Re: [Critical-Realism] Error and ontology

[Jan Straathof <janstr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ruth, all,

I think you have nicely summarized the line of the discussion. I agree
with Tobin and Mervyn, following their strand, that much depends on
how to define and categorize concepts as knowledge, hypothesis, belief,
opinion, intention etc. In my first post i proposed knowledge as the ability
to be guided by the facts (cf. Plato, Wittgenstein, Ryle). With this i meant
to say that knowledge etc. is a species of ability. And if knowledge is an
ability, it is an ability whose exercise can consist in thought as well as
in speech and other intentional behavior. It is the ability to do things, or
refrain from doing things, or believe, or want, guess or doubt things for
given reasons. In this sense i see knowledge also as the ability to do things
wrong i.e. to make errors, and that's why i conceive knowledge etc. as
prior to or conditional for error. (That error is not necessary an ability
to produce knowledge show the examples given by Tobin and Bwanika:
errors often lead to new errors). Louis' point about Putnam's brain-in-
a-vat is epistemically interesting but ontologically suspect in defence of
the transcendental realism of RTS. The crux of his thought experiment
was to show the absurdness of metaphysical/transcendental essentialism,
because the world is not *ontologically* independent of the human mind,
but an epistemic product of our mental make-up and social behaviour, i.e.
there is no Archimedean point of view of the world because we cannot
step outside our conceptual boundries.

You wrote,

>Which is to say, objective idealism sustains error too.

Indeed, this was the initial idea i had in mind. When i mentioned the error
of the Intuitionist mathematician in my previous post, i tried just to say
that idealist based mathematical theories sustains error too. That is to
say, error is convincing possible and intelligible in different and
contradicting ontological systems and therefor not a decisive demarcating
argument for
any of these systems of thought, incl. realism.

yours,
Jan



_______________________________________________
Critical-Realism mailing list
Critical-Realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/critical-realism