File spoon-archives/seminar-14.archive/marx-bhaskar_2001/seminar-14.0103, message 9


From: Hans Ehrbar <econ-AT-lists.econ.utah.edu>
Subject: pon3-20
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 15:50:00 -0700


*{PON3:25} Chapter 2: Societies*

*Introduction*

What properties do societies possess that might make them
possible objects of knowledge for us?  My strategy in
developing an answer to this question will be effectively
based on a pincer movement.  But in deploying the pincer I
shall concentrate first on the ontological question of the
properties that societies possess, before shifting to the
epistemological question of how these properties make them
possible objects of knowledge for us.  This is not an
arbitrary order of development.  It reflects the condition
that, for transcendental realism, it is the nature of
objects that determines their cognitive possibilities for
us; that, in nature, it is humanity that is contingent and
knowledge, so to speak, accidental.  Thus it is because
sticks and stones are solid that they can be picked up and
thrown, not because they can be picked up and thrown that
they are solid (though that they can be handled in this sort
of way may be a contingently necessary condition for our
knowledge of their solidity).^1

In the next section I argue that societies are irreducible
to people and in the third section I sketch a model of their
connection.  In that and the following section I argue that
social forms are a necessary condition for any intentional
act, that their pre-existence establishes their autonomy as
possible objects of scientific investigation and that their
causal power establishes their reality.  The pre-existence
of social forms will be seen to entail a transformational
model of social activity, from which a number of ontological
limits on any possible naturalism can be immediately
derived.  In the fifth section I show how it is, just in
virtue of these emergent features of societies, that social
science is possible; and I relate two other types of limit
on naturalism (viz. epistemological and relational ones)
back to the fundamental properties of the transformational
model itself.  In the last section I use the results
established in the previous section to generate a critique
of the traditional fact/value dichotomy; and in an appendix
to the chapter I illustrate the notion of social science as
critique in the reconstruction of an essentially Marxian
concept of ideology.  Now it is important to note that
because the causal power of {PON3:26} social forms is
mediated through human agency, my argument can only be
formally completed when the causal status of human agency is
itself vindicated.  This is accomplished in Chapter 3 in the
course of a parallel demonstration of the possibility of
naturalism in the domain of the psychological sciences.

The transformational model of social activity developed here
will be seen to entail a relational conception of the
subject-matter of social science.  On this conception
`society does not consist of individuals [or, we might add,
groups], but expresses the sum of the relations within which
individuals [and groups] stand'.^2  And the essential
movement of scientific theory will be seen to consist in the
movement from the manifest phenomena of social life, as
conceptualized in the experience of the social agents
concerned, to the essential relations that necessitate
them.  Of such relations the agents involved may or may not
be aware.  Now it is through the capacity of social science
to illuminate such relations that it may come to be
`emancipatory'.  But the emancipatory potential of social
science is contingent upon, and entirely a consequence of,
its contextual explanatory power.


1. See A Realist Theory of Science, 1st edn (Leeds 1975),
2nd edn (Hassocks and New Jersey 1978), esp. ch. 1
sec. 4. (p. 25)


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