Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 12:06:59 -0500
From: rahul-AT-peaches.ph.utexas.edu (Rahul Mahajan)
Subject: Re: Economic field theory


Hans:

>Rahul, I did not say that *science* is merely empirical monism.  I
>said that *positivism* is a "mixture of empiricism and monism which
>nowadays passes as science".  This was an unfortunate formulation.  I
>should perhaps have said, positivism is a "mixture of empiricism and
>monism which nowadays passes as the correct interpretation of what
>scientists do."

Sez who? Not only does it seem very easy for social scientists to denounce
positivism without being clear about what they mean by it (and I mean
clear), it's even easier for them to say it passes as science without
knowing what science is and for whom this passing is occurring. Certainly,
there are a few (not many) scientists who believe in some mixture of
empiricism and monism, but most of them hold considerably more
sophisticated views than I hear from third-rate philosophers.

 It was not a critique of science but a critique of
>positivism.  In the positivist world outlook, which is shared by many
>scientists although it is in contradiction to what they do as
>scientists, the world lacks "depth" (this is the "empiricist" part of
>it), and this "flat" world is governed by just one kind of lawfulness
>(this is the "monist" part of it).
>
>
>I believe you that you wouldn't want to say that reductions of
>higher-order to lower-order sciences "are always possible in
>principle."  But I disagree with the reasons why you wuld not want to
>say it.  You would not want to say it because it is a too sweeping
>statement, and because you think one cannot know this kind of thing.
>Bhaskar claims that one can infer, from the fact that science is
>possible, that the world is stratified, i.e., governed by different
>sets of laws that arise on different levels and which are not
>reducible to each other.  Of course, some are reducible, chemistry
>is reducible to physics, but others are not.  Most importantly,
>societies are not reducible to individuals.  The claim that this can
>or should be done is pro-capitalist ideology.

This (the claim that the world is "stratified") is sheer nonsense. Not only
does it not mean anything at all, it clearly makes much more sense to say
that we impose any stratification by our efforts to understand. It's not as
if it could mean anything (let alone be true) to say that the universe
separates the realm of chemistry from that of physics, say. The most
important point is that no deep understanding can be created from apriorism
-- it requires an intimate knowledge of many different examples, at the
least. I don't expect anyone who hasn't really worked at science (as
opposed to merely taking classes) to come up with any meaningful insights
about the "nature of reality." I don't know how Bhaskar comes to this
conclusion, but I'm no longer interested. It sounds as if his "critical
realism" is uncritical garbage.

The bit about pro-capitalist ideology is completely irrelevant, of course.
The truth value of a statement is not dependent on who benefits or claims
to benefit from it. More on reduction of society to the individual later,
as I must run.

Rahul




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