Re: [Critical-Realism] How can a de-ont exist or anabsence be present?

[Howard Engelskirchen <howarde@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Nick, Hi Louis,

Thanks very much for the post, Nick.  Your 
discussion at the end of plants in a drought is 
very good and I will reflect on it.  There is an 
important tradition in the contemporary 
philosophy of biology that rejects the idea that 
real definitions can be given of biological 
species that do not take into account their 
environment -- precisely their connection to what 
they need.  Unfortunately I don't know enough to bring that to bear.

Louis, the thing I want to emphasize is a further 
reflection on your having raised the notion of "real possibility."

I've suggested that being presupposes non-being 
and that a way to talk about causal structure is 
in terms of material form or organization -- as 
Nick says, "Identity is shifted from the 
particular material out of which the boat is 
built to the way in which that material is 
organised."  Our attention to natural kinds, and 
to their causal powers, is an attention to the 
different ways matter is organized.

Now one of the important points Mervyn has made 
is that the specificity of inaction is not 
captured by a purely positive account of what has 
actually happened, and therefore, he concludes, 
we need to talk about the causal efficacy of absence.

In rejecting the conclusion it would be wrong to 
reject the concern.  So what really is at 
issue?   Isn't the issue here real 
possibility?  What we want to insist on is that 
what a thing does never exhausts what it could do 
and we can't understand what a thing is without 
taking that into account.  That's Nick's point 
about plants in a drought.  What a plant does in 
the absence of water -- and thanks for reminding 
me to attend to that shriveling thing on my 
window ledge -- does not exhaust what it could do 
if the circumstances were different.

Mervyn has also emphasized that attention to 
inaction can't be captured by imagined 
hypotheticals about what could have happened, and 
so here too he solves the problem by invoking the 
causal efficacy of inaction.  But again, I can 
reject the conclusion without rejecting the 
concern.  In his doctoral dissertation Marx drew 
a sharp distinction between abstract possibility 
-- the limitless imaginings of the philosopher 
unconcerned with the constraints of the real 
world -- and real possibility.  And that's what 
we're after here -- explanations that draw a 
sharp line of distinction between abstract and 
real possibility.  We want to insist on the one 
hand that real possibility is different from 
abstract possibility and on the other that it is 
distinct from what actually happens.

I wonder if that isn't a good way to think in 
general about CR's attention to absence.   But to 
talk about real possibility we don't need to talk 
about what absence, non-being and what didn't happen cause.

(p.s. to Nick.  I have a hard time reading your 
posts on my computer.  A little absence between 
lines of thought would help!   Ah, perhaps this 
is a rhetorical device to make your point!!)

best,

howard




At 04:56 PM 12/7/2007, you wrote:
>Dear Howard, Louis and Mervyn, First off, my 
>apologies for the inattentive responses to 
>Howardâ??s post, and my thanks to Louis and to 
>Mervyn for clarifying the central issues. 
>Apologies too for getting carried away: the post 
>is a long one. Howard asked about â??the causal 
>efficacy of phlogiston,â?? emphasising that his 
>question was not about â??what someone thought 
>or thinks about phlogiston, but of the 
>de-ont?â?? Mervynâ??s initial contribution was 
>to lay out the point about different classes of 
>de-onts and I hoped to develop this line of 
>thinking with my comments on classes of 
>possibility. From the perspective of ontological 
>polyvalence, this kind of de-ont has no causal 
>significance whatsoever. Howard was quite right 
>to say that: â??The point generalizes. An 
>absence, absence of being, means an absence of 
>causal structure and hence of causal 
>efficacy.â?? Absolutely! Phlogiston is an 
>absolute non-entity and entirely non-causal. 
>After the agreement comes the inevitable 
>â??howeverâ??. Howard indicates a shift in gear, 
>or at least an ambiguity, when he says â??What a 
>drought causes is a result of the causal 
>structures in place, not of absent 
>non-structures that aren't there.â?? If we take 
>â??absent non-structuresâ?? to mean that member 
>of the class of impossible beings, i.e. absolute 
>non-entities, can have no causal role in the 
>playing out of a drought then there can be no 
>disagreement. But this is by no means the only 
>way this could be read. At least, we can read 
>into it the possibility of referring to the 
>other classes of de-onts: as yet unrealised 
>possibilities and past presences. So, when 
>Howard asks â??How can a de-ont exist or an 
>absence be present?â?? it is worthwhile trying 
>to give a useful response, one that disagrees 
>with the idea that â??When we speak of the 
>presence of an absence, there is actually no 
>causal structure to which we refer.â?? A 
>polyvalent response to this insists on the 
>co-presence of absences and presences and argues 
>that the former are, or least can be, integral 
>to any real causal powers. So, this is what 
>appears to be at stake: a polyvalent account of 
>being and then a similar account of causality. I 
>donâ??t have a good feel for the extent to which 
>this is contentious, but the reality of absence 
>does not seem to be too much of a problem: not 
>only is reality irreducible to what it is 
>possible to experience through our senses 
>(ontological depth), it is also irreducible to 
>what is here and now. Reality also encompasses 
>all that has been (the past) and all that will 
>be (the future). From the limited perspective of 
>any here and now the past (to the extent it is 
>no longer present) and the future (to the extent 
>it is not already being realised) are absences. 
>Also, another dimension of the here and the now 
>we cannot experience is all the possibilities 
>embedded and embodied in it. These are real, 
>whether or not they are ever realised. In sum, 
>to say that something is absent from the here 
>and now is just to say that it is at a distance 
>in terms of time and/or space. Absenting, on the 
>other hand, means that that distance is 
>changing, i.e. something is further off in time, 
>space, or less of a possibility) or, in the case 
>of absenting the absence, that distance is 
>diminishing. So, reality is essentially 
>polyvalent: it is always-already constituted by 
>a given ensemble of presences and absences. What 
>is more, that ensemble is always-already 
>changing: polyvalent configurations are always 
>being reconfigured. Royâ??s dialectic, though, 
>has several aspects, with absence being only 
>one. Before we can look at what kind of case 
>might be made for the causal significance of the 
>relevant classes of absence we should take some 
>other ideas into consideration. Two such worth 
>mentioning are the unity of space, time and 
>causality and entity relationism. Space, time 
>and causality are necessary ontological 
>relations within and between all aspects of our 
>universe; their unity binds being together into 
>causal processes, tensed rhythmics. Entity 
>relationism is closely related to this. The old 
>philosophical problem of the boat whose parts 
>are so completely changed over time raises a 
>question about the identity of the boat. If none 
>of the wood from which it was originally 
>constructed is present any longer, then can it 
>be said that we still have the same boat? Do we 
>not now have a different one? Critical realism 
>offers one kind of answer to this in terms of 
>the persistence of the structure over time. 
>Whatever pieces are used to repair the boat, the 
>structure remains the same: the boat retains its 
>capacities. Identity is shifted from the 
>particular material out of which the boat is 
>built to the way in which that material is 
>organised. However, this has the unfortunate 
>consequence of formalising identity. The 
>dialectical critical realist response to this 
>question is to embed the boat into the social 
>relations which have produced and reproduced it. 
>This shift in perspective means that the 
>identity of the ship is now to be understood as 
>changing over time and it has been considerably 
>expanded to encompass its integration into its 
>social milieu. That is, this particular boat is 
>spatially, temporally and causally integrated 
>into geo-history, and its real identity as a 
>particular entity is inseparable from that 
>history. Identity encompasses the many 
>dimensions of absence: the past, the outside and 
>the possibilities that might unfold in the 
>future.  This has important ramifications for 
>the discussion of absence and causality: the 
>real identity of any entity now encompasses 
>external as well as internal relations and it 
>encompasses past, present and future changes to 
>both kinds of relation. It is in this context 
>that it can make sense to speak of the 
>polyvalence of causality, thereby including 
>absences as co-constitutive of real change. So, 
>coming back to the question about the effects of 
>a drought: what effects does a drought have, and 
>how? The plants that survive in a given place do 
>so because their essential needs are being met: 
>they get the water they need to enable them to 
>sustain their own existence. That water, then, 
>is integral to what those plants are, both in 
>terms of their external relations to a water 
>supply and their internal metabolising of the 
>water. Water is integral to the structures and 
>capacities the plants have, and we could not 
>speak of those structures or mechanisms without 
>reference to it: there is no actual structure of 
>the plant that can be abstracted from the water. 
>The drought means that the external relations of 
>these plants are changed. The breaking of this 
>relation to nourishment, the absence of water, 
>puts them in danger of perishing. This change 
>means the plants lose something essential to 
>what they are. They become incomplete and 
>failing plants, unable to function and facing 
>the prospect of eventual death. These notional 
>plants, then, must be understood as being bound 
>into their environment such that their 
>identities as living beings encompass their 
>on-going relations to it. The drought changes 
>those relations, causing external and internal 
>absences: it generates absences which are 
>essential components of the causal processes 
>which bring about the death of the plants. So, 
>Howard is right again to way that the existing 
>causal structures of the plants are essential to 
>what happens next, but so too is the absence of 
>the water from them. In the end, though, would 
>it be too crude to say that the drought, the 
>absence of water, kills the plants? Would it 
>really be a mistake to say that a relation of 
>absence, i.e. lack in the face of need, is 
>causally efficacious? Nick. 
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