Re: BHA: Ontological Stratificatio

[lynne engelskirchen <lhengels@xxxxxxx>]

Hello Hans!

It's great to hear from you!!

I think Tobin is right to challenge the idea that because chemical
reactions emerge from the physics of particles and because life emerges
from chemical reactions that this establishes ontological stratification.
An electron is a powerful particular and an atom of hydrogen is a powerful
particular and you and I are powerful particulars and each of us is capable
of making the world different than it would otherwise be.  I don't locate
any ontological stratification  there, though I recognize that there is a
priority of emergence in how these different agents come to be.

Also, tangentially, whatever may be true of pragmatism as a school of
philosophy and whatever may have been the confusions of idealism and
realism that ultimately muddled Peirce's thought, there is no question that
he held to a position of ontological stratification very much like
Bhaskar's, as Tobin's article establishes.  He considered the world
differentiated into the possible, the actual and the semiotic.

Now, I'm interested in stratification as a feature of the world itself.  As
I started to explain this, using the litmus test example, I realized that
it wasn't as plain a distinction as I thought.  The world is stratified,
Bhaskar argues, because although we bring about the pattern of events when
we conduct a scientific experiment, we don't bring about the change the
experiment is about -- ie we don't cause the litmus paper to change red in
acid.  That is nature's work.  So therefore the world is stratified
ontologically.  We must distinguish between patterns of events and causal
laws, those things we bring about as coparticipants with nature and those
we don't.  We provide the occasion for the change, but not the change itself.

This leaves open the interpretation that seemed unsatisfactory to me:  the
world is stratified because there is a causal mechanism of nature I don't
control that changes the color of litmus paper when it contacts acid.  But
because I don't control something doesn't establish that there is an
ontological difference between me and the thing -- that we are real in
different ways.  It does establish, as Tobin points out, a difference
between my existence as a conscious being and other powerful particulars.
But that is an ontological difference between the experiential and the
actual, not between causal laws and patterns of events.  So I realized I
had to bear down harder on the distinction Bhaskar actually makes: I wanted
to distinguish ontologically not patterns of events and causal mechanisms
or structures but patterns of events and causal laws.  Then I realized I
did not have a very good idea of what Bhaskar meant by law.  That provoked
the Peirce's stone experiment example and the reference to scholastic
realism, for Peirce has wrestled with the question, though I'm not sure his
result is clear.  On the question of law, is Bhaskar clear?

Andrew raises a point that points in the direction of Peirce's solution,
actually.  I don't really know what you mean about the abstraction of
spatial structure, Andrew, but the way you present the idea offers a good
example to chew on.  You can stand in front of me or at my back.  The
furniture of a room (or the world) can clutter it or leave place for easy
movement.  Spatial structure in this sense is actual.  But the causal
efficacy of matter taking the one spatial form or the other is different
and has, as you suggest, different real potentials.  But then this is key,
isn't it, not spatial structures as such.  Causal structures have powers
even when they are not exercised.  So the possession of potential is (1)
non-actual and (2) ontologically different from realized results or
patterns of events.

Now that's clear as far as it goes, but the problem is that realized
results are material things in the world and all material things are
powerful particulars, so do we deal here not with an ontological
stratification as a feature of the world itself, but rather with a
perspectival switch?  If we consider the furniture of the world as a
realized result of some causal process, then it is a pattern of events; if
we consider it as causally efficacious itself, then it has causal power and
potential.  But then isn't this a difference in how we choose to look at
the thing, not how the world is?

Tobin points to the distinction between the semiosic and the actual and I
follow him there.  Intentionality, the semiosic, the ideological do not
have the same relation to causal power that muscles and acid and hydrogen
do.  So I agree this difference is an ontological one.  (But having made
this a matter of ontological stratification, don't we have a problem with
reasons as causes?  The question raised in that respect, incidentally, is
not about whether reasons are caused!  That is a different matter.)

To summarize:

1.	The world is made up of powerful particulars.  Powerful particulars have
causal powers.  That means they are more than appears.  They exist as a
range of real possibilities.  This is the ontological level of the real.

2.	The world is what occurs, patterns of events.  Not all possibilities are
realized.  Those realized are ontological level #2, the level of the actual.

3.	The world is appropriated by humans (and other creatures also!) through
the mediation of consciousness, intentionality, semiosis.  This is
ontological level #3, the level of experience.

But come back to the passage of Bhaskar at RTS 54 Tobin quotes from my last
post:  "[the] ontological distinction between causal laws and patterns of
events depends upon only two premises:  (1) that men are causal agents
capable of interfering with the course of nature and (2) that experimental
activity, the planned disruption of the course of nature, is a significant
feature of science."

How does the fact that humans have the power of agency establish a
distinction between the actual and the non-actual real?

Here perhaps is the significance of intervening:  we can bring about
patterns of events, but we can't bring about nature's laws.  So we share,
ontologically, with hydrogen and acid the power to bring about patterns of
events.  What we lack is the power to bring about nature's laws.  In other
words nature operates according to its own dictates.  We can create new
elements in the laboratory, but as far as we know we can't create the laws
that enable us to create new elements.  That's the basic premise of
scientific realism, isn't it.  So Level #1, the non-actual real, would be
the world of causal laws. What is possible is possible because of nature's
laws.  Nature works only in these ways, not in that.

But then (1) how do we think of these laws?  they are not some sort of
platonic forms, and (2) where does that leave us with social laws and the
ontological stratification of society?

Howard




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