Re: [Critical-Realism] Critical Realist Philosophy of Information

["Mervyn Hartwig" <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Bhaskar's original conflation of structures and causal mechanisms"

Tommy rot.

"he just seems to be getting back to what Christians have
understood all along and for centuries tried to express (with only a
superficial understanding of language and dynamics) in terms of Aristotle's
four causes"

This is a preposterous reduction.

Time you stopped befuddling the issues in this way -- as Tim has been
suggesting for yonks now.

Mervyn 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Dave
Taylor
Sent: 14 December 2007 11:22
To: 'Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List'
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Critical Realist Philosophy of Information

Dear Jose-Carlos

But it was not AI, it was Algol68 I pointed to as the explicator of meaning.
AI has almost completely missed the boat - of general freedom as against
particular automation.  

The four levels of reference in Algol68, applied to itself, are the events,
things, structures and performance by the computer logic of its programmed
procedures, which in turn may generate new data at each of these levels of
significance.  Before Algol68 - most visibly in Algol60 - the programming
was taken for granted and (as in Humean science) only events and
data-processing objects were declared and therefore recognisable as
variable.  Algol68 introduced definitions in terms of a structural level
which included the precedural structures of programs, leaving structures
referring one way to objects and the other way to corresponding structures
in the performance of the procedures.  The meaning of the events are thus
not only referred to structured objects but interpreted (given meaning) in
terms of what they do to the computer and the computer does with them.  

Bhaskar's original conflation of structures and causal mechanisms is of
course resolved in his Dialectic.  Original though his approach is,
conceptually, he just seems to be getting back to what Christians have
understood all along and for centuries tried to express (with only a
superficial understanding of language and dynamics) in terms of Aristotle's
four causes.  In Christian talk, we represent our meanings in what we do,
but the meaning of what we do must be seen in the context of us and our
"church" (the metaphorical "Mystical Body" referring to the structure of
community at whatever level - be it local, a society or the complete human
race); but ultimately it must also be seen in its total context, God, the
spiritual "computer" whose energy enables us to realise what we try to do or
say.

"No man is an island".  Within a body the cells cooperate, they don't
compete.  Within an ecosystem, objects represent what they do, and compete
as such - as the human equivalent of ideas - in the co-operative context of
vegetables growing, carnivores scavenging and microbes recycling.  The human
race actually having ideas, we don't have to act as the Darwinins would have
us act, like animals; we can compete at the level of ideas on how best to
cooperate.  If you want the meaning as against texts of a philosophy of
information, of "the truth that sets us free", that's it.

Dave



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