[Critical-Realism] Error and ontology

["Ruth Groff" <RGroff1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tobin, Mervyn, George (I think),

I didn't really understand the initial objection to what Tobin said.  He said that people who dismiss meaningful concepts of knowledge, science and/or the norm of a belief being true, are unlikely to be moved by an argument about what a commitment to the intelligibility of experimentation commits one to philosophically.  But, he said, people like that do sometimes have a belief in the concept of error.  So you can start there instead, and ask "What must the world be like for error to be possible?"  Or, in a more abstract register, "What must the world be like for the concept of error to be intelligible?"  

Yes?  It was, I thought, a discussion of intellectual strategy.  The objection, abt knowledge coming first - which is how I think it was initially formulated - is to say, in response, "Well, the po-mo could say to you that no, in fact they don't believe in error either, because error presupposes knowledge, and they reject that."

To this I think I would say 

(1) you've got them anyway, because they've just caught you out commiting an error.  And 

(2) I'm not sure sure that error does presuppose knowledge.  Maybe the following is what Mervyn means, but I think that what it presupposes is what Charles Taylor - in a great piece on Foucault, in which he argues sort of along these lines (ref available upon request) - terms "epistemic gain."  That is, the philosophical implications of error only kick in it it's recognized error.  To recognize error you don't have to have now got it right; you only have to believe that your present belief is sounder than the previous one.    

(3) I think I think, as evidenced by the imagined po-mo's response, that whether or not, and/or how, the categories or true and false are related to eachother is besides the point here.  The point being merely that it is harder to foreswear the latter, and that ontological implications flow from it just as surely as from the former.

But as to what those ontological imlications are, I still disagree.  I don't think that you get materialism out of it, only externally given structure.  Which is to say, objective idealism sustains error too.

r.

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