Subject: Re: BHA: Re: reply to Howard -- but not really
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2003 16:01:44 -0500


Hi Carrol,

Point taken.  Getting it right must sometimes be with remarkable accuracy.
But also sometimes only crudely and with nothing resembling a mirror.

And hello Steve.  Steve, if I understand correctly, your concern with
quarks, electrons and such is with unobservables.  The reality of your hand
on the keyboard isn't at issue, I assume.  One really thoroughgoing effort
to sustain that position was insisted upon by Mach, who Lenin took some
exception to, and others in the early part of the century.  They argued that
things like atoms and electrons were just ways we had of organizing our
thinking about sensible phenomena, and argued that no claim at all as to the
reality of such postulated entites was warranted.  But that valient
struggle, given most rigorous formulation by logical empiricism, was
decisively lost.  Anyway, if it is a matter of unobservables, no one, I
assume, has yet seen your brain, so we would have to conclude that that also
is a phantasm of yours, and the list's, imagination.

Howard

Actually, just as we now have a picture or two of atoms, though not of
electrons, the jibe above about not having seen one's brain, shows something
of the pace of science.  It is from Wittgenstein from mid-century (On
Certainty), but, of course, now actual pictures of the brain are common.
But the example still suggests the hazards of excluding unobservables from
the domain of the real.  Of course there are unobservables that are
fictions, and there is nothing but fallible thinking and practice we may
misconceive to draw the difference.




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk>
To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2003 1:54 PM
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: reply to Howard -- but not really


> Carrol
>
> Only trouble is that the majority of the interesting scientific objects
> have no such corrospondence and cannot be thought of in these terms -
> the idea of  holding a physical mirroring of an ideological entity,
> especially a non-existent one  is a very entertaining thought however,
> like reading Tolkein and imagining it to be history. The haunting
> thought of the  Lacanian 'imaginary real' springs to mind where it is
> more a matter of the representation of nature and the object being a
> part of a pre-symbolic reality, in the act of symbolization the there is
> always a lack between the representation and 'raw nature'. The base
> 'Real' is not this pre-symbolic/raw nature for this is an impossible
> state and obviously not even imaginable, it is in that act of
> symbolisation that you produce an unbridgeable gap in the reality
> symbolized. This gap may be the closest we can get to Max Planck's
> 'Reality' - but here I'd suggest that every form of the 'reality' is
> plainly constituted through phantasy. It's important to avoid the
> reification of the real by imagining that any science at any level get
> beyond the gap into the real (the pre-symbolic )... This is not to say
> that the representation of a phantasy, whether it is the 'gay gene' or
> an actual one legged table does not take place as neuroscience proposes
> but rather that they are working at best within the gap.
>
> regards
> steve
>
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >Howard Engelskirchen wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Hi Ruth,
> >>
> >>Yes, it does help.  Still, I wonder if you could spell out the category
> >>error.  Also, if you take "literally" and "certainty" out of it, does
> >>"correspondence" still have the same sting?  The version I argued for
speaks
> >>to an accommodation between our representations of the causal structures
of
> >>the world and those structures sufficient to reliably guide practice.
[clip]
> >>
> >>
> >
> >Antonio Damasio, _Descartes' Error_, p. 104.
> >
> >If you look at this page you will see that at least in one instance of
> >perception, and at one neurological 'level,' there is a close enough
> >correspondence between the object and the brain for it to be very nearly
> >a literal (physical) _mirroring_ of the perceived object in the brain.
> >The (geometrical) shape of the stimulus is reproduced by the
> >(geometrical) shape of the pattern of neural activity in the visual
> >cortex.
> >
> >Carrol
> >
> >
> >
> >     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
> >
> >
> >
>
>
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