BHA: Just when i thought it was over...

[Ruth Groff <rgroff@xxxxxxxx>]

Okay, so I mention the dicussion about alethic truth to my advisor [I was
trying to find out what's going on with Kant's category of the understanding
"negation", to see if that would help me think through the question of how
Bhaskar distinguishes between truth-as-alethia and causality... sigh... not
much luck.  But I digress...], and I give him the example we were tossing
about, that the alethic truth of water is its molecular structure.  Yes?  He
says, "That's not truth *or* cause, that's a *description*, one of many
possible descriptions."

I myself am, as we all know, all too well, very unclear about all of this,
and had in fact been thinking earlier that alethia in the instance of the
example sounds like a combination of material and formal cause, in the
Aristotelian language that Bhaskar periodically likes to invoke.  I had been
wondering about the matter of *final* cause, to stay inside the Aristotelian
framework for the moment, in relation to the truth of social phenomena...
wondering how, in accounts of the alethic truth of *social* phenomena, one
could justify focusing in on material cause and formal cause, which is what
"The truth of water is its molecular structure" seems to amount to.

But none of this helped me to see how a proper critical realist would
respond to Asher's remark.  It seemed kind of right.  Any comments?

R.





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