Subject: Re: Actually it's potential/real, actual, experience
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 04:45:58 -0700



Dear Seminar-Listers:

Scientific laws describe the ways of acting of certain
things, and experiments create the conditions under which
these things act without interference from other things.
Besides observing how these things act, science also looks
at the makeup of these things themselves.  For instance in
chemistry, besides observing in which proportions different
chemical substances react with each other one also forms
wire frame models which show how atoms are arranged in
space, and one can even use quantum mechanical equations to
compute the orbits of the outer electron which encircle more
than one atom and thus create the chemical bindings between
them.



Or, to bring an example from Marxism, according to Marx's
theory of capitalism, value is a thing that is
active in a capitalist society, and in order to be able to
infer the "laws of motion" of capitalism, one has to know
what value is.  This is why Marx places so much emphasis on
the quality of value: one has to know what value is in order
to be able to infer how it acts.  Those who only observe the
quantity, i.e., the proportions in which goods are exchanged
on the market, reduce the concept of value to a superficial
empirical regularity, but are unable to grasp the dynamics
of value itself, because value is much more than these
exchange proportions.  When Marx therefore criticizes
Ricardo for not paying enough attention to the quality of
value, he raises the same criticism which Bhaskar makes
with his distinction between causal laws and empirical
regularities.


In order to understand better how value becomes a center of
causality which asserts itself through individual purposeful
activity, we need to know more about the ontology of
societies, and also about the concepts of reduction and
emergence.  In order to throw some light on the latter, I
will send Section 5 of Chapter 2 of RTS to the list.  Then
we will also do some readings from PON.



-Hans.


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