Re: [Critical-Realism] Dave's post

["Dave Elder-Vass" <d.eldervass@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, and thankyou, to all of you who have taken the trouble to send your very 
enlightening replies to my barrage of questions about the transitive and the 
intransitive. Having opened this Pandora's box, I feel some responsibility 
for trying to close it, so let me try to summarise what I think you all have 
said:

a) in making the transitive/intransitive distinction in RTS Bhaskar is not 
seeking to make a general ontological argument, but rather to draw our 
attention to the relationship between theories and the tendencies they 
describe, and in particular to the fact that the former are produced by 
people and the latter are not (at least in the physical sciences);

b) this leaves a variety of questions about the distinction open...

c) ...which is fine for RTS because they are not questions that affect the 
particular relationships he is examining here;

d) in his later work he has sought to refine the distinction to resolve some 
of the issues left open in RTS, without abandoning the substance of the 
argument in RTS.

e) given (b), there are a variety of possible interpretations of the 
distinction as it is expressed in RTS, many of which are equally plausible. 
I am sympathetic BOTH to Mervyn's argument that in these circumstances it 
makes sense to pay attention to how Bhaskar himself resolves these 
differences in his later work AND to Ruth's argument that doing so may 
confuse and distract us from the task of understanding RTS - an argument 
that rests on (c).

So, although I don't think my questions have really been answered, I am very 
happy for us to move on!

Cheers

Dave


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ruth Groff" <RGroff1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List" 
<critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: 28 June 2007 16:33
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Dave's post


Hi all,

Dave, you wrote:

Early in the section you cite, RB identifies the intransitive objects of
knowledge as "things which are not produced by men at all: the specific
gravity of mercury, the process of electrolysis, the mechanism of light
propagation. None of these 'objects of knowledge' depend upon human
activity". Now it is clear from the context that he intends 'intransitive
objects of knowledge' to include more than just these examples, and it would
seem that he is identifying the intransitive as things (I use the word
loosely) that do not "depend upon human activity".

The implication would seem to be that objects of knowledge that DO depend on
human activity are transitive (if this is indeed the case, it would seem to
contradict the claim in a recent post that the transitive is a subset of the
intransitive).

What I think is that you have to read this distinction in context.  I don't 
think that his purpose here is to set out a metaphysical demarcation for its 
own sake.  He is talking about the practice of natural science.  That's the 
frame.  The question that structures the introduction of these categories 
isn't, then, "How shall I (we) parse the nature of reality?" or "Who's 
right?  Materialists or idealists or both?"  The question is more like "What 
is it that modern natural scientists are doing when they do experimental 
science?"  The distinction, I think, has to be seen as being - as it is in 
the text - an answer to that question.  To be sure, he later goes on to do 
all kinds of additional things: we get transitive and intransitive 
"dimensions" period, rather than "of science"; we get them mapped onto 
social science; we get the general metaphysical pronouncements that we are 
so hungry for.  Etc., etc.  But I don't think that reading those things back 
into this distinction is the way to go, myself.

You wrote:
But 'knowledge' is itself an ontologically vague term,
so it would be helpful if Bhaskar was a little clearer about what he means
by it here. Does he mean knowledge as it exists in the heads of human
individuals? Or in books? Or in some sort of intersubjective social sense?

I think he means, THERE, "existing theories, especially those that actually 
figure into the thinking of present-day natural scientists, i.e., the ones 
that they have to deal with in one way or another in their efforts to make 
headway in their theorizing."


You wrote:

Knowledge does indeed depend on human activity, but so do lots of
other things, and the meaning of 'transitive' depends critically upon which
of these other things are to be included. I would say, for example, that all
social structures, and indeed people themselves, "depend upon human
activity", as well as knowledge itself. But one could also argue that all
technological artefacts (e.g. "armchairs and books") depend upon human
activity (though now we are referring to human activity in the past and not
in the present) for their existence, and indeed all features of the natural
world that have been affected by people, e.g. countryside altered by
agriculture. Where is the line to be drawn? I don't see an answer to this
question in the source, though perhaps others have a clearer view.

Again, I don't think that his aim there is to distinguish between "things 
that people make" and "things that people don't make" -- just to say that 
theories are things that we do make, and the underlying forces of nature are 
not things that we make.


You wrote:

This would presumably lead to the identification of the intransitive with 
the real-but-not-actual domain of transfactual mechanisms and powers.


Yes, I think something like that is right.  It is the underlying powers of 
physical entities that are the things that we don't make.  We can "make" 
events, in the sense that we can create artificial conditions under which 
sequences of event of interest to us will occur - that's what experiments 
are - but we don't thereby make the underlying powers that cause the 
sequence.

But, and this gets to your next point, I would stress the "something like 
that" part, above.  This because I don't think that you can, in fact, get 
all of the categories and typologies of RTS to map onto each other.  It's 
not that seamless of a text.  I think that this is something that is really 
important to bear in mind in reading it.


You write:
But perception gives
us access to the actual in general, including many things that might seem to
be transitive under anything but the very narrowest readings of
'transitive'. But if perception really does entail intransitivity of the
objects of perception, this would seem to contradict the assertion that
intransitive objects do not depend on human activity, since things like
people and books can be perceived.

Here I can only say that I don't think that the fact of perception tells us 
anything much about the ontological character of the objects of perception. 
In saying this we can see that I am pre-Kantian in my thinking: I want to be 
able to talk philosophically about objects period, not only about 
objects-as-possible-objects-of-perception.  We also see that I'm not sold on 
RB's much later claims about the realist implications of "referential 
detachment," i.e. the fact the we use language to refer.


You write:
Now it occurs to me that this vagueness of these categories might be
connected to RB's orientation in this work to the 'hard' sciences of physics
and chemistry (an orientation that was criticised by Ted Benton in his
comments on 'The Possibility of Naturalism'). In considering these, it is
perhaps tempting to see science as an interaction between knowledge and
natural objects of that knowledge, which is surely the relationship that is
being pointed to by the transitive/intransitive distinction. But if we
extend our thinking to accommodate the social world (and to be frank, even
an analysis of the social process of science itself demands this), then a
variety of other categories appear, including social structures and
technological artefacts, that seem only ambiguously addressed by this
distinction.

Yes.  But I think that it's fine to write books that are just about natural 
science.  I mean, why not criticize this book for not being a cook book?! 
I'm teasing.  But you see what I mean.  I think the criticism comes because 
the main people who read RB are social theorists of one sort or another, 
rather than philosophers of natural science.  (Philosophers of natural 
science did, some of them, read RTS, and yuo sometimes see it cited in the 
literature, but RB didn't continue to publish in the area, or engage in 
those debates, so it became less relevant.)

So that's my feeling about the transitive object of science versus the 
intransitive object of science: it's closer to a mole-hill than to a 
mountain.  The really radical ontological claim in this book is the claim, 
following on Harre, that nature has powers.

r.



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