Date: Mon, 1 Apr 1996 22:42:30 -0500
Subject: Re: PROBLEMATIZE THIS!


I agree with Rahul that philosophy of science without a solid foundation is
science is a vainglorious and superfacial exercise, not all that different
>from a philosophy of history without a solid foundation in history. (But that
didn't stop Hegel in either area, did it?) I know that I am out of my league
in discussions of hard science conducted at much more sophistication than the
New York Times Science Times section. (A man has to know his limitations.)
But the issues which are raised in philosophy of science around questions of
knowledge and its social determinants/matrices are much broader than hard
science, and I would like to try to find some ways to have a conversation
with Rahul and Ralph, who are intelligent chaps and not too bad at one line
throw aways -- I am still chuckling at Rahul's comment to that Stalinist
dimwit Chaterjee that an issue of quantum mechanics involved computations so
he had better take off his shoes. (Yeah, I know, it always loses something in
the telling.)

I find it difficult to figure out exactly where Rahul and I agree and
disagree, in part I think, because we speak languages which overlap but don't
exactly coincide. IMO, this is not so much because of what Rahul describes as
loose formulations on his part, as it is a function of different, but not
completely incomensurate, intellectual training. For example, Rahul writes:
"The inversion of causality (though they don't formulate it that way)
involved in the pomo's idea that the original event only has meaning or
existence through its representations is absurd and reprehensible." Now I am
just not sure that I know with enough precision what Rahul is trying to get
at with the term 'the inversion of causality' to be entirely certain of what
he is saying. My suspicion is that his formula is a reductionist misreading
of certain 'post-modernist' ( really discursive) notions of history. My
position is: Certainly events take place separate from their representations
in historical narrative, but do these events have meaning without the
interpretative frame of the historical narrative? (And what depending upon
what we may mean by existence, that too can depend on representation; an
historical event of a century ago simply does not exist for us without a
representation.) No doubt, there is some quality of the event prior to the
representation which places limits on how the event can be plausibly
interpreted, on what meanings can be given to it, but that is different, I
would contend, in saying that it determines, in some causal way, the
representations. There is no event-in-itself.

Thus, I think we are going to have to work here to establish some fruitful
dialogue. I want to take up Rahul's comments on historical narrative and
revealing the truth, but I don't have the time to do it tonight.

Leo



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