Hi Dick,
Thanks for your post. I have always thought about these issue in very
much the same way as you, though in my case it was not that I was taught
by Jesuits but just that I never knew all that much about science -- if
you don't know a lot about science, then Aristotle's physics is by far the
most compelling. Add to this having been introduced to philosophy via a
semester-long critique of Ayer and Hume, carried out by the world's most
charismatic professor ever ... and voila!
In any case, you wrote: "Causality seems to me to be intimately related to
essence or natural kind."
I agree with this, and I take it to be the view that is advanced in
RTS. Bhaskar says that the concept of "causal mechanism" rests on the
concept of "the exercise of a power." This concept of a causal power, in
turn, is necessarily connected to that of "real essence." Objects
(entities or relations -- later, absences thereof (i.e., "de-onts'," which
for the record I am skeptical of)) have the powers they do, according to
Bhaskar, in virtue of their real essences.
I was perfectly content with this until Ronny put us on to that Irving
Copi article (I will check the reference for you, if you'd like, and you
probably would), and to Ellis' book [*Scientific Essentialism*, Cambridge,
2001]. Before reading these pieces, I had kind of thought that Bhaskar
(or maybe Bhaskar and Harre & Madden) was unique in making this kind of
argument. But it turns out that there is and has been all kinds of
discussion within mainstream philosophy about each of the components of
the model! Big debates pro and con about the existence of natural kinds,
arguments about what KINDS of kinds there might be, nuanced discussions
about dispositional powers and how they relate to other properties ...
etc. [Given that I'm basically working within the discipline of
philosophy, I feel kind of silly that I wasn't aware of this -- but also
excited, to realize that there is all of this work out there on the
foundational concepts which figure in Bhaskar's work and which I find so
interesting and persuasive.]
Anyhow, I'm not sure what to say more than that I am now trying to figure
out for myself *precisely* what I think causality is, once we've shifted
to working within the essentialist, neo-Aristotelian metaphysics that you
describe. I really appreciate your comments on the issue.
Warmly,
Ruth
has in Aristotelian terms, Because I received my philosophical training in
a Jesuit seminary, in which neo-Thomistic thought was dominant, I never
really accepted the total modernist rejection of Aristotle. One could, I
was taught, accept the successive revolutions in physics, without
rejecting the Aristotelian four causes. The linear view of causility is
"essentially" a truncated view of efficient causation, leaving out
material, formal, and final causes. Talk of human agency is a way of
bringing final causation back into the discussion. "A functional relation
between ongoing events" pertains to formal causality, understood as the
intelligibility inherent in those events. But there are other kinds of
intelligibility in events, such as the kind of developmental process so
dramatically illustrated by embryonic development, the combination of
random variation and environmental selection illustrated not just by
biological evolution but also by the selective survival of economic
enterprises and of operant behaviors in operant conditioning theory. And,
of course, the dialectical processes examined in DPF provide another way
of describing essences as a generative (causal) mechanism In dialectic,
imo, essences cannot be thought of as inhering in windowless monads. The
"monads" would have to have constitutive internal relations with one
another, and these relations would have to include "negation" and "absence."
>I am suggesting connections between "real essence" and the combination
of material and formal cause that the Aristotelians and Thomists call the
essence of material beings. I am further suggesting that the various
kinds of intelligibility developed in the modern sciences, social as well
as natural, expand the traditional notion of formal causality.
>
>There is also a whole realm of scientific work that does not fit into
any of the four causes -- statistical science. This has to do with the
probability of events, or the relative frequency of their
occurance. There is no direct intelligibility, no intrinsic connection,
between successive tosses of a coin. But the relative frequency of heads
and tails in a series of sets of coin tosses will oscillate around .5.
>
>It seems to me that catastrophe theory is a way of getting at the
increasing probability of an event -- the straw that breaks the camel's
back -- and that chaos theory spells out patterns of oscillation of
events around much more complicated "attractors" than the .5 of the toss
of an unbiased coin. These both deal with statistical probabilities, and
provide a kind of indirect intelligibility quite different from the
direct intelligibility of "essences."
>
>Regards,
>
>Dick
>
>At 10:15 AM 02/27/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>>I have been wondering about Bhaskar and causality too. When I looked
at him
>>and Harre and Madden, I see mostly the ontological affirmation that
there are
>>causal powers, pitted against the Humean conjunction view. Part of the
>>disengagement with contemporary thinkers that Ruth talks about relates
to the
>>discussion of a different opposition to Hume, the linear view of causality
>>exemplefied in the two billiard balls. I was hoping to see Bhaskar or
Harre
>>talk about 'contemporaneous causation, a functional relation between
ongoing
>>events as when a gas expands with heating, etc. Mandelbaum talks about
this
>>at length in his *Anatomy of Historical Knowledge* and other works. It is
>>another way of bringing back causality, not by affirming that we must
discuss
>>powers, which it more or less takes for granted, but by trying to
demonstrate
>>the actual process. What is more, there is common sense support (as
well as
>>scientific) support for this view.
>>
>>Ian
>>
>> >
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>How about the following, then: can anyone tell me what they see as the
>> >>major difference(s), if any, between *RTS* and Harre and Madden's
*Causal
>> >>Powers*? I am about to order *Causal Powers*, so that I can read it
over
>> >>carefully, but I'd love to get a jump start by hearing what others
think.
>> >>
>> >>Also, there is and has been a fair amount of debate, actually, within
>> >>academic philosophy, over Locke's conception of real essences, the
>> >>existence (or not) of natural kinds and how these issues relate to the
>> >>conceptualization of causality. The lack of engagement in RTS with
>> >>contemporaries involved in these debates is kind of striking,
really. I'm
>> >>curious about it. Is it just that philosophers of science in the
>> >>mid-1970's never crossed paths with metaphysicians and/or
philosophers of
>> >>language? [For that matter, does anyone know if Bhaskar did his
degree in
>> >>a philosophy department?]
>> >>
>> >>r.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> --- from list bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > --- from list bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
>>
>>Ian Verstegen
>>Department of Art History
>>Temple University
>>8th Floor Ritter Hall Annex
>>Philadelphia, PA 19122
>>tel: (215) 204-7837
>>fax: (215) 204-6951
>>http://astro.temple.edu/~iversteg
>>
>>
>> --- from list bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
>
>
>
>
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