From owner-bhaskar Tue Jul 23 13:16:35 1996
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 11:14:01 -0600
From: Hans Ehrbar
Message-Id: <199607231714.LAA03008@pharos.lib.utah.edu>
Subject: rts2-03
16 A Realist Theory of 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
Introduction 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
18 A Realist Theory of Science
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.
Chapter 1 establishes the necessity for an
ontological distinction between causal laws and patterns
of events (see esp. 1.3) and contains a sketch of a
critique of empirical realism (see esp. 1.6). Chapter 2
develops in detail the conditions required for the Humean
analysis of laws and provides an analysis of normic
statements (see esp. 2.4). Determinism is shown to be an
immensely implausible thesis; and the central tenets of
orthodox philosophy of science - such as the principle of
instance-confirmation (or falsification), the Humean
theory of causality, the Popper-Hempel theory of
explanation, the thesis of the symmetry between
explanation and prediction, the criterion of
falsifiability, etc. - to be manifestly untenable.
Chapter 3 sets out to give a rational account of the
process of scientific discovery; in which both nature and
our knowledge of nature are seen as stratified, as well as
differentiated (see esp. 3.3). A theory of natural
necessity is developed which it is claimed is capable of
resolving inter alia the problems of induction and of
subjunctive conditionals and Goodman's and Hempel's
paradoxes (see 3.6). Chapter 4 rounds off the argument
and summarises some of the main themes of this study.
Moving towards a conception of science as concerned
essentially with possibilities, and only derivatively with
actualities, much attention is given to the analysis of
such concepts as tendencies and powers. Roughly the
theory advanced here is that statements of law are
tendency statements. Tendencies may be possessed
unexercised, exercised unrealised, and realized
unperceived (or undetected) by men; they may also be
transformed. Although the focus of this study is natural
science, something is said about the social sciences and
about the characteristic pattern of explanation in
history.
If the first half of this work is concerned with
establishing the necessity for an ontological distinction
between causal laws and patterns of events and tracing the
implications of the
Introduction 19
distinction between open systems and closed, that is, of
the differentiation of our world, the second is concerned
principally with showing how science can come to have
knowledge of natural necessity a posteriori. The
differentiation of the world implies its stratification,
if it is to be a possible object of knowledge for us. If
generative mechanisms and structures are real then there
is a clear criterion for distinguishing between a
necessary and an accidental sequence: a sequence E_a . E_b
is necessary if and only if there is a generative
mechanism or structure which when stimulated by the event
described by `E_a' produces E_b. If we can have empirical
knowledge of such generative mechanisms or structures then
we can have knowledge of natural necessity a posteriori.
In showing how this is possible a non-Kantian 'sublation'
of empiricism and rationalism is achieved.
In the transitive process of science three levels of
knowledge may be distinguished. At the first (or Humean)
level we just have the invariance of an experimentally
produced result. Given such an invariance science moves
immediately to the construction and testing of possible
explanations for it. If there is a correct explanation,
located in the nature of the thing whose behaviour is
described in the putative law or the structure of the
system of which the thing is a part, then we do have a
reason independent of its behaviour as to why it behaves
the way it does. Now such a reason may be discovered
empirically. And if we can deduce the thing's tendency
>from it then the most stringent possible (or Lockean)
criterion for our knowledge of natural necessity is
satisfied. For example, we may discover that copper has a
certain atomic or electronic structure and then be able to
deduce its dispositional properties from a statement of
that structure. We may then be said to have knowledge of
natural necessity a posteriori. At the third (or
Leibnizian) level we may seek to express our discovery of
the electronic structure of copper in an attempted real
definition of the thing. This is not to put an end to
enquiry, but a stepping stone to a new process of
discovery in which we attempt to discover the mechanisms
responsible for electronic structure.
In 3.5 the grounds for inductive scepticism are
examined and shown to be fundamentally mistaken and in 3.6
the problem, which arises from the ontology of atomistic
events (and closed
20 A Realist Theory of Science
systems), resolved. Dynamic realist principles of
substance and causality are shown to be a condition of the
intelligibility of experimental activity and the
stratification of science. Science, it is argued, is
concerned with both taxonomic and explanatory knowledge:
with what kinds of things there are, as well as how the
things there are behave. It attempts to express the
former in real definitions of the natural kinds and the
latter in statements of causal laws, i.e. of the
tendencies of things. But it is concerned with neither in
an undiscriminating way. It is concerned with things only
in as much as they cast light on reasons; and reasons only
in as much as they cast light on things. A realist theory
of the universals of interest to science complements the
realist theory of scientifically significant invariances,
i.e. invariances generated under conditions which are
artificially produced and controlled.
It is the argument of this book that if science is to
be possible the world must consist of enduring and
transfactually active mechanisms; society must consist of an
ensemble of powers irreducible to but present only in the
intentional actions of men; and men must be causal agents
capable of acting self-consciously on the world. They do so
in an endeavour to express to themselves in thought the
diverse and deeper structures that account in their complex
manifold determinations for all the phenomena of our world.
.