Re: [Critical-Realism] One last review

["Ruth Groff" <RGroff1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Mervyn,

Thanks for this.  I think that we might agree in many ways, about the difficulties involved in reading certain kinds of material.  I think that we mainly disagree about whether, and if so to what degree and in what sense, RTS is the kind of material in question.  Probably we do just have to agree to disagree about this.  

I want to make it clear, though, that it is not that I don't appreciate the issues involved in reading material that one takes to fit into a dialectical whole, or even material that one takes to be part of a unified, developmental whole.  I think about these issues most in relation to Plato and Marx.  Try to read Book 1 of the Republic, for example, or even the first scene, without understanding that it is already about the the entire dialogue; it can't be done.  Or read Book 7 as though you could without also reading the Phaedrus and the Symposium, or 9 without the Gorgias.  For that matter, it is impossible to know what Aristotle thinks in the Politics without reading it through the lens of the Ethics, which for that reason must be read first.  How to work the Metaphysics and De Anima in is a little bit less pressing, but is still a concern.      

The main question that texts such as these present with respect to reading, for me at least, concerns how to read them for the *first* time.  It gets easier after that.        

But you are right: I am less vexed by the issue in relation to RTS than I would be if we were reading other material.  I think that the categories of RTS are internally related in some, though not all, ways, and that this poses some of the challenges for a first reading that I've alluded to, but where we differ is that I think that the book itself can be read on its own.  

The main thing that I've been vexed by, in any case, is not something like your counter-view, but rather a worry that out of a certain kind of impatience readers may lose the trees for a forest that will as a result not be clearly defined either.  

All seems to be well though.

Warmly,
Ruth



-----Original Message-----
From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Mervyn Hartwig
Sent: Fri 29-Jun-07 4:11 AM
To: Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] One last review
 
Hi Ruth

Just a few further thoughts on our approach to a text. We'll doubtless have 
to agree to disagree. I don't of course want to obstruct the great work 
you're doing here.

You seem to be making an assumption that  the onus is on those who think 
there's  fundamental continuity between scientific realism and what comes 
after to demonstrate that there is. I make the opposite assumption and 
believe this is intuitively more plausible in the case of any
important thinker, as well as evidentially in the case of most. If there 
*is* fundamental continuity and we're looking at the founding moment of a 
developmentally consistent system, then to proceed on the basis that 
transcendental realism/RTS may well be externally related to the rest of the 
system is to call in question the internal relationality of a whole -- what 
RB later calls ontological and analytical extensionalism. Which is not to 
deny that it's really important to get a good grasp of  RTS text and its 
context -- what is at issue is how we do it.

Another way of coming at the point would be to say that your approach seems 
to assume that the best way to understand RTS is by logocentric immersion in 
the text with the ideal of achieving an identity or at least correspondence 
between our accounts and RB's, whereas I think we also need a hermeneutical 
dialectics between scientific realism, the other moments of the system and 
our own theoretical horizons, in particular because the ideal of 
correspondence is an impossible one, i.e. understanding is irreducibly 
dialogical.

There's a sense in which any illumination from the other parts of the system 
is of course not just temporally horizontal and retrospective but also 
vertical and simultaneous: each of the moments of the system (TR, CN, EC, 
DCR, etc.) are in the present and developing in relation to each other and 
other relevant discourses, and supportive of a range of research endeavours 
etc.

Mervyn


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ruth Groff" <RGroff1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List"
<critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2007 4:46 PM
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] One last review


Hi all,

Mervyn, thanks for this.  My impulse to "stop there," for now, is based on
two things.

One, it seems to me that there is a risk of cr readers not wanting to stay
put long enough to really register what was being said in RTS, in its own
terms.  There's a desire either to get on to what he says about social
science, or a desire to get on to his later thinking, or a desire to
generalize or extend to broader metaphysical questions, or all of these
things .... I guess I must think that these desires incline one to read with
less attention to the text itself than I like.  I think it's a good book, so
I want to hit pause.

Second, there is disagreement about whether acceptance of the analysis in
RTS commits one even to the analysis in PON, let alone anything that comes
after.  So I'd like to resist the idea that all the rest is necessarily
contained in the present text.  My feeling is that when we get to PON we can
see if the argument to extend (while modifying) the categories is
persuasive.  Probably for some it will be, for others not.  Then on to DPF.
Etc.

This doesn't mean that we have to do it this way.  I just wanted to clarify
the reading strategy that informs my comments.

My e-mail seems to still be working.  I'll go back to Dave's e-mail now.
(For better or for worse, for everybody's inboxes!  Sorry.)

r. 


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