REQUERIMIENTO FISCAL Y LEGITIMIDAD CONSTI TUCIONAL

In A Realist Theory of Science (1975, 1978) and The Possibility of Naturalism (1979, 1989) Bhaskar set in motion a programme in the philosophy of natural and social science which came to be called critical realism.32 He diagnoses a recurrent error, dubbed the ‘epistemic fallacy,’ (1978: 16) in which ontology is

30

Meehl and Sellars (1956) reject Peper’s analysis for essentially the same reason, even though holding for their own part that emergentism is false on empirical grounds.

31 _{Some of these questions are returned to in Chapter Three below (section 6) and in the conclusions of the} present work.

32

Bhaskar (1975) defended ‘transcendental realism’, Bhaskar (1989a) ‘critical naturalism’. The two terms were subsequently combined (e.g. 1989b) to form ‘critical realism’.

reduced to epistemology, in other words where questions about the real are pursued as though they were questions about our knowledge of the real. Opposing this allegedly anthropocentrist move he argues, against empiricism and positivism, that we may deduce from features of scientific practice that the world is structured, differentiated and changing. A differentiated world contains open and closed systems, where closed systems alone manifest the regularity (constant conjunction) classical empiricists assume to be ubiquitous, and which they take as the paradigm of causality. A structured (or ‘stratified’) world, on the other hand, is one where different orders or levels of causal power operate, not always obviously manifest in the actual flow of events.33 Thus it is, he says, that in some cases scientists may causally intervene in nature to produce a closed system, and the consequent experimental regularity still be partly informative about nature itself. More specifically, as is explained below, Bhaskar thinks that we may conclude by means of transcendental argument from the fact of differentiation itself that the world is stratified, i.e. that physics is not complete, and furthermore that the ways in which the world is stratified are susceptible to change.

Bhaskar’s overall argument is extremely ambitious and has a rich selection of targets. One feature of that argument, which may be a consequence of this extreme ambition, is that it is not always clear that particular theses Bhaskar advances are capable standing solely on the strength of the reasons given, but appears instead that, as presented, they stand only in the network of other conclusions and arguments he offers. Such ‘all or nothing’ situations are philosophically odious, and my conclusion in what follows is that read as an attack on the Completeness Thesis Bhaskar’s argument fails. Nonetheless I contend that it is interesting in its own right, and in any event connects in significant ways with issues common to some of the other major positions in the philosophy of science which I will be considering here, notably those of Dupré and Cartwright. I also argue, against Bhaskar, that his approach to the question of the status of laws identified under experimental conditions can in fact be used to construct a defence of the Completeness Thesis against lines of anti-completeness arguments which are relevantly similar to his own.

Bhaskar’s general purpose in A Realist Theory of Science is to develop a ‘systematic realist account of science’ which will ‘provide a comprehensive alternative to ... positivism’ (1978:12). His starting point in A Realist Theory of Science is the distinction between transitive, that is socially constructed, and intransitive, that is entirely independent of social life, aspects of the world. He states that:

Any adequate philosophy of science must find a way of grappling with this central paradox of science: that men in their social activity produce knowledge which is a social product much like any other ... [but] that knowledge is ‘of’ things which are not produced by men at all ... If we can imagine a world of intransitive objects without science we cannot imagine a science without intransitive objects...(1978:21-2).

In the face of this alleged paradox34, Bhaskar’s starting point is to take it as given that science does

make sense, and in particular that the activity of the modern style experiment35 _{is at least sometimes} epistemologically defensible. He then asks transcendentally what sort of world would we have to inhabit for this defensibility to be philosophically intelligible. More specifically Bhaskar regards his argument as a transcendental deduction from the ‘possibility’ of science (1978: 26). There is good reason to be cautious about transcendental arguments, since they depend heavily on the proper identification and interpretation of whatever is used as a premise, and are open to alternative analyses of either that premise itself or of the conditions needed to render it possible. Furthermore it is at least unclear what precisely is meant by the claim that science is ‘possible’. I return to the question of the interpretation of this premise in section (5) below, and for the time being concentrate on Bhaskar’s philosophy of science.

4.1.

Experimental Activity

Experimental activity is of particular interest here precisely because, with the exception of celestial movement, almost all empirical regularities occur only in situations characterised by experimental control.36 This is simply to say that what is above called the ‘differentiation’ of the world into open and closed systems just is an empirical fact.

Bhaskar contends that the constant conjunction is the empiricist/positivist paradigm of causality,37 _and that empiricism and positivism have a common commitment to what he calls ‘actualism’, and which he defines as the doctrine of the actuality of causal laws; that is, to the idea that laws are ‘relations between events or states of affairs’ (1978:64). He proposes to show the defects of this view, and the strengths of his own, by analysing what he calls the ‘conditions for closure’. As noted above he calls systems in which constant conjunctions do obtain ‘closed’ and those in which they do not ‘open’. Since actualism identifies natural laws with constant conjunctions, it presupposes closed systems. The analysis of the conditions for closure should then make clear the extent to which actualism is sustainable. In opposition to actualism Bhaskar proposes to show that, contra Hume, a constant conjunction of events is neither a sufficient nor even a necessary condition

34

It may certainly be a puzzle but it seems infelicitous to call it a paradox. 35

Bhaskar himself is not entirely clear about his target here, although the types of experiment he discusses (see section 4.1 immediately below) suggest that his paradigm examples are classic experiments by, e.g., Galileo and Boyle which isolate specific regularities or the responses of single variables under controlled conditions. Dear (1995) gives an exceptionally clear and careful account of the historical development of these types of experiment.

36

This fact has also been commented on by Nancy Cartwright (1980, 1983) and is discussed further in Chapter Four below, especially section (5.3).

37 _{Bhaskar makes clear that in different ways it is Hume, Mill and Kant who he has in mind here. Whether his} exegeses are fair is a question which is not central to my purposes here, although failings with his reading of Mill are an important consideration in section (6) below. What is most significant for my purposes, though, is not whether Bhaskar’s exegeses are accurate, but whether the positions he attacks truly permit the conclusions he draws from their failings to be established.

for a scientific law (e.g. 1975: 33-35). Given that closed systems are, at least prima facie, not the norm, the analysis of experimental activity just is the analysis of the special conditions for the credibility of actualism.

Bhaskar points out that ‘an experiment is necessary precisely to the extent that the pattern of events forthcoming under experimental conditions would not be forthcoming without it’ (1978: 33). This observation is fairly common-sensical, drawing attention to the fact that experiment would serve no purpose at all unless by engaging in experimental activity something was made to happen which would not otherwise have happened. At least one possible purpose of an experiment is to be informative, which is to say that in some sense it should ‘tell us something’ which but for the performance of the experiment we would not have come to know. If, however, we are to make proper sense of our commitment to regarding experimental work as scientifically informative then Bhaskar thinks we are required to accept some significant assumptions:

It is a condition of the intelligibility of experimental activity that in an experiment the experimenter is a causal agent of a sequence of events but not of the causal law which the sequence of events enables him to identify (Bhaskar 1978: 12).

Bhaskar’s claim here is that without the assumption which he calls a ‘condition of intelligibility’ we would have to regard the outcomes of experiments as either arbitrary reflections of experimental intention (so that the experimenter could generate any sequence of events, and the result be completely uninformative) or useless (so that the result is informative only about the experimental situation rather than the world at large). At this point it is worth noting that the term ‘causal agent’ can be read relatively weakly, indicating simply that the experimenter was not causally redundant with reference to the events which occurred in the experiment. There are places in Bhaskar’s argument, though, where the notion of a causal agent is given a much stronger metaphysical reading involving real bearers of causal powers, a conception which raises a number of difficulties some of which are discussed below. If, for the time being, we take the weak sense of causal agent and regard the assumption as acceptable, that is to say if we reject the alternative possibilities that experiments are either uninformative or useless, then it follows immediately that there must be a categorical distinction between events and whatever it is that the laws of science have as their objects.

In other words: attempting to justify the minimal assumption that experimental activity is at least potentially informative about the world, and noting that the world consists of both open and closed systems where it is generally constitutive of an experimental system that it be closed, it follows that whatever the object of science is, it cannot be patterns of events. If the object of science is events, then either science can tell us nothing about most of reality, since any laws relating purely to events would apply for the most part only in

the laboratory where the patterns of events have to be worked for anyway, or science has discovered no laws at all, since no general law describing events can stand up to the existence of open systems.38

Bhaskar, as we know, has already decided that that experimental work is at least possibly informative about affairs outside the laboratory and so concludes at this point that such work tells us about the ‘generative mechanisms’ (Bhaskar 1978: 14) which give rise to events rather than the events themselves. The term generative mechanism is not supposed to carry any great weight at this stage, and it rather marks the ‘categorical distinction’ noted above, which is to say that a generative mechanism cannot itself be an event, and that generative mechanisms are those aspects of the world in virtue of which the events which do occur occur.

On the view Bhaskar is defending experimental activity is seen as the planned disruption of what is going on in some part of the world with the intention of getting the flux of events, by being empirically regular, to give some indication of the properties of a particular generative mechanism. At times he describes the function of experiment as being to bring some generative mechanism ‘in phase’ (1978: 35) with the flow of events so that properly interpreted the events can be seen as informative about the mechanism or mechanisms in question. There is no obvious a priori reason to assume that closure will always be possible, which is to say that it is reasonable to suppose that the world could include systems (or perhaps ‘levels’ of reality although I am wary of the implications of the notion of a level here) for which closure is impossible.39

Bhaskar goes on to develop a view of natural laws as ‘transfactual’ (1975: 51) ascriptions of ‘tendencies’ (1975: 97-100) or powers to things in the world. In a closed system a tendency will manifest itself regularly under equivalent conditions, but in open systems the manifest flow of events will typically be the product of the operation of many tendencies, some of which may be exercised without any eventual effect. Aspects of this view are discussed further in the discussion of Cartwright’s notion of ‘capacities’ (Cartwright 1989) below.

Although Bhaskar thinks that specific enquiry into the nature of the generative mechanisms in the world is a scientific task which cannot be pre-empted by philosophy, he also maintains that the claim that there are

generative mechanisms at all, and that the world is what he calls stratified, can be made on the basis of philosophical argument. He marks this point by drawing a distinction between what he calls philosophical and

scientific ontology:

One consequence of the argument which establishes the transfactual and non-empirical nature of laws is that a philosophical as distinct from a scientific ontology is irreducible in the philosophy of science. A

38 _{Bhaskar does not draw a distinction between fundamental and phenomenological or engineering laws in the} manner of Cartwright (1980, 1983), whose approach (discussed in Chapter Four below) is to accept the ‘limited validity’ option as far as laws go, although her later (1989) work on capacities is closer to Bhaskar’s thinking on tendencies.

39

This may be the case, for example, with Quantum Mechanics. The question of how to interpret failures of closure is discussed below in sections (5) and (6) while Quantum Mechanics is discussed in section (7.2).

philosophical ontology will consist of some general account of the nature of the world, to the effect that it is structured and differentiated, whereas a scientific ontology will specify the structures which, according to the science of the day, it contains and the particular ways in which they are differentiated (1989b:150).

One of Bhaskar’s major conclusions, then, is that as a point of philosophical ontology he regards the world as stratified in the sense that it contains physically efficacious causal kinds other than physical ones. It is in virtue of his defence of this conclusion that his position is centrally relevant to my consideration of the completeness thesis here.

While there is a great deal more which can be said about Bhaskar’s transcendental realism, what has been covered here is sufficient for the purposes of engaging with the issue of the strength of his analysis of experiment as a rejection of the Completeness Thesis. The following section presents an analysis of his argument for emergence, and the section after that develops criticisms of the argument which I regard as sufficient to refute it.