[Critical-Realism] transitive/intransitive, cr and philosophy, etc.

["Ruth Groff" <RGroff1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

1.  I think Tobin is right -- it's not just that temporality isn't key; it's that it's besides this particular point.  Not all points; just this one.

2.  I will say again that the contemporary philosophers outside of cr who take on, in a very serious, very technical way, the implicit ontology shared by empiricism and post-structuralism are the people working in metaphysics and philosophy of science who are writing about powers, disposition and scientific essentialism.  That's who is doing it.  I'm sorry that I sound frustrated; it's just that they really are the ones doing it, and I don't think that anyone else really is.  Harre and Madden and Bhaskar in RTS did it a little, but never went as far - because not being so narrowly focused.  But seriously, that's the follow-up literature to engage with.  

3. Meanwhile, back to what it is about the "intransitive object" of natural science that makes it be different from the transitive object.  The transitive object, again, is the accumulation of our best scientific theories about the natural world.  Scientists, in the activity that is science, do work on this object, as well as on the other object, the "intransitive object."  

Now RB says that it is obvious that our best scientific theories are not metaphysically identical to the natural world.  He may be wrong about this.  But I don't see that he gives a lot of direct argument for it, in RTS.  In this book he is primarily concerned to provide an immamant critique of the post-Humean account of scientific knowledge, especially the notion that laws are grounded in the observation of regularity.  That's the target.  Not subjective idealism, at least not per se, and Kant's transcendental idealism only indirectly.

What he DOES give a quick, down-and-dirty and compelling argument for - IF you are already on board with the self-understanding of modern natural science - is what he says he will do it for: viz., why laws do not depend on regularity and why the expectation of regularity cannot be what causality is.

When you push on the above, you get into an ontology that requires, at a minimum, dispositional properties, at a maximum essential dispositional properties, on the basis of which things fall into natural kinds.  The short-hand for this is to say that, contra the entire mainstream of modern philosophy, from Descartes on, there are too such things as essences.  That objects in the natural world have their own structures.

Whether we can know what these structures are, and whether the effort to do so is or isn't what scientists do, and how we would know if we, or they, were right -- these, as tantalizing as they are, are different questions.

Still, to say that the objects of the natural world have essential structures of their own is about as radical as you can get, post-Descartes.  A few moderns along the way have done it.  But they haven't tended to attach the position to materialism, let alone to a commitment to the epistemic value of modern science.  However, pretty much all of the contemporary philosophers who are developing this kind of ontology and the re-conceiving of "laws" that it entails, do.  Hence the general title for the approach: "scientific essentialism."  The early Bhaskar, along with Harre and Madden, fit into this now-larger literature.

I've lost track of my numbering, but all of this is to say, in a kind of round-about way, that although I am CLEARLY not someone who thinks that RB is the only, or even the best, person to read on these issues, I do feel, pretty strongly, that we should resist the temptation to get side-tracked too much in our discussions.  RTS is a good book.  It's really worth reading it for it's own, limited, questions I think.  And, though I know that I am sounding like a broken record now - forgive me, please - for pursuing the dispositional realism at its core, there are a number of very good contemporary philoosphers doing this work, publishing in mainstream philosophy journals.

I will apologize one last time if I sound strident.  I do, I think.  Pay it no mind.  Please.

r.





 

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