From: Howard Engelskirchen (hengels@ZOOM-DSL.COM)
Date: Sun May 11 2003 - 02:57:07 EDT
Rakesh writes: > Yet not quite sure at all what to make of > the attempts to introduce virtuality into traditional ontology; not > sure whether the concept of virtuality helps in any way to clarify > Marx's sense of the actual reality of his laws of tendency. > __________ As I understand it, Rakesh, the rest of your post answers the question posed -- without speaking to the way in which the philosophers you mention use the precise term "virtuality," if you start with a "things with powers" ontology, then you need the actual/latent distinction because powers may exist unexercised. My friend has the power to see, but just now her eyes are closed. * * * For the rest, I'm not convinced that the uncertainty principle gets credit for the methodological progress you identify. In explaining how modern methodologies of science have gotten beyond the primary/secondary quality distinction, you say that a primary quality > was > supposed to be a feature which an object possesses independent > of an observer. Classic examples were supposed to be mass, > position or size. Primary qualities, that is, were thought to be > resident within their object; inalienable from it and make up their > essence. An observer simply measured or read a primary quality, > but the quality is in no sense dependent upon the observer. > > Secondary qualities arise from the interaction between the object > and an observer. Taste and color are typical of this type. Again, without getting into how old philosophy understood these things, two separate methodological issues seem fused here, and we can sort them out without appeal to the uncertainty principle. The first problem is the empiricist idea that as passive observers scientists simply hold a mirror up to nature and record the images that appear. But given widespread recognition today that all scientific work is theory dependent, there is not much appeal anymore to the mimetic model of what scientists do. As Marx understood, producing knowledge depends on conscious idea driven activity. It is a separate question whether objects of science are independent of us. We can function in the world as ordinary causal phenomena, but the fact that all scientific activity is theory dependent doesn't mean scientists self-actively impose conceptual order on nature. Recall the Theses on Feuerbach. Causation is not a social construction we impose on things. The real issue is recognizing the fit required between the theoretical presuppositions of our activity and the causal structures we study. That such a fit exists is a condition of knowledge. The point of establishing a thing as a natural or social kind -- e.g. as hydrogen, or a rabbit, or value -- is that the term itself is situated within a range of background theories such that it provides a reliable basis for projecting hypotheses that advance our efforts to act in the world. While the categories we use will reflect our own presuppositions and purposes, we have to get it approximately right about structures independent of us. To speak in terms of the old metaphor, we try to carve nature at its joints. If we have the joints approximately right, there will often be many ways to carve and how we decide to do will depend on the theories we presuppose and our purposes. But if the causal structures of the world are independent of us then we can't carve any way we want. We can't carve where there aren't joints. Howard
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