Re: BHA: negativity wins

[Mervyn Hartwig <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Yoshie,

Delighted to hear from you again.

You're right. That's an important distinction to be made, and there
doesn't seem to be any reason in principle why it can't be made within a
DCR framework.

Kuhn's sociological account is basically internal to the scientific
community, so you're right, he doesn't distinguish A and B. I wasn't of
course wanting to defend all aspects of his account (it wasn't even
original apparently), only to use it as a convenient handle for the now
widely accepted view that scientific revolutions do in fact occur.

Bhaskar does think it important to relate science and philosophy to
their wider social contexts via a sociology of knowledge, though being a
philosopher he doesn't practice it a great deal. He has always held that
'as new [philosophical] premises (forms of social practice) arise, new
modes of philosophical reflection become possible (*and necessary*)'
(SRHE 13-14, my emphasis.)

I myself would distinguish between

1) A shift in _Weltanschauung_ or general outlook or worldview that
accompanies the transition from one mode of production to another, i.e.
in your example from feudalism to capitalism.

2) A shift in the general conceptual scheme (GCS) or philosophical
ontology (or grammar, as Nick has called it) that informs the various
sciences.

3) A paradigm shift or shift in the fundamental research programme of a
particular science, eg from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican in
astronomy, from Creationism to Darwinism in the biological sciences,
from the Newtonian to the Einsteinian in physics.

There is warrant for the distinction between 2) and 3) in Bhaskar. Thus
in RTS (195) he says that 'The trouble with social science is not that
it has no (or too many) paradigms or research programmes; but rather
that it lacks an adequate general conceptual scheme. (RTS, 195)' And of
course it is this GCS that he, from PON on, has being trying to supply
in his philosophy, because he sees it as essential for emancipatory
social science, which in turn is an important aspect of the dialectics
of emancipation which will take us to a post-capitalist, ecologically
sustainable etc order. And he certainly seems to think that the
revindication of ontolgy is made both possible and necessary by social
developments, in the same way that the theory of biological evolution
became possible and necessary with the development of competive
production for the market and Einstein's theory of relativity with the
first great wave of globalisation of capital, hence of the relativity at
the heart of exchange value. (Newton watched the apple fall, Einstein
was able to think the possibility of the observer falling too.)

Seen in these terms the fundamental drive in Bhaskar's system is to
bring 1), 2) and 3) into phase, such that a non-positivist naturalism
informs all the sciences which are in turn overreached and embraced
within a fundamentally religious Weltanschauung which is not however
incompatible with science (is informed by the same GCS).

I don't want to deny that Bhaskar sometimes gives the impression that
philosophy develops purely under its own internal logic, as in his
account of the Western philosophical tradition - where ontological
monovalence, e.g., is born with Parmenides and just seems to kick on,
regardless of the social context. But even this can be accommodated in a
schema which stresses the importance of socio-historical transitions, if
one holds (as I do) that the transition from relatively egalitarian
gathering and hunting societies to hierarchical or class societies was
qualitatively far greater than subsequent transitions (a fact arguably
registered in the widespread myth of a Fall), then there is a sense in
which there is continuity in the social context underpinning om. This is
one of the points I think of the Bhaskarian concept of generalized
master-servant-type relations. Compare the way in which William Blake -
between whose thought and Bhaskar's I'm becoming more and more convinced
there are deep affinities - links om (not his term, but that's what he
means) and instrumental rationality to institutionalized forms of
oppression and repression.

In FEW it sometimes seems that fundamental social structure itself is
generated by philosophical mistakes as in the account of 'the irrealist
categorial structure' of modern society. But it is perhaps possible to
read this as supplementing rather than displacing the account of social
structure and power given in the earlier works.

Mervyn


Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx> writes
>
>It seems to me that it is best to make a distinction between (A) the
>_emergence_ of modern science (made possible by the transition from
>the world before capitalism to the capitalist world) and (B)
>theoretical changes _within_ modern science.  Calling both (A) & (B)
>"paradigm changes" a la Kuhn _obliterates_ the aforementioned
>distinction, that is to say, the _specificity_ of capitalism as a
>mode of production (& the ideological condition that goes with it);
>in other words, the effect of Kuhn's argument is to obscure the
>specificity of what capitalism is.
>
>Is there anything in Bhaskar's theory that invalidates the
>distinction between (A) and (B)?  Given Bhaskar's emphasis on
>emergence as an important concept, I rather think that it is more
>consonant with Bhaskar's philosophy of science to make the
>distinction.
>
>Yoshie
>
>
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