File spoon-archives/seminar-14.archive/marx-bhaskar_2001/seminar-14.0102, message 3


Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 09:31:26 -0500 (EST)
From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: empirical vs.actual


Hi everybody,

Hans, you wrote:
>I want to also finally answer Ruth's argument whether RB
>means "perceived event" when he speaks of "constant
>conjunction of events".  This argument is convincing to me.
>The events in the phrase "constant conjunction of events"
>belong to the empirical sphere, they are events which are
>accessible to humans sense-experience.  This is what
>empiricism considers the only legitimate basis of science.
>But I don't think that Bhaskar defines the *actual* as
>perceivable events only.  The actual is anything that
>happens.  The empirical is a historically increasing subset
>of the actual, since as time goes by humans invent more and
>better instruments which give them access to more and more
>events.  Does this make sense to you, Ruth?

Yes.  By "the actual," Bhaskar wants (I think) to designate a set of
phenomena that are logically divorced from any actual (no pun intended)
experience of them.    

As you say, from the perspective of at least a crude empiricism, we can only
have knowledge of that which we experience directly (in fact, strictly
speaking, what we have knowledge OF, from this perspective, is never an
"outside" object at all - perceived or otherwise - but rather is our own
internal sense-perceptions).  Bhaskar points out that the empiricist
conception of what a "scientific law" is stays within these subjectivist
parameters.

>From the perspective of critical realism, by contrast, science is a practice
through which we gain knowledge of that which exists but which we do not, or
do not yet, experience directly (or even at all).  But this is just to
repeat what you said!  Sorry!        

Warmly,
Ruth

>After sending you the reading I just announced, which is
>again quite short, I would like to have some discussion
>about the connection between this part of Bhaskar's argument
>and Marxism.
>
>BTW, the text of RTS, from the discussion on the Bhaskar list
>in 1996, is on the web under
>
>http://www.raggedclaws.com/criticalrealism/archive/rts/index.html
>
>It is not as nice as the text I am using now, because the
>text is interrupted by page breaks and footnotes.  In the
>present version, all the footnotes are moved to the end of
>each installment.  I sent Wallace Polsom, the maintainer of
>raggedclaws, the complete and cleaned-up version of the
>text, as I am using it now.  I assume he is going to put it
>up instead eventually.
>
>-Hans.
>
>
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>



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