Re: [Critical-Realism] Error and ontology

["Mervyn Hartwig" <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ruth

You're right, It did start off as a discussion about intellectual strategy 
(and I think the strategy is a worthwhile one)
but since then Tobin has gone on to claim on several occasions that he can
*transcendentally* derive the reality of a mind-independent world from the
possibility of error and from that *alone*. That's what I dispute.

I mean, on the face of it it's absurd. 'Error alone demonstrates the
existence of mind-independent reality, and this is a truth' is almost on a
par with the pomo's 'There is no knowledge and that's a fact'.

I don't think the epistemic correlativity of truth and error are beside the
point. In your example, the pomo can only catch you out committing an error
if they hold at least one proposition to be true. Also, your argument is not 
transcendental.

"Epistemic gain". I think I'd want to add to the requirement that the
proposition be believed to be true  that it is in fact well-grounded --
otherwise, if the proposition is wholly erroneous, error would not have been
demonstrated.

I think it's important that we don't concede so much to the pomo sceptic
that we end up unable to assert anything with any confidence. I'm impressed
by the argument of Bhaskar in DPF (already more than implicit in RTS) that
when in the epistemological dialectic of science (the logic of scientific
discovery in RTS) scientists can explain one level of structure by another
there is little room for practical doubt about the matter. Thus when 'water
tends to boil when heated' is explained by water's electric configuration,
there is still room for doubt. When its electric configuration can then in
turn be explained by a deeper level of structure, we can be pretty sure
that the first explanation is right so far as it goes. If this weren't so,
 aeroplanes wouldn't fly, etc. In the sociosphere it's in the real interests 
of slaves to know the real causes of their oppression with rather more 
confidence than Tobin's fallibilism/falsificationism provides for, and given 
the possibility of a non-positivist naturalism, there's no reason that I can 
see why they shouldn't.


Mervyn


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ruth Groff" <RGroff1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List"
<critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 2:41 PM
Subject: [Critical-Realism] Error and ontology


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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