Date: Wed, 18 Jun 1997 23:47:40 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: To Yoshie on Bhaskar


I thank Gary for sharing with me and others his reading of Bhaskar. I am
hoping that other people on this list will also read and post on Bhaskar's
work. I think his work will help us work through and beyond many of the
questions that have exercised this or that segment of M-I subscribers (e.g.
the labor theory of value, dialectical materialism/historical materialism,
humanism/anti-humanism, change/continuity, whether the Western working
class are revolutionary, and planning/market). It is not to say that
Bhaskar (to my knowledge) has made concrete analyses of those questions,
but I think that his work will help us understand why certain disputes
might arise and might also help us debate more rationaly.

One of the most attractive aspects of Bhaskar's work is his rehabilitation
of ontology, an ontology of specific kind: what he calles transcendental
realism. Oftentimes marxists and other leftists criticized postmodernists
for denying reality. This line of criticism has not been very effective, in
that it always led to a strange non-debate:
"You say reality doesn't exist, and it's discourse all the way down."
"No, I didn't say *that*."
"You did, too." (And the trading of accusations just goes on.)

Bhaskar, on the other hand, focuses on the nature of tacitly assumed
reality in postmodern thought (and other objects of his critique). The
question is *not* whether or not one is a realist, for one cannot but be a
realist (in that scientific experiment, applied science, and everyday
activities all depend on the existence and assumption of reality); The
question is: what kind of reality?

Bhaskar's analysis is dialectical in that it seeks to demonstrate the two
opposing philosophical traditions (e.g. logical positivism and
hermeneutics, of which postmodernism is a linguistically-centered
off-shoot) derive from a common problem--a common lack of the concept of
non-anthropocentric, stratified, and differentiated reality. This lack
doesn't remain a simple absense in either tradition; in fact, both rely on,
tacitly or explicitly, an account of reality of a certain kind, namely
empiricism.

Bhaskar's compelling account explains how reality is deprived of depth,
stratification, differentiation and flattened by both logical positivism
and hermeneutics. The key distinction Bhaskar employs to restore us to a
proper account of reality is that between empirical regularities and
generative mechanisms. (On the other hand, an empiricist realism inherent
in both logical positivism and hermeneutics conflate these two different
levels.)

"For the objects of scientific inquiry are neither empirically given nor
even actually determinate chunks of the world. Rather, they are real
structures, whose actual presence and appropriate concept have to be
*produced* by the experimental and theoretical *work* of science" (emphasis
mine) (Bhaskar, _The Possibility of Naturalism_ 17) His attention to the
*work* of science salvages and improves on a partial truth arrived at (and
deformed) by the hermeneutic tradition: the fact that concepts are neither
simple *reflections* of nor identical to real *things*. In this manner,
Bhaskar insists on us keeping in mind the "intransitive" existence of
reality as well as the "transitive" work of knowledge production.

According to Bhaskar, to identify and explain such "real structures" (or
transfactually efficacious generative mechanisms) must be the objective of
scientific research in both natural and social sciences. However, the unity
of sciences remains at this level of abstraction. He calls our attention to
real and significant differences between the objects of research in natural
sciences and those in social ones. Also, diffrent objects demand different
methods and different criteria for judging competing theories. (For
instance, laboratory experiments cannot be fruitfully used in a science
whose object of research is society itself.)

I do not have the time to give a more extensive report on Bhaskar tonight,
but I am planning to come back to his work later. I would like to hear what
others have thought of his work.

Yoshie




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