Re: BHA: Epistemological relativism

["Marko Beljac" <beljac@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> On "epistemological relativism."  First of all, keep in mind that Bhaskar
uses the term "relativism" here in a way that no one else in philosophy
does.  It does not refer to the view that competing knowledge-claims are of
equal epistemic merit.  Instead, it refers -- as you say -- simply to the
truism that without human beings there wouldn't be humanly produced
knowledge-claims, and that these hmanly produced, linguistic claims of ours
(to the effect that the world works in this or that way) have changed over
time and will no doubt continue to change.  Saying that science is something
that we humans - as opposed to tables or plants or even higher primates -
produce, and that it has changed over time, tells us nothing about whether
or not some, all or any of the knowledge that we have produced is true.  To
put it differently, the concept of truth is not at stake in deciding whether
or not to go along with what Bhaskar unfortunately, in my view, dubbed
"epistemological relativism."

I do not think that our knoweledge of the world, ie science, are "lingusitic
claims". They are of course Mathematical claims. Also epistemic relativism,
in whatever form, of course makes sense if we assume what you say "science
is something that we humans-as opposed to tabled plants...produce". However
Science to my mind is not "production" but "discovery". There is something
about our natures that enables us to learn the laws of nature. The laws of
nature are of course real and our knoweledge of them owes to our
biological/cognitive natures not to the societies we live in or that
"scientists" form. One may well state that natural languages are something
that we, not plants or tables produce, but this does not change the fact
that the evolution of language and the acqusition of language cannot be
explained through natural science. There are not entities out there that one
may refer to as "language kinds".


>
> On the epistemic status of the claim "The natural world is real."  Here
I'd say two things.  First, if the analysis above is correct, then the fact
that such a claim is, indeed, a claim - the end-result of some cognitive
labour undertaken by human beings - implies nothing about its truth-value.
There is no added need to worry, no reason to think that because it is a
linguistic artifact, such a claim is any less epistemically sound.  (Because
really, when you think about it, what's the alternative?!)  Second, I think
that Bhaskar and many critical realists would say that although all
knowledge-claims are fallible, those such as "The natural world is real,"
which are arrived at via a valid transcendental deduction, are especially
well-grounded, compared to other claims.  [Do keep in mind here that for
many critical realisists, or perhaps at this point I should say
transcendental dialectical critical realists, to conclude that "The natural
world is real" is not to endorse materialism as a metaphysical stance.  So
that which has been established transcendentally -- and therefore with a
relative degree of certainty -- is very general.]
>
> Finally, on emergence and supernatural forces.  Again two points.  First,
to say that human nature (or any set of properties that are emergent at a
given level of complexity, for that matter) does not REDUCE to underlying
biology, is not to say, as you do, that it has nothing at all to do with it.
It is instead to say one or both of two things.  At the epistemological
level, it is to say that explanations in which psychological predicates are
employed capture something that is not captured by explanations in which
only physiological predicates are employed; the two types of explanations
are not equivalent in meaning or in explanatory power.  At the ontological
level, it is to commit oneself to the existence of specifically
psychological properties.  [Just as, when one says that social phenomena do
not reduce to individual phenomena, one is saying both that social and
psychological explanations are not equivalent and that social entities
exist.]  Second, while anti-reductionism hardly commits one to the belief
that deep down everything is God [Bhaskar himself, for example, originally
called his anti-reductionism "synchronic emergent powers materialism"], it
*is* the case that some transcendental dialectical critical realists hold
this metaphysical position.  The important thing, though, in terms of your
objection, is that belief in emergent properties is perfectly consistent
with a robust materialism.

Social entities exist. But not in of themselves. They exist because we exist
and we have a biological nature which enables them to exist. Therefore
sociology must reduce to biology...the manifesto of an unashamed
reductionist.




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