Date: Tue, 09 Jun 1998 08:26:18 -0700 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: James Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [PEN-L:484] Re: realist postulate Reply-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> Ricardo responds: >Okay, so your position is not that of the naive realist. That is, the >only thing you assume is that you do have a subjective perception of >something, but you do not assume that your perception corresponds >directly to a physical object. You admit that there may be a gap >between the way the object seems to your perceptions and the way the >object really is. But you are satisfied that the way the object seems >to your perceptions is a sufficient ground for knowledge. > >If this is what you are saying, then you position is a lot more >sophisticated than that of the naive realist, still so common >among many marxists. I had to check A.J Ayer's book, The Problem of >Knowledge, to interpret your position. Are you consciously >following his views? If so, my "blatant misrepresentation" is a >result of your own ambiguous use of the term "realist postulate", >since what you are defending is the empiricism of Berkeley and Hume. I was following my interpretion of Roy Bashkar, whose name I probably misspelled and whose thoughts are too complicated to cite without doing injustice to them. BTW, his ideas are all the rage among Marxists. I really don't know enough about Berkeley or Hume or Ayer to talk about them. R: Well, Bhaskar is a realist, a sophisticated one; he is a strong critic of empirism and the whole tradition set by Hume. Many marxists see him as the saviour of materialism (though he defines his philosophy as "realism"). Accordimg to him the problem with empiricism is that it allows one to speak only of regularites in the form of "whenever I observe x....then I observe y". Empiricism dismisses as metaphysical any claim that there is something intrinsic to x such that it necessarily leads it to cause y. Bhaskar however insists that things have essential properties such that x necessarily causes y. But I only read one book by Bhaskar, some time ago. I know that he thinks he is performing a "Copernican revolution" against Kant's own claim that he had accomplished such a revolution in philosophy. If I recall, whereas Kant felt it was necessary to deduce certain categories in order to *understand* the influx of our sensory experiences, Bhaskar thinks that we must postulate causal mechanisms out there in order to explain things. From what I know, I think Bhaskar is right against empiricim, but wrong that causal mechanisms out there are the foundation of our knowledge. I think you too (even as you waver into Berkeley's empricism) think that we must postulate something in order to assure ourselves that what we say is true. ricardo I said: >> As I said before, the realist >> _postulates_ (i.e., assumes rather than knows) that there is something out >> there which is the basis of our knowledge. We perceive something. The >> realist assumes that this perception in some way reflects the external >> world, objective reality. R: >You see here you are moving back to naive realism. For if what >counts is your subjective perceptions, then the *basis* of your >knowledge cannot be something out there. The basis, rather, has to >be your subjective perception of something out there. But I _assume_ that the basis of the subjective perception is "out there" (or perhaps the excessive amount of caffeine in my veins) rather than _knowing_ that this is true. This assumption may not be valid, but it seems necessary to rational thought. in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html
