Re: BHA: Re: starting up DPF readings again.

[Louis Irwin <lirwin1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Howard,

>1.   What is the significance of our being able to imagine a world
>of absence only?

I am not sure that this question captures the issue of priority of absence
over presence, if that is what you are after.  That priority is surely more
than just the possibility that the world could have been empty.  I have
never read DPF as saying that something comes out of nothing.  I thought
the priority of absence means that the world could have no presences at
all, while the opposite case of all presence and no absence is not
possible, at least in a world without change (and a world without change is
not distinguishable from an empty wporld).

>2.   Is it really true that if there were only the positive nothing
>could happen?

To question this, you have to think things could happen in a world with
only positive things, that is in a world without absences.  Yet change
always involves a transition from something to its absence: something
possessed a property yesterday that it does not possess today.  That seems
a truism.

You go on to say:

>if every
>individual thing is different in some way from every other
>individual thing, then how does it follow that there must be
>absence or that nothing would happen?  Each thing will be in some
>way distinguishable from the other.  So now they are all jammed up
>against each other without gaps.  All we need is to suppose that
>their interaction with one another is perfectly choreographed and
>we have no need of absence. We can even allow that they decay and
>are transformed.

All right - A is distinguishable from B, which is distinguishable from C,
etc.  If Bhaskar accepted indiscernibility of identicals, then we could
immediately conclude that A has some property B does not have, and then
argue for the existence of absences.  But Bhaskar rejects that principle as
I recall (and forget why).  But the truism above about temporal change
should still suffice.  The world you seem to be describing seems to lack
temporal change.

>3.   Now what I do have is an individual and an other ("to allow at
>least two . . . non identicals is transcendentally necessary").
>That does seem necessary for something to happen.  Then what I have
>is a relation between them.  What is the ontology of that relation?
>Since it is a relation it is imperceptible.  Is it real?

Not all relations are imperceptible, but are you suggesting that if
something is imperceptible then it is not real?  Surely not, so I don't see
your point.

>* * * *
>
>Does the first section of Chapter 2 mean that the following
>argument from a book I teach out of is error?:  "The problem as to
>omissions is that reliance on an omission is an illogical concept.
>We can say that A acted -- bought or sold -- at a given price in
>reliance on what B told him, but we can't say that A acted --
>bought or sold at a given price -- in reliance on what B didn't
>tell him."

I guess the law is saying that a legally enforcable contract must be based
on what is said or done rather than on what is not.  That is a reasonable
enough prescription, but I doubt the contrary reliance is illogical.  Not
wise or workable or just, perhaps, but not incoherent surely.

>* * * *
>
>Anybody have a workable definition of "ontologically
>extensionalist" (p 40 at bottom).

Traditional extensionalism can be viewed as taking a fixed set of atoms of
some sort that are part of a closed system yielding actualist generalities.
In a logically extensional language the atoms are atomic sentences which
enter into truth-functional relations.  For example, 'p&q' is true if and
only if p is true and q is true.  Truth as a whole can be given a purely
extensional definition along these lines.  A major problem is that language
tends to be highly recalcitrant when you try to interpret it in exclusively
extensional terms.  This example is at the level of epistemology, but
Bhaskar sees the same sort of thing occurring at the level of ontology and
hence his phrase.  The world is reduced to atomistic states, and laws are
sustained as valid by the tacit assumption of closure.  In opposing such an
atomistice view, RB of course wants to view totalities as other than atoms
bound together by external relations.  The concept of absence as essential
to this picture.

Bhaskar questions both the scientistic assertion that factual propositions
are value-free in content and the positivist denial that value propositions
can be derived from factual propositions.  The first denies that factual
discourse can be about values, the second denies that factual discourse can
lead to values. The scientistic assertion, conjoined with an extensional
theory of meaning, leads to the positivist denial: value-free semantic atoms
plus the construction of meanings from extensional functions of these can
only lead to value-free propositions.   Bhaskar's view is that facts are
social constructs in the transitive dimension and so are bound to
incorporate values implicit in social relations.

Louis Irwin



     --- from list bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---