BHA: Go team! What a great discussion!

[Ruth Groff <rgroff@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

First of all: Mervyn, thanks for your post on the deontology stuff.  Also,
sorry about the "nutty."  I don't, in fact, believe you to be anything of
the sort!  And thanks too for the call for papers.  The deadline is really,
really soon, but I might pursue it.  You?  Others?

James I appreciated your elaborations.  It's curious, really, that
utilitarianism should end up being associated with a focus on the Good in
the current division of things.  It so much seems an approach that cuts off
real thinking about what is involved in living a virtuous (in the sense of
the excellence of a thing, in this case human beings) life.

Anyhow it was interesting.  I'd be curious to hear even more about how you
make use of Bhaskar's work in your own.  Is it just DCR that is useful, or
was CR useful too?

Meanwhile: YAY Doug, for coming through with a reference for "powerful
particular"!  I feel better now.  I might have to read their book, though,
before I use it again in conjunction with Bhaskar.

As a result of our recent discussion of DPF ch. 2, I've been wondering about
the differences between the accounts of causality in RTS and DPF
respectively.  Do people think that Bhaskar's conception of causality
changed enough from RTS to DPF that from the perspective of DPF the account
in RTS is just flawed?  Or can it be translated, or better: transposed, onto
the DPF account?

If it's just plain old wrong, from a DPF perspective (hopelessly monovalent,
actualist, etc.), it would seem to me that the *RTS-specific* line of
argument for science having an intransitive object (viz., the transcendental
argument from experimentation) has to go too.  Now that may really be fine,
since as soon as Bhaskar applied transcendental realism to the SOCIAL
sciences, the argument was no longer based on the RTS transcendental
deduction from experimentation anyway.  But it does raise the question for
me of just what it is from transcendental realism that is preserved at the
1M level of dialectical critical realism.  If the answer is "Non-identity"
it gets tricky.  Because the "non-identity" argument of RTS (at least as
I've understood the term from how Adorno uses it, which is something like
"the non-identity of subject and object") hinges, I think, precisely on the
realist account of causality as a power of things that is developed there.
In fact one might say that that *IS* the argument for non-identity in
transcendental realism.  I can see that in a way none of this is all that
significant, since, again, as early as PON Bhaskar had to develop an
argument for non-identity suited to the *social* sciences, but still ... I'm
curious about it.

r.



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