File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/marxism_19Jul.94, message 40


Date: Thu, 21 Jul 1994 19:42:07 +0100
From: m_cockerill-AT-omega.lif.icnet.uk (Matt Cockerill)
Subject: Re: Bhaskar's Ontological Grounding of Dialectics



A couple of epistemological comments from the lab-bench:

Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar-AT-econ.utah.edu> writes:

>(2) How can you find out about that part of the world which is not
>accessible to science?  By what Bhaskar calls a second-order or
>transcendental argument, which looks at the effects in order to infer
>what that must be like which has these effects.  Bhaskar's classic
>example, which has established him a lasting place in modern
>philosophy of science, is the following:
>
>From the fact that science is possible we can conclude that the world
>is such that science is possible.

This sounds to me to be a very Goedel influenced view of epistemology. As
you know, Goedel's incompleteness theorem implied that in any consistent
and sufficiently complex formal system there exist true statements which
are not derivable from the system's axioms. In the same sense, I take it
that Bhaskar is saying that the methodology of science produces incomplete
knowledge, and that there exist second order truths (analagous to Goedel's
theorem) which can be recognised as true, but which would never have been
hit upon by scientific methodology.

>>The foundational moment of critical realism was a Copernican/Darwinian
>>revolution which stood the world back on its feet again, critiqued the
>>*epistemic fallacy* and situated epistemology constellationally within
>>ontology.
>
>(The only word which my development did not explain here is: what does
>this have to do with Darwin?  Presumably Bhaskar refers to the fact
>that science is a social evolutionary process.

I guess that Bhaskar is simply referring to the Darwinian revolution as the
second step in the loss of anthropocentricity from natural philosophy.
After Copernicus it became accepted that we weren't central to the universe
in a bricks and mortar sense, but it was Darwin's revolution that more
seriously questioned the assumption that we were the central concern of a
Creator's cosmic masterplan.


===============================================Matt Cockerill <m_cockerill-AT-icrf.icnet.uk>
Imperial Cancer Research Fund (Cell Cycle Group)
Clare Hall
South Mimms
Potters Bar       Tel: 071 269 3876
Herts.  EN6 3LD   Fax: 071 269 3801
===============================================


   

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