BHA: Knowledge as a social product

[Ruth Groff <rgroff@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi Marko,

You said that you agree with Mervyn (and with the rest of us, along with the early Bhaskar, at least) on the key point of the discussion.

As Mervyn put it:

1. "Certainly, knowledge is a social product, achieved via the transformation in the TD of existing knowledge (which itself is in the ID in relation to such practice)"

2. "but how this is done, in science, is constrained and shaped also by the way the world is quite independently of our knowledge."

I take it that the "but" above could just as easily have been an "and."

I want to make sure that you do agree with Mervyn here.  If you do, then we can call it a day and move on ... if you don't, then perhaps we can enlist Mervyn's considerable powers of persuasion [ :-)] to help convince you!

For better or for worse, the idea that knowledge is something that is socially produced (and also that it doesn't really make sense to talk about isolated cavemen as a way of thinking about practices like knowledge production) *is* a basic element of the critical realist alternative to positivism. If you are trying to decide what you like or don't like about critical realism, it would be important both to understand the critical realist position a bit better than it seems that you do, and to decide for sure your own position on the point (though I would agree with Tobin that you seem, at least, to have been pretty consistent in your opposition to the position that Mervyn sets out).

Warmly,
Ruth



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