT-mail.com
> "Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce
>
>      --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---



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