Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 20:45:46 +0000
Subject: Re: BHA: scientific realism, transcdental realism and respose to


Howard
 I'm shoryt of time so cannot respond in detail to this interesting 
email which has given much interesting food for thought. I would assume 
that you are a 'philosophical realist' as well as a 'scientific realist'.

I had considered that I'd responded to the question 'What constitutes 
empirical adequacy ?' earlier but i'll repeat myself - a theory can be 
said to be empirically adequate if what it states about the observable 
entities and events in the world/local universe is true. In other words 
the phenomena it describes fit within the model  presented. To clarify 
further this must include all the phenomena including those observed and 
those that have not yet been observed which should fit within the 
theoretical structure.

With regard to your two possibilities - given that science is in my view 
primarily an ideologically bound activity, that is it deals with a 
'reality' which is always already ideological and that as a consequence 
I see very little scientific activity which can be said to be addressing 
the 'real'. Which then means that I am not sure where I fit within the 
two possibilities, because obviously I am not denying that the 'real' 
exists but rather that i'm not convinced that we can state that science 
is an activity which can  state that it is investigating the 'real' 
rather than constructing and defining an ideologically bound 'reality'. 
Reality is precisely ideological in the sense that even in the royal 
sciences of physcis and mathmatics it is impossible to get through the 
social construction , the ideological to the 'Real'. Consequently then 
we are working with different notions of reality and probably it would 
make sense for us to recognise this now.

If science had never invented any 'causal structures and relations'  I'd 
accept paragraph four but it has...

oops gotta go my lift is here..

regards
steve

Howard Engelskirchen wrote:

>Hi Steve,
>
>Let me say again that I have only dropped in on a conversation and therefore
>don't really follow a number of things you have said and may well
>misunderstand.
>
>I'll move backwards through your argument because if I understand correctly,
>your real concern is with science as a "construct."  I assume "social
>construct" is meant here.
>
>1)    There are two possibilities:  (i) you believe that what counts as real
>is socially constructed in the sense that the world is what we make it by
>how we think of it or agree it should be -- what counts as real is a matter
>of philosophical or linguistic or social convention;  alternatively you mean
>(ii) that science is a historically situated activity that is socially and
>politically determined in what it is, what it does and what it achieves.
>
>If you mean the first, then your position is inconsistent with scientific
>realism and we have a disagreement.  We do not make causal structures and
>relations (except insofar as we function as causal phenomena ourselves, and
>then only to the extent that we do -- we make a dam; we do not make the
>force that pulls water over it).
>
>If you mean that the way we understand the world is a product of social,
>ideological and political structures, then this is fully consistent with
>scientific realism today.  There is nothing in the realist argument that
>would bar the proposition that a historically specific mode of production
>sets limits to what science can know.   Aristotle, for example, could not
>know the equality of social labor produced by exchange because of slavery
>and it seems quite likely that there will be no flowering of the social
>sciences comparable to what has happened to the natural sciences over the
>last three or four hundred years as long as social life is dominated by
>capitalist relations of exploitation.
>
>But there are two separate issues here.  Assuming social structures block or
>facilitate what may be known, still within those limits investigators may
>identify causal structures of nature or society that actually operate and
>they may do so accurately enough so that we can learn to accommodate our
>conceptual, disciplinary and everyday practices to them.
>
>2)    You argue that any philosophy of science asserts  that what best
>explains the empirical success of science is that the relevant theories are
>approximately true.
>
>This is not true.  Logical empiricism denied the truth of unobservables.
>Forms of instrumentalism are agnostic about truth.  Hermeneutic approaches
>look for the most meaningful interpretations, not those that are true, and
>so on.
>
>3)    You argue that your own best understanding of science is that "science
>aims to give us theories that are empirically adequate, and acceptance of a
>scientific theory is merely that it is empirically adequate."
>
>But as I said in my last post, this just re-asks the question most of us
>would like answered:  what is it about empirically adequate theories that
>accounts for their success?
>
>4)  Notice that "the realist argument that science must be engaged in
>identifying what is 'real' because it works and is approximately true"
>sounds more like a pragmatist's argument than a realist one.
>
>The realist argument is abductive:  We have the fact that when we did a, b
>and c, result R was produced.  How is this to be best explained?  Well, if
>theory T correctly identified how causal process X behaves, according to T
>when we do a, b and c, R is produced.  It must be the case, therefore, that
>T correctly identified causal process X and how it behaves.  But the
>abduction is a result of the global success of science, of course, not this
>or that isolated example.
>
>5)    You say that accepting a scientific theory means believing in its
>truth.  If you mean believing in the whole truth of it, then this is not
>entailed by realism -- the point of the example I gave in my last post
>regarding the luminiferous ether was to show that scientists can be quite
>skeptical about a whole bunch of the substance of their theories.  A
>scientist could believe that she had correctly represented the propagation
>of light by a wave equation without believing that the carrier medium was an
>elastic solid, even though this idea figured in the way she worked out the
>equation.
>
>6)    Finally, your introductory paragraph subtly shifts from the position
>that realists think they do accurately represent the way the world is to the
>quite different position that realism claims to present a "literally" true
>story of what the world is like.  "Literally" is the word that makes your
>ideological point but is not essenhtial to realism's argument or even fully
>coherent in context.  We know our senses don't exhaust the range of sensible
>phenomena.  We're not even sure that extension plus time exhaust the world's
>dimensions.  The question is not whether we've given a photo-literal
>depiction, but whether allow us to accommodate our practices to the world's
>causal structures.
>
>best,
>
>Howard
>


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