Subject: rts2-02c
Date: Mon, 05 Feb 2001 20:02:03 -0700


         Empirical realism is underpinned by a metaphysical
dogma, which I call the epistemic fallacy, that statements
about being can always be transposed into statements about
our knowledge of being.  As ontology cannot, it is argued,
be reduced to epistemology this mistake merely covers the
generation of an implicit ontology based on the category of
experience; and an implicit realism based on the presumed
characteristics of the objects of experience, viz. atomistic
events, and their relations, viz. constant conjunctions.
(These presumptions can, I think, only be explained in terms
of the need felt by philosophers for certain foundations of
knowledge.)  This in turn leads to the generation of a
methodology which is either consistent with epistemology but
of no relevance to science; or relevant to science but more
or less radically inconsistent with epistemology.  So that,
in short, philosophy itself tends to be out of joint with
science.

         It is argued in Chapter 1 that the very concept of
the empirical world embodies a category mistake, which
depends upon a barely concealed anthropomorphism within
philosophy; and leads to a neglect of the important question
of the conditions under which experience is in fact
significant in science.  In general this depends upon
antecedent social activity.  Neglect of this activity merely
results in the generation of an implicit sociology, based on
an epistemological individualism in which men are regarded
as passive recipients of given facts and recorders of their
given conjunctions.

         Against this it is argued that knowledge is a
social product, produced by means of antecedent social
products; but that the <RTS2:17> objects of which, in the
social activity of science, knowledge comes to be produced,
exist and act quite independently of men.  These two aspects
of the philosophy of science justify our talking of two
dimensions and two kinds of 'object' of knowledge: a
transitive dimension, in which the object is the material
cause or antecedently established knowledge which is used to
generate the new knowledge; and an intransitive dimension,
in which the object is the real structure or mechanism that
exists and acts quite independently of men and the
conditions which allow men access to it.  These dimensions
are related in Chapter 3.  Two criteria for the adequacy of
an account of science are developed: (i) its capacity to
sustain the idea of knowledge as a produced means of
production; and (ii) its capacity to sustain the idea of the
independent existence and activity of the objects of
scientific thought.

         It is the overall argument of this study then that
knowledge must be viewed as a produced means of production
and science as an ongoing social activity in a continuing
process of transformation.  But the aim of science is the
production of the knowledge of the mechanisms of the
production of phenomena in nature that combine to generate
the actual flux of phenomena of the world.  These
mechanisms, which are the intransitive objects of scientific
enquiry, endure and act quite independently of men.  The
statements that describe their operations, which may be
termed `laws', are not statements about experiences
(empirical statements, properly so called) or statements
about events.  Rather they are statements about the ways
things act in the world (that is, about the forms of
activity of the things of the world) and would act in a
world without men, where there would be no experiences and
few, if any, constant conjunctions of events.  (It is to be
able to say this inter alia that we need to distinguish the
domains of the real, the actual and the empirical.)

         Although the primary aim of this book is
constructive, it is an important subsidiary aim to situate
the conditions of the plausibility of empirical realism and
to show it as depending upon what is in effect a special
case.  These conditions are briefly: a naturally occurring
closure, a mechanistic conception of action and the model of
man referred to earlier.  The attempt to reduce knowledge to
an individual acquistion in sense-experience and to view the
latter as the neutral ground of <RTS2:18> knowledge that
(literally) defines the world results in the generation of
an ontology of atomistic discrete events, which if they are
to be related at all (so making general knowledge possible)
must be constantly conjoined.  (Hence the presupposition of
a closure.)  On this view the causal connection must be
contingent and actual; by contrast I want to argue that it
is necessary and real.


     --- from list seminar-14-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---