You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Theory' category.
I really like the idea of rights as a global meta-discourse: something that informs how we think about humanity on a universal level, the dimensions of human particularity and the ethical/social/political questions that flow from this. However as a political discourse, active in the life of capitalist liberal democracies, I think it’s a very negative thing: it goes hand-in-hand with a zero-sum approach to human freedom, a juridicial understanding of social conflict and self-assertion of a kind which is fundamentally inimical to solidarity and collective agency. Is it possible to contextualise rights discourse or is the extent to which it’s taken up and seen to work as a language in which to speak about the human moral/political situation a consequence of its affectivity, the intuitive semantic force of it? Taking this as anempirical premise then, if it’s the case, does this suggest we ought to give up rights discourse because despites its moral and conceptual value in certain domains it will create and reinforce the kind of liberal and legalistic individualism which meshes so neatly with the capitalist order and which provides its moral and ideological underpinning i.e. the people offering the most moral and moralising defence of capitalist are those who are defending the political and economic commitments that flow from liberial individualism (formal and negative freedom with all this entails in terms of tacit commitments about the human existential situation).
I just came across this great article from Science News. It’s a report from a conference on critical realism and theology.
According to McMullin and to Peacocke, critical realism stands opposed to those who regard scientific development as conditioned by sociology. Specifically they mention the “Edinburgh school” of sociologists of science and the followers of philosopher and physicist Thomas Kuhn of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the Kuhnian view, scientific activity is governed by paradigms, generally accepted ways of looking at a given problem or set of problems. What people seek to find experimentally, what they do find and how they relate new findings to old knowledge are all highly conditioned by the particular paradigm they follow. The Ptolemaic picture of the solar system, to which the Inquisition was wedded, and Galileo’s Copernican view are rival paradigms in the Kuhnian view. Observers believing in either one would arrange observations according to the presuppositions of that paradigm.
Critical realists will have none of this conditioning. They insist that, by correcting errors and rejecting false starts, science “converges” to real answers to given questions, answers that are not paradigmatically conditioned.
Peacocke sees the sciences as a “nested set,” each dealing with reality at a particular level of complexity. In his view, the levels of greater complexity are not completely reducible to levels of lower complexity: Biology, for example, is not reducible to physics and chemistry. Peacocke does not believe in anything like an elan vital, some special principle of life. He acknowledges that the processes occurring in biology are those of physics and chemistry but insists nevertheless that biology is not reducible to chemistry and physics. In this nonreductionist scheme, theology takes its place as dealing with reality on the most complex level of all, and it is not reducible to the natural sciences. One of the serious problems in the past has been that science has explained on natural grounds things that theologians considered inexplicable.
Physics makes scientific problems for critical realism. Antirealists, McMullin remarked, will draw their examples from mechanics. At the time I was unwilling to be called an antirealist — who wants to be in favor of unreality? — but now I think I probably am one, from the critical realists’ point of view. I asked whether science needs to converge to one answer to every question. Quantum mechanics tends to give at least two answers to every question, and it tells you you can’t choose between them; it deals with a reality that is complex and often paradoxical. McMullin brushed this aside. To him there are no paradoxes in quantum mechanics — a conclusion, I think, that will amaze most physicists. To most physicists the conjunction of particle and wave natures in a single being is as close to an antithesis as you are likely to get.
Peacocke insists that critical realism teaches us that electrons are real. I believe it; now tell me what an electron is. What does “real” mean in the context of an electron’s existence? Indeed, for physicists the interesting question nowadays is whether quarks and gluons are real, but critical realism’s exclusion of mechanics from its purview seems to preclude it from dealing with that question.
The critical realists concentrate on what they call the structural sciences, by which they mostly mean biology. They get geology into their program by leaving dynamics out of it. They also try to annex astrophysics by leaving mechanics out of it. Most astrophysicists would be hard put to find much left of their discipline if you took mechanics out of it. I got the feeling that I was attending a celebration by biologists who had found a philosophy that fits biology rather well, as the Kuhnian analysis fits physics rather well, and who were not going to let objections mar their festivities, even when the objections came from another biologist.
I think what they’re saying is ultimately wrong but it’s a fascinating engagement. I guess from the Critical Realist standpoint the dispute could in part be explained by the restrictive metatheoretical architecture of disciplinary practices that have, to varying degrees, occluded epistemic relativism through all manner of basically quite dogmatic positivist metatheory. In itself I’d suggest this is more understandable given the entire debate played itself out within a framework that metaphysically counterposed scientific objectivity to human subjectivity, such that a collapse of the seperation between them was seen to threaten the very possibility of truth and reason. Yet this fear is mistaken. As the glossary for critical realism explains,
Epistemic relativism turns on the issue whether science has a universal, objective and unchanging set of concepts that serve as its absolute foundation (SRHE 43). Its opposite is termed “monism.” Bhaskar says it does not and hence plumps for epistemic relativism. He believes that all our concepts and beliefs are historically generated and conditioned and so relative to a perspective and subject to change. He combines this view with judgmental rationality, which asserts that science is not arbitrary and that there are rational criteria for judging some theories as better and more explanatory than others.
Epistemic relativism, of course, does not say that our conceptual toolkit is arbitrary, a view no doubt supported by judgmental rationality. This concept also permits an understanding of changing conceptual framework as well as the accretion of knowledge in an unchanged conceptual framework (SRHE 52). Bhaskar often refers to changing and unchanging knowledge, but he appears to mean conceptual frameworks rather than the aggregate of what is known.
