Re: [Critical-Realism] Comment re: holism

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

Thanks Howard,
 
You ask in what sense not instantiated in space? 
 
The short answer to your question is that, acording to RB, many natural structures (like atoms) are present as such, rather than being present 'only in their effects'.
 
The longer answer requires unpacking what RB means when he says (in PON) that social structures are present 'only in their effects'. I would say he means that social structures are to be analysed as relations of *positions*. They are *not* relations of individuals and persons. The term 'position' is here a metaphor because it refers to something with no spatial location. Thus the position 'husband' and the position 'wife' do not move from place to place. We do not say the the social position 'husband' is moving along the motorway at 90 mile per hour! I may be doing so but I am a *person*, a powerful particular, with spatial location, and persons (and individuals) are exactly what RB's conception of social structure abstracts from.
 
I agree with you that social strtuctures *are* material but the corollary must be that social structures cannot be conceived of analytically as merely relations between *positions*. This is why I would conceive of them as relations between practices, material practices indeed. I think you must tacitly be thinking in these terms too (but no doubt I am wrong!).
 
This is a key point so I will not address the further issues you raise - everything I have to say about these hangs on the issue above.
 
Best wishes
 
Andy
 
PS RB himself cunningly muddies waters by throwing in 'positioned-practices' in PON. It is Archer who has helped to clarify matters here (in a way that RB has explictly accepted), with her polemic against 'central conflation'.  

________________________________

From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Howard Engelskirchen
Sent: Mon 6/4/2007 3:13 PM
To: Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Comment re: holism



Hi Andy,

Thanks very much for your interesting comments.

In what sense not instantiated in space? Pointing of course is a different
thing.  The whole point (pun accepted) of realism is to vindicate the
reality of unobservables, and yes you cannot point at relations, but you can
certainly point at their material ground.  What are relations that have no
material ground?  A question for Tobin -- are signs instantiated in space?
There is no sign without a material ground.  So your point Andrew really
goes to Ruth's critique of Bhaskar's notion that social structures are a
material cause of actually I forget what -- the TMSA?  Why isn't the
relation between husband and wife instantiated in space?  Yours is.  It has
a specific location right now.  I have friends, including you, that are long
distance.  This is a different relation than one that is next door.  If you
are right about CR, then that calls into question whether the realism of CR
is in a thoroughgoing sense materialist.

As for 'powerful particulars', that goes to the points I made about our
reluctance to think about the causal potency of social things.  We get away
with this because of the pervasive tendency to think of cause as efficient
cause only.  Do you think the social form of commodity producing labor is
causally potent?  Capital?  Are these materially grounded?  If they are
materially grounded, do those material grounds have spatial location?  Are
they, the social forms of commodity producing labor and capital, causally
potent?  If they are causally potent why aren't they 'powerful particulars'?
Or fields of them.  Notice, for example, the historical significance of the
'home market' and its territorial ground.

On your other point, the thing one works on is material cause only insofar
as one thinks of it materially.  I don't need to reduce everything to
midsized solids -- I think forms of energy, and, in particular human
activity, are material.  But it is possible to think of 'the thing one works
on' metaphorically and not concern oneself with its material ground -- and
it may be indeed that the reference to social structures as material cause
works like that.

Great to hear from you!

Howard


----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Brown" <A.Brown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List"
<critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2007 3:10 AM
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Comment re: holism


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.



----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----


> _______________________________________________
> Critical-Realism mailing list
> Critical-Realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/critical-realism
>


_______________________________________________
Critical-Realism mailing list
Critical-Realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/critical-realism





----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----


> _______________________________________________
> Critical-Realism mailing list
> Critical-Realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/critical-realism
>


_______________________________________________
Critical-Realism mailing list
Critical-Realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/critical-realism


_______________________________________________
Critical-Realism mailing list
Critical-Realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/critical-realism