Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 12:20:46 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Re: rts2-25



Dear Seminar,


I found the readings for this week extremely difficult, perhaps because I
am not familiar with all the terms that Bhaskar uses here.  Specifically,
although I would agree with Bhaskars conclusions about criticizing closed
systems, I did not quite understand his argument.  Here some basic
questions.

Bhaskar distinguishes between cause1: qua causal agent and cause2: qua
antecedent condition.  He also distinguishes between cause an
determination.  He then distinguishes between epistemological and
ontological determination:  the former claims that events can be known
before they are causes and the latter claims that the antecedent
conditions for an event may occur before their immediate cause.   Is
determination cause2?

Now I think that cause1 is just another way of stating Aristotles
efficient cause;  however, I am unsure about what exactly Bhaskar means by
antecedent conditions.  Is he talking about something like conditions for
the possibility so that cause 2 is on a lower level than cause 2? The
problem is complicated because a little earlier, Bhaskar  refered to
"antecedent sufficient conditions", but he calls cause2 only an
"antecedent condition".  He argues that we should separate cause1 and
cause 2, so I assume that he claims that the various determinists do not
make this separation.  Hence from the determinists perspective, should we
say that epistemological and ontological determinism are the same? After
all, from their perspective antecedent conditions bring about the event
and hence are cause 1. 

Then on p. 9-10 of my e-mail version(RTS115-6), I was unclear  about Bs
argument for the claim:

"This means as a means of discovery, i.e of achieving such a body of
knowledge reductionism must fail. For it presupposes precisely what is to
be discovered. "  

I am not sure why this is the case for predictive
reductionism.  Previously Bhaskar argued that this reductionism required a
strategy, but now he claims it must achieve a body of knowledge.  What is
the relationship between the strategy and the body of knowledge?

Finally, I was confused about the following claim:

"The only way of reconciling experimental activity with the empiricist
notion of law is to regard it as an illusion"

I do not see why this is the case.  Why couldnt the empiricist merely say
that experimental activity is a means of seeing constant conjunctions that
we may not otherwise not perceive?  At the most, if the empiricist
presupposed that the world is transparent, experimental activity would be
superfluous but not necessarily an illusion.  Here it would help if he
took an actual empiricist model of experimental activity and showed how
they were committed to this absurd conclusion.




Viren
   





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