Date: Tue, 31 Dec 1996 13:35:18 -0500 (EST)
Subject: BHA: Center for CR e-mail



               State University of New York at Stony Brook
                       Stony Brook, NY 117777

                                            Michael Sprinker
                                            Professor of English & Comp Lit
                                            Comparative Studies
                                            516 632-9634
                                            31-Dec-1996 01:25pm EST
FROM:  MSPRINKER
TO:    Remote Addressee                     ( _bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu )
 
Subject: Center for CR e-mail

Doug's e-mail address for the new Center for Critical 
Realism is, I think, wrong.  At least it does not correspond
to any UK e-mail address I've ever seen.  I have a feeling
the final two elements have been reversed, so that the correct
address should be:

ccr-AT-criticalrealism.demon.co.uk

Someone should try it out and see what happens.

Michael Sprinker

p.s.  I'm just back from a conference, and have only one worry
in response to all the posts on the transitivity/intransitivity
of science and the possibility that there are only "sciences,"
versus there being one thing called science.  The latter position, 
as is revealed
I believe in some ofthe posts, risks reductionism, so that something
called "science" is a real object with properties that apply across
the board to particle physics, microbiology, mathematics, and
planetology.  I think this is false, and there is no evidence that
I know of showing that, for example, what planetologists study
and the way they study it can be explained by the theories of
particle physicists or micro-biologists--and vice versa.  I don't
know what Amariglio intended by his insistence on there being
multiple sciences, but if he meant no more than what Aristotle meant
in distinguishing physics from politics and poetics, he surely
is on ground that CR also occupies.

Apropos of RB's reported comment on the necessity for a theory
to account for its own existence, this can only occur in the
social sciences, I'd have thought, since one surely cannot account
for the coming into existence of classical mechanics by means
of physical theory itself--now THAT really would be reductionism
carried to an absurd length!


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