>
>It makes NO sense to claim the emergence of human beings was an
>accident any more than it makes sense to say that "it" was
>intended or planned.
Tahir: You're quite right - see below.
It does somakesense. To say that it was an accident means it was not intended, planned, or otherwise necessary. What's your problem with that?
Tahir: Inended or planned does not equate to necessary and they don't belong in the same group. Something can be planned and not necessary and something can be necessary without being planned. My understanding of necessity is that it relates to causality. If capitalism or the evolution of a species was caused (how could it be otherwise?) then this involves a certain necessity. Certain forces in a certain time or place caused such and such to come into being. This is necessity. The issue of whether scientific laws are adequate to describing the pattern of necessity or accounting for the outcome is something quite different. For those familiar with Bhaskar's work, the former relates to the intransitive and the latter to the transitive dimensions of science (mind-independence and mind-dependence respectively.)
Nor does it makes sense to say capitalism was
>an aberration-compared to what?
Feudalism. Brenner argues that cap emerged in England and not France or Poland because of a special concatenation of historical circumastances that made it rational for English asset holders to make sure that land and labor became alienable. This included: the Black Death and the decline of population in the the 14th C., the structure of the common law and the nature of land tenure in England as opposed to elsewhere, and a bunch of other, uh, accidents. jks
Tahir: Still muddy I'm afraid. If the conditions were right in England then this is what caused the phenomenon. Their absence elsewhere explains a different outcome. The term 'accident' in all this tells us nothing, unless it means something (very) loose like "a bunch of stuff that just happened to be going on there rather than somewhere else".
The real confusion here that Carrol introduced is between whether the phenomenon is caused or not, on the one hand, and whether it can be explained by a certain set of scientific laws on the other hand. It is irrational to say that the event or phenomenon was not caused and therefore not necessary. It is not at all irrational though to say that it could not have been predicted, since all this means is that we have no scientific knowledge that is adequate to such a prediction. This is why Bhaskar takes such pains to point out that science is about explanation, not prediction. Because systems are open in the real world (as opposed to the closed system of the natural science experiment) there are more factors than can be accounted for in any set of scientific laws and therefore prediction is impossible, except of course in terms of educated guessing. To equate this with a lack of necessity is irrationalism in science. BTW the introduction of teleology is a straw man in this deb! at! e - it's not about that, although I might take issue with someone who says capitalism wasn't planned at all. Tahir