Re: [Critical-Realism] RTS Reading 1

["Ruth Groff" <RGroff1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Mervyn, thanks for the first post.  Here are a few thoughts that I have, reading this through.  I offer these really just to get the conversation going, and to encourage people to weigh in.  I think it would be great, personally, if people would, among other things, ask questions about things that they don't understand or aren't familiar with by disciplinary training or interest.  I know many members of the list don't have a lot of philosophy background. 


RB writes:

Sociologists are making increasing use of the allegedly discredited Aristotelian typology

of causes.  


I don't know which sociologists he means; he doesn't reference anyone by name.  Does anyone have a sense of this, of who in sociology was talking in Aristotelian terms in the early 1970s?  

For those who aren't familiar with the "typology" in question (which is connected to an entire metaphysics, one which, unsurprisingly, has a bearing on the ontology proposed in RTS), it goes like this:  

1. material cause: the material cause of a thing what it is made out of.  The material cause of table that I am sitting at is wood, viz., pine.

2. formal cause: the formal cause of a thing is ... well, it turns out to be very tricky, actually, to say what it is, and maybe Howard will want to say something here, but crudely I will say that it is the thing that makes something be what it is, and not some other thing.  One way of thinking about it is to think of the formal cause of a thing as the way that the thing is organized.  So the classic example is to say that the formal cause of a house (or my table) is the blueprint, which sets out a distinctive "form" that the material in question will take.  But 2 points of caution.  One, for Aristotle all matter is already "enformed."    By analogy, there is (to stick with the example) no such thing as a form-less house.  The weakness of the "blueprint" way of thinking about it, then, is that it locates the form outside of the enformed-object.  Two, the example has perhaps too much of a structural spin.  With living things, for Aristotle, the "form" is called the soul, and it refers (directly) to those capacities that are distinctive of the creature in question.  For human beings it is our rational capacity (differentially distributed, A. though, between Greeks and non-Greeks, men and women).  With a house or a table, one tends to think of the structure first, in some way, and then consider that it has properties of particular kinds (for supporting wieght, e.g.); with people (for A.) the form just is the capacity.  But this is probably more than anyone cares about ... sorry.

3. efficient cause: the efficient cause of my table and house is the person (or people) who made it.  This sense of "cause" is the closest to theone moderns tend to default to.

4. final cause: the final cause of a thing is its purpose.  The final cause of my table, we could say, is to support things like my keyboard in a way that the original pine tree wouldn't.  With Aristotle, the final cause of everything the same, at one level of abstraction -- namely, it is for each thing to actualize its form, excellently.  (Most things are, for A., only potentially what they distinctively are.)  Perhaps the single biggest division between Aristotelian and post-Aristotelian (i.e., modern) metaphysics is that most of the moderns - and certainly thosue whose story matters for the development of the empiricist and Kantian accounts of science that RB will criticize - explicitly reject the idea that things are in some sense animated to become what they have the potential to essentially be.  Contemporary neo-Aristotelian scientific essentialists recover the dynamism, but separate it out from the sense of purpose, or telos.  The Greek term for the drive to actualize form is escaping me for some reason (it's not dunamis, or telos ... o well).

I think it's important to get a handle on these categories in order to appreciate the alternate metaphysics that RB says he's going to set out, and that Harre (an a few others, both at the time and earlier) had already begun doing.  Hence my going on ad nauseum.


RB writes:

The basic principle of realist philosophy of science, viz. that perception gives us

access to things and experimental activity access to structures

that exist independently of us, is very simple.  Yet the 

full working out of this principle implies a radical account of the nature

of causal laws, viz. as expressing tendencies of things, not conjunctions of

events.  


This is the crux of the proposed alternate ontology.  Laws express the "tendencies of things."  To unpack this is to wind up back on recognizably Aristotelian ground.  The claim is that things have ways that they are, properties that make them be what they are.  The further claim is going to be the these properties are dispositional -- that is, they are ways of behaving. 

That things have essential dispositional properties is what makes experiments be intelligible, RB will argue.  It's also what makes the problem of induction not be a real problem.

Harre and Madden say this too.  So I would argue with the way RB positions himself relative to the two "strands."  He is not clear enough, in my view, that the one "strand" is already saying this.  Though there are plenty of things to be argued about, amongst those of like mind on this point, and RB certainly contributes new and different things to the discussion.

Anway, those are my thoughts about what is absolutely crucial about the Preface.   

But this is just meant to get discussion going.

Warmly,
Ruth

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