BHA: Santa and his concept

[MSPRINKER@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

               State University of New York at Stony Brook
                       Stony Brook, NY 11794-3355

                                            Michael Sprinker
                                            Professor of English & Comp Lit
                                            Comparative Studies
                                            516 632-9634
                                            08-Jun-1998 10:11am EDT
FROM:  MSPRINKER
TO:    Remote Addressee                     ( _bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx )

Subject: Santa and his concept

Dear Louis,

I would not disagree in any fundamental way with your last
post.  But then what in the realm of social phenomena would
or could ever possess intransitivity.  Since social phenomena
(or, better, social structures) are, according to Bhaskar, always
dependent on agents for their realization, it would seem that
they are in some sense absolutely concept-dependent--or at least
action dependent:  you can't have capitalism without capitalists
and wage laborers, both of whom assent to the wage form, and
so forth.  Would that not lead very quickly to saying that
capitalism, or any mode of economic production, lacks real
intransitivity?

I must confess that given my great admiration for A REALIST
THEORY OF SCIENCE, I've long been puzzled and dissatisfied
with the way in which the Bhaskarean program works in the
social sciences.  It's there that the ontological questions
which seem to me largely unproblematic for the natural sciences
become impossibly complex and the solutions unsatisfactory.
This is especially true, I think, when Bhaskar tries to describe
the history of scientific theory, where his latent rationalism
comes to the fore.

Cordially,

Michael


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