[Critical-Realism] RTS Reading1

["Brian Dick" <briandick51@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,



There has been some discussion of Bhaskar's characterization of the two
critical trends in the philosophy of science in the 1970s that he is
attempting to synthesize: the social character of science and the
stratification of science.  I went back and looked at his entry on "Realism"
in *The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth Century Social Thought* (1993),
546-9.  I will reprint here three consecutive paragraphs that are relevant
to this discussion:



"Modern scientific realism takes off from criticism of the logical
positivism of the 1920s and 1930s which formed the basis for the received
view of science until the late 1960s. One of the first decisive attacks on
this was mounted by W.V.O. Quine who argued against the canonical
analytical/empirical and theory/fact distinctions for a holistic view of
knowledge as in effect 'a field of force whose boundary conditions are
experience'. Drawing upon this, Mary Hesse and others argued that scientific
language should be seen as a dynamical system constantly growing by the
metaphorical extension of natural language. Observational predicates were
not isomorphs of (physical, sensual or instrumental) objects, but 'knots'
attaching the network to the object world in a theory dependent and mutable
way.



"This was powerfully reinforced by a growing awareness induced by the work
of Karl Popper, T.S. Kuhn, I. Lakatos, P.K. Feyerabend and, in France, G.
Bachelard and A. Koyre, of the reality of scientific change. Theories were
social constructions offering competing descriptions and explanations of a
theory-independent world. Rom Harre invoking the tradition of W. Whewell and
N.R. Campbell, drew attention to the role of models in theory growth.
Theoretical entities and processes, initially imaginatively posited as
plausible explanations of observed phenomena, could come to be established
as real, through the construction of either sense-extending equipment or of
instruments detecting the effects of the theoretical phenomena (in the
latter case invoking a causal criterion for attributing reality). All this
strongly suggested a vertical *'theoretical'* realism. This was further
supported by the linguistic arguments of Saul Kripke and H. Putnam and the
use of natural kind terms, such as 'gold' and 'water', presupposed that
those substances have real essences, although not necessarily known to us.



"Shortly afterwards Roy Bhaskar produced, in his system of transcendental or
critical realism, an argument for a horizontal 'transfactual' or nomic
realism, alongside the theoretical realism already established. He argued
that it is a condition of the possibility of experimental and applied
activity that the objects of scientific enquiry (causal laws, generative
mechanisms, structured things) not only exist but act independently of that
activity—transfactually, in open and experimentally or otherwise closed
systems alike.  Both theoretical and transfactual realism involve what a
recent writer has called, following Mandelbaum, 'transdiction', that is
inference to the (in practice and in principle) unobservable (Manicas, 1987,
p. 10). May have hailed this as a Copernican revolution in (3)."



(3) refers to scientific realism as opposed to (1) predicative or (2)
perceptual realism.



Brian
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