>>> Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> 03/30/00 03:58PM >>>Bhaskar writes that theories of scientific change have failed to make "a
distinction between causal laws and empirical invariances (patterns of
events)" implied by "experimental activity" (p. 39). The problem of the
"implicit _ceteris paribus_ clause," in Bhaskar's view, results from a
"_fusion_ of the world and experience (a conflation of the ontological and
epistemic orders)," to which both Popper and his critics are committed (p.
38). In other words, a distinction must be drawn between "the _real_
structures, mechanisms and systems of relations at work in nature (and
society), providing the ontological basis of causal laws, and the manifest
(or _actual_) patterns of events they generate, whether humans are causal
agents in their productions or not" (p. 40).
______
CB: Perhaps this is the same distinction that Marx makes when he says:
"My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which , under the name of "the Idea", he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of "the Idea". With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought."
Lenin formulated an epistemological theory of reflection based on this model.
CB