Re: BHA: society, santa, truth, etc.

[Ruth Groff <rgroff@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi Colin!


I wrote:
>>>And couldn't one argue on the basis of DPF that the cause of strife around
>>the globe is the absence of God, since (1) God is, on this view, real and
>>(2) presumably things would be very different if God either existed or
>>decided to impose world peace?

And you wrote:
>Well, of course I don't accept this since I don't believe in him in the
>first place - that is I don't believe god exists...

I just wanted to emphasize that I said that God is `real', from this
perspective, not God `exists'.

Getting back to Santa, though, I agree with you (I think) that it is the
intersubjectively held beliefs about him, and the material practices which
such beliefs engender, that both exist and are real.  Santa himself is
neither.  Okay.  So is it (a) Santa not existing, (b) the fact, i.e.,
well-founded belief, that Santa does not exist or (c) the idea/practice of
Santa that is the de-ont in this example?

[Your dehydration case would seem to be of the type (a), with "not being
present" standing in the place of "not existing."  Yes?  I need to think
about this more, but it really seems like so many re-descriptions to me.  I
mean, doesn't dehydration just *mean* the absence of water?  And if you die
as a result of not having water, isn't there something that actually happens
in your cells?  Why isn't "The lack of water causes death" just another way
of saying "We need water to live" or "If a whole bunch of things occur,
including the ingestion of water, you get live people?"  (There must be
someone who knows the first thing about biology who can help me out here!)
I don't know; there's certainly something intuitively plausible about the
idea that absences can have causal significance, but I'm going to fence-sit
for a time yet on how it ought best be theorized.]


>Well you may not be sold, but if I get you right you are wrong. we have
>discourses of Minotaur's etc, but as far as I can see very few practices.
>The mere existence of an absence does not make it causally efficacious any
>more than the mere existence of a presence makes it causally efficacious.

My brain *really* hurts now, but let me say that I did not mean to suggest
either (a) that all of the things that exist but are absent are efficatious
or (b) that all of the things that are non-existent and absent are
efficatious.  I'm sure that there are plenty of absences, both of things
that are existent and of things that are non-existent, that are irrelevant.
It did, however, in the language of RTS, seem that, in the case of de-onts,
to be "real" is to be "actual."


>Well, I'm not howie, but:
>
>1.	Water is wet
>2.	water is H2O
>3.	water quenches thirst
>4.	Water has the power to put out fires.....

Well, *I'M* (clearly) not a biochemist (or a brilliant philosopher for that
matter), but while all of these statements seem like they could be true, the
list doesn't seem to get at the heart of what I took Howie to be claiming,
which was that the world is ontologically indeterminate -- that, in
principle, multiple, if not an infinite number, of causal accounts of a
given phenomenon must be generated because any given phenomenon just *IS* a
multiple/infinate number of ways.  This is different, it seems to me, from
saying that most interesting phenomena are complex, or that phenomena can be
described in many different ways (the latter being what I took Howie to mean
when he referred to the "epistemological" sense in which truth(s) is/are
multiple).


>On RB's account of SS can you fleece out what you understand by it and the
>bits you don't like; and the hard bit, provide a better account. RB doesn't
>claim that his account is perfect, only that it is the best available that
>he is aware of.


I'm way too exhausted just now to fleece anything out (other than a
blanket!), and even in the longer term of, say, tomorrow, the real response
will have to wait until the writing of my dissertation is actually under
way, BUT, that said, I guess where I don't learn as much from Bhaskar is
when it comes to theorizing (1) the ontological significance of ideas and
(2) validity/"rationality at the level of judgement".  I'm *sure* that I
can't do better than he does (!), but at this still very early stage in my
own thinking, I guess I would say that I've learned more about what's at
stake in these matters, in particular, from my other big favorite, Charles
Taylor.  Taylor's no great analyst of capitalism, mind you, but I've found
the hermeneutic and Aristotelian strains of his thinking to be instructive.
(Actually, didn't we talk about this at one point?  You were unimpressed, as
I recall.. thought that Bhaskar had critiqued/dismissed hermeneutics quite
handily -- no?)

Anyway, I'm sorry to have so little to offer, other than vague grumblings,
but stay tooned for said forthcoming earth-shattering dissertation, due in
2000!

R.








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