File spoon-archives/seminar-14.archive/marx-bhaskar_2001/seminar-14.0102, message 12


From: Hans Ehrbar <econ-AT-lists.econ.utah.edu>
Subject: rts2-14a
Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2001 19:16:26 -0700


4. THE STATUS OF ONTOLOGY
AND ITS DISSOLUTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

This analysis of experimental episodes enables us to isolate
a series of metaphysical, epistemological and methodological
mistakes within the tradition of empirical realism.  For if
the intelligibility of experimental activity entails that
the objects of scientific understanding are intransitive and
structured then we can establish at one stroke: (i) that a
philosophical ontology is possible; (ii) some propositions
in it (causal laws are distinct from patterns of events, and
events from experiences); and (iii) the possibility of a
philosophy which is consistent with (and has some relevance
for), i.e. which is itself `in phase with', the realist
practice of science.  Ontology, it should be stressed, does
not have as its subject matter a world apart from that
investigated by science.  Rather, its subject matter just is
that world, considered from the point of view of what can be
established about it by philosophical argument.  The idea of
ontology as treating of a mysterious underlying physical
realm, which owes a lot to Locke and some of his rationalist
contemporaries (particularly Leibniz), has done much to
discredit it; and to prevent metaphysics from becoming what
it ought to be, viz. a conceptual science.  Philosophical
ontology asks what the world must be like for science to be
possible; and its premises are generally recognized
scientific activities.  Its method is transcendental; its
premise science; its conclusion the object of our present
investigation.

         The metaphysical mistake the argument of the
previous section allows us to pinpoint may be called the
`epistemic fallacy'.  This consists in the view that
statements about being can be reduced to or analysed in
terms of statements about knowledge; i.e. that ontological
questions can always be transposed into epistemological
terms.  The idea that being can always be analysed in terms
of our knowledge of being, that it is sufficient for
philosophy to `treat only of the network, and not what the
network describes',^17 results in the systematic {RTS2:37}
dissolution of the idea of a world (which I shall here
metaphorically characterize as an ontological realm)
independent of but investigated by science.  And it is
manifest in the prohibition on any transcendent entities.
It might be usefully compared with the naturalistic fallacy
in moral philosophy.  For just as the naturalistic fallacy
prevents us from saying what is good about e.g. maximizing
utility in society, so the epistemic one prevents us from
saying what is epistemically significant about
e.g. experience in science.  To show that it is a fallacy
and to trace its effects are two of the principle{<<al}
objectives of this study.  In showing that the
intelligibility of experimental activity entails that the
objects of scientific knowledge, in so far as they are
causal laws, are intransitive I have already succeeded in
the first of these aims.  For this means that a statement of
a causal law cannot now be reduced to or analysed in terms
of a statement about anyone's knowledge of it or knowledge
in general.  On the contrary, its assertion now entails that
a causal law would operate even if unknown, and even if
there were no-one to know it.  So that knowledge ceases to
be, as it were, an essential predicate of things.

         The epistemic fallacy is most marked, perhaps, in
the concept of the empirical world.  But it is manifest in
the criteria of significance and even the problems
associated with the tradition of empirical realism.  Kant
committed it in arguing that the categories `allow only of
empirical employment and have no meaning whatsoever when not
applied to objects of possible experience; that is to the
world of sense.'^18 (For us on the other hand if the Kantian
categories were adequate to the objects of scientific
thought then they would continue to apply in a world without
sense, and have a meaning in relation to that possibility.)
Similarly, the logical positivists committed it when
arguing, in the spirit of Hume, that if a proposition was
not empirically verifiable (or falsifiable) or a tautology,
it was meaningless.^19  Verificationism indeed may be
regarded as a particular form of the epistemic fallacy, in
which the meaning of a proposition about reality (which
cannot be designated `empirical') is confused with our
grounds, which may or may not be empirical, for holding it.
Once this doctrine is rejected {RTS2:38} there is no need to
identify the necessary and the a priori, and the contingent
and the a posteriori; or, to put it another way, one can
distinguish between natural and logical necessity, and
between natural and epistemic possibility.  Further there is
no need to assume that the order of dependence of being must
be the same as the order of dependence of our knowledge of
being.  Thus we can allow that experience is in the last
instance epistemically decisive, without supposing that its
objects are ontologically ultimate, in the sense that their
existence depends upon nothing else.  Indeed if science is
regarded as a continuing process of discovery of ever finer
and in an explanatory sense more basic causal structures,
then it is rational to assume that what is at any moment of
time least certain epistemically speaking is most basic from
the ontological point of view.^20  More generally, the
epistemic fallacy is manifest in a persistent tendency to
read the conditions of a particular concept of knowledge
into an implicit concept of the world.  Thus the problem of
induction is a consequence of the atomicity of the events
conjoined, which is a function of the necessity for an
epistemically certain base.

         Although the epistemic fallacy is of most interest
to us as it is manifest in the tradition of empirical
realism, it is worth mentioning that a philosopher who
rejected empirical realism might still commit the epistemic
fallacy, i.e. analyse being in terms of knowledge, if, as in
some varieties of Platonism and rationalism, he were to
define the world in terms of the possibility of
non-empirical knowledge of it.  For the transcendental
realist it is not a necessary condition for the existence of
the world that science occurs.  But it is a necessary
condition for the occurrence of science that the world
exists and is of a certain type.  Thus the possibility of
our knowing it is not an essential property, and so cannot
be a defining characteristic, of the world.  Rather on a
{RTS2:39} cosmic scale, it is an historical accident; though
it is only because of this accident that we can establish in
science the way the world is, and in philosophy the way it
must be for science to be possible.

         The view that statements about being can be reduced
to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge might
be defended in the following way: ontology is dependent upon
epistemology since what we can know to exist is merely a
part of what we can know.^21  But this defence trades upon a
tacit conflation of philosophical and scientific ontologies.
For if `what we can know to exist' refers to a possible
content of a scientific theory tha{<e}n that it is merely a part
of what we can know is an uninteresting truism.  But a
philosophical ontology is developed by reflection upon what
must be the case for science to be possible; and this is
independent of any actual scientific knowledge.  Moreover,
it is not true, even from the point of view of the immanent
logic of a science, that what we can know to exist is just a
part of what we can know.  For a law may exist and be known
to exist without our knowing the law.  Much scientific
research has in fact the same logical character as
detection.  In a piece of criminal detection, the detective
knows that a crime has been committed and some facts about
it but he does not know, or at least cannot yet prove, the
identity of the criminal.

         To be is not to be the value of a variable;^22
though it is plausible (if, I would argue, incorrect) to
suppose that things can only be known as such.  For if to be
were just to be the value of a variable we could never make
sense of the complex processes of identification and
measurement by means of which we can sometimes represent
some things as such.  Knowledge follows existence, in logic
and in time; and any philosophical position which explicitly
or implicitly denies this has got things upside down.

         The metaphysical mistake the analysis of
experimental episodes pinpoints, viz. the epistemic fallacy,
involves the denial {RTS2:40} of the possibility of a
philosophical ontology.  But if transcendental realism is
correct, and ontology cannot in fact be reduced to
epistemology, then denying the possibility of an ontology
merely results in the generation of an *implicit ontology*
and an *implicit realism*.  In the empirical realist
tradition the epistemic fallacy thus covers or disguises an
ontology based on the category of experience, and a realism
based on the presumed characteristics of the objects of
experiences, viz. atomistic events, and their relations,
viz. constant conjunctions. (Such presumptions can, I think,
only be explained in terms of the needs of a
justificationist epistemology, e.g. for incorrigible
foundations of knowledge.)  This in turn leads to the
generation of a methodology which is either consistent with
epistemology but of no relevance to science; or relevant to
science but more or less radically inconsistent with
epistemology.  So that, in short, philosophy itself is `out
of phase' with science.  Let us see how this happens.

         First, the general line of Hume's critique of the
possibility of any philosophical ontology or account of
being, and in particular his denial that we can
philosophically establish the independent existence of
things or operation of natural necessities, is accepted.
Now it is important to see what Hume has in fact done.  He
has not really succeeded in banishing ontology from his
account of science.  Rather he has replaced the Lockean
ontology of real essences, powers and atomic constitutions
with his own ontology of impressions.  To say that every
account of science, or every philosophy in as much as it is
concerned with `science', presupposes an ontology is to say
that the philosophy of science abhors an ontological vacuum.
The empiricist fills the vacuum he creates with his concept
of experience.  In this way an implicit ontology,
c{r}ystallized in the concept of the empirical world, is
generated.  And it is this ontology which subsequent
philosophers of science have uncritically taken over.  For
whether they have agreed with Hume's epistemology or not,
they have accepted his critique of ontology, which contains
its own implicit ontology, as valid.


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