Date: 	Tue, 7 Jan 1997 09:47:11 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: BHA: Transitive & intransitive


I haven't been able to follow all the twists and turns of the discussion of
transitive and intransitive, but I did want to comment briefly on a couple
of formulations in Colin's most recent post. He says:

>But
>if realism is to apply in the social world then we must be able to consider
>that world apart from our descriptions of it. In other words it must be
>intransitive to our descriptions of it at all levels and not just at the
>level of generative mechanisms. It's for this reason that I tend not to go
>along with Bhaskar when he seems to make the transitive/intransitive
>distinctions onto epistemology/ontology. 

I think he conflates two separate issues in the first sentence here. There
are many things which exist in the world independently of our descriptions
of them. But it is wrong to think that we can "consider that world apart
>from our descriptions of it". The realisation that we cannot ever "know the
world" is precisely the reason we must accept epistemological relativism.

I am not sure what any of this implies for Bhaskar's distinction between
intransitive and transitive. But I see no reason to make generative
mechanisms a special object of social scientific investigation. Surely these
mechanisms in social life are as subject to historical change as any other
product of our social lives. If class is a generative mechanism, the social
effects that it generates cannot be disociated from the capacities and
activities of the actual class actors who sustain, reproduce and transform
it. The scientific evidence for the existence of this kind of generative
mechanism is given by its effects, which are knowable and real.

Howie Chodos



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