Re: [Critical-Realism] Comment re: holism

["Andrew Brown" <A.Brown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Howard and Ruth,
 
(1) Howard, the difference between a social structure, as conceived of within CR, and the structure of an atom, is that the latter is indeed instantiated in space but the former is not. E.g. one cannot point to the husband-wife relation as one can to an atom (admittedly pointing to atoms requires experiment). It is this that Harre and others seize on in their critique of Bhaskar and the TMSA. That is, social structures are 'present only in their effects', for Bhaskar and CR, whereas atoms are just present. Atoms are 'powerful particulars' but social structures have no spatial location so cannot be. This is related to the fact that, for CR, social structures are relations of *social positions* (which do not have spatial location) not of individuals or persons (who do have spatial location). In my view the way out of this is to see structures as relations of *practices* but Archer calls this 'central conflation'!
 
(2) Ruth, surely the thing one works on ('material cause') constrains and facilitates one's work (your 'formal cause')?
 
Best wishes
 
Andy

________________________________

From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Howard Engelskirchen
Sent: Mon 6/4/2007 7:11 AM
To: Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Comment re: holism



Hi Ruth,

There's a critical absence in your argument and a decisive ambiguity with
the consequence that what is right on lacks the ground it needs.

The absence is the concept of relations.  Bhaskar says this very clearly in
the second chapter of PON or its various iterations, e.g. ch 5 of Reclaiming
Reality.  This is from Marx, e.g. "Society does not consist of individuals,
but expresses the sum of the relations and conditions in which these
individuals stand to one another," v. 28 (Grundrisse) p 195 -- right after
the beginning of the section from the Chapter on Capital on 'Exchange Value
Emerging from Circulation.'  This is the point with ontological purchase.
The alternative is that individuals are the only existent or, by contrast,
there are individuals and pretty much ill defined wholes like groups or
nations or populations or societies -- these are the things, as I understand
it, to which 'holism' refers.  Bhaskar is ready to acknowledge the value of
studying social psychological phenomena like groups, but he would want to
start, like Marx, from the relations of which they are composed.

The ambiguity is with your use of the word 'agents'.  You say "while
structures surely arent agents . . . ."  But then you will go on to say that
structures cause things.  But there is an ambiguity in the concept of agency
between the idea of efficient cause, as when Bhaskar says it is only
individuals that ever do anything, and the way we think of anything with
causal potency as a causal agent.  The difficulty is a residue of our
tendency, since the Renaissance, of reducing all cause to efficient cause.
Yes, individuals are the efficient cause of the reproduction of any social
relation.  But when we say structures also cause things we are appealing to
the kind of idea that includes material and formal cause as well as
efficient cause, and, since social things stable enough to endure are always
reproduced, final cause, also.

As you know I agree with you about social structures -- they are the
constitutive formal causes of causally potent social entities.  But that
means that formal causes themselves, the relational structures of social
life, must be causally potent.  That is the critical thing and corresponds
to our experience.  We all know passing buckets down a line is a different
phenomenon from each person going individually to the well or, to use an
analogy, that you can arrange furniture in a room so people can walk through
or not.  But the point is form cannot be just the idea of it but must be
materially instantiated, that is, for social things, instantiated in nature
and the behaviors of individuals, which together may be thought of as the
material causes of social life.

It is amazing the effective censorship that exists, and self-censorship in
fact, with regard to questions of social ontology.  It's as if you belong in
a circus sideshow doing phony magic acts if you dare to talk of anything
besides individuals as 'real'.  But that only works for humans.  We study
colonies of other living things as if they were discrete entities in their
own right.  Why do the so to speak hierarchical phenomena of nature suddenly
come to a stop with social life?  Atoms make molecules and molecules work
according to different laws than atoms but we don't think molecules are
spooky.  Molecules make the tables we write at, etc.  If the nucleus of say
a hydrogen atom were home plate, the electron would not only be somwhere way
beyond centerfield, it would be way beyond the stadium wall, but we don't
have any trouble calling the atom a 'thing'.  But when it comes to calling
the baseball team a social 'thing' suddenly we lose our nerve.

That's not you doing that by any means, I'm not suggesting that at all.  I'm
just musing on why grappling with the ontology of social relations is so
difficult.  Is anyone familiar with the work being done in Italy on Spinoza
and relations and substance?  Relations have had a bad rap in Western
philosophy .  They tend not to be seen as fundamental.  But it's hard to
think of forms as causal structures without thinking relationally as far as
I can see.

Howard



----- Original Message -----
From: "Ruth Groff" <RGroff1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List"
<critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, June 03, 2007 8:44 PM
Subject: [Critical-Realism] Comment re: holism


Hi Mervyn,

Your comment re: holism caught my attention.  I think that what I would want
to say is that the Bhaskar of the TMSA is a holist but not a structuralist.
That is, there is no question from his perspective that structures and
social wholes such as "society" EXIST.  (Contra Harre and/or Varela, for
example, who are good examples of real, live atomists who bump up against
the cr literature.)  What I imagine you to be referencing is instead a claim
about which kinds of things, of the things that exist, are the kinds of
things that make social phenomena happen.  The claim here is that it is only
individuals that do this.  Am I right to think that it's that point that you
are drawing on when you say that RB and Archer (whose work I don't know) are
critical of holism?

[For the record, I think that while structures surely aren't agents, the
claim doesn't square as well as I'd like it to with the other part of the
argument, viz., that we know of the existence of the unobservable whole that
is society via its effects.  (And of course, quite apart from how it fits or
doesn't into a larger argument from RB, the claim in question might just be
wrong.)  In this regard, I'm pretty sure that I think that structues should
be thought of as formal causes (i.e., things that enable and delimit agency
in specifiable ways -- see Doug's great stuff on structures), and not just
as material causes (i.e. as that which is worked upon by individuals).  This
way of thinking about it allows for both individuals and structures to be
the causes of things, albeit causes of different kinds, but preserves the
"ontological gap" between them, as RB put it in PON.]

r.



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