Re: [Critical-Realism] Critical-Realism Digest, Vol 32, Issue 86

[<gdemetrion@xxxxxxx>]

"BUT, Kant later realised as expressed in  
the Refutation of Idealism, that this was not sufficient to prove the  
existence of objectivity, as the required permanent element could  
conceivably be just another representation, albeit relatively enduring  
against the more fleeting ones. Thus, Bhaskar only proves with this that  
there are degrees of transitoriness to our representations, and not that  
there is a mind-independent world."

Assuming this is accurate would it be reasonable to argue from this (what might be a Bhaskarian heuristics) that strictly speaking Bhaskar does not transcend a postmodern hermeneutics in a similar way, perhaps even with some different nuances, of Popper's notion of science as a creative fiction?

I don't deny the reality of generative mechanisms on the presupposition that action is the result of causation as a faith-based statement fundamental to science and more broadly-based human reasoning in any meaningful sense of the term.  Also in what sense do we know that things are caused.  My sense is that this is the Humean question which Bhaskar apparently has effectively answered.  Whether he has or not is another matter, the question teasingly suggested by Phil.  Perhaps though, in a strict sense, what Bhaskar has established is a reasonably effective heuristic grounded in the assumption that there is a mind-independent world as something radically separate from human perception even though it is only by such that one can reach any understanding of what that may be.  I don't really have any problem with such an assumption, which, in their different ways, Popper and even Dewey would lend credence to in their own "postpositivist philosophies of science which also reject both positivism and constructivism in search for a more middle ground epistemology, however much the dynamic between epistemology and ontology is cut in all of their perspectives.  Yes, there are rocks in the world and they don't depend on my assumption for their existence, but if this were all Bhaskar were saying, which I don't believe he is, he wouldn't be saying very much.

Perhaps there is more of a need to undertake closer looks at relationships between critical realism, critical pragmatism (Peirce and Dewey in some different ways--Dewey being much more comprehensive), and critical rationalism (Popper, perhaps others).  There's much to offer on that, however difficult that may be than keeping the borderlands of related schools of scientific philosophy hermetically sealed from each other. I exaggerate to be sure in the effort to make the broader point on the value of greater focus on critical convergences even while respecting differences amongst closely related schools of thought.

In short, what is it that we know?  What is it that we think we know?  What is it upon which we have faith (the evidence of things unseen") that exists r may exist?

No doubt I suffer from the disease of amateurism.

George Demetrion
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