Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2001 09:45:15 -0500 (EST)
From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: Re: The premises extracted


Hi Greg, everyone,

I thought that Greg's isolation of the premises was great.  It's really
useful.  I would want to fiddle around with the formulation of #1, though,
just a tiny bit.  

Greg wrote:
>1. If science occurs, then the world exists and is a certain way.

I would want something like:

1. If experimentation is what we think it is, then the world exists and is a
certain way. 

But you know, even this bothers me.  I'm writing this late at night, so bear
with me. 

Here's the thing:  I've never actually thought of this argument as
establishing anything about the natural world that could not be had from
simply assuming the validity of the substantive claims of the natural
sciences.  (Which, as we know, Bhaskar does.) 

Instead, I have always thought of the argument as an essentially *logical*
one.  That is, I see it as a very powerful argument about what one must
think about y if one thinks certain things about x, but not as an especially
powerful argument for the truth-value of what one must think about y.

Maybe this is just a failure of nerve on my part.  This is a real
possibility.  I can tell that I am going to be puzzling over this.  But, so
far at least, I have always felt more confident with the far more modest
premise: "If experimentation is what we think it is, then we must *think* of
the world in a certain way."   

Off to sleep,
r.



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