ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the generation and consequences of the empiricist theory of the structure of scientific knowledge, a theory that follows logically from the empiricist theory of its production, which it also buttresses at key points. I show how the deductivist conception of the structure of scientific knowledge, through the reductionist theory of meaning that establishes a correspondence or identity between constant conjunctions of atomistic events and causal laws, makes it impossible to sustain the ideas of the stratification of both the world and our accounts of it, by undermining the possibility of concepts such as those of tendencies and powers.
In opposition to empiricism, I develop here and in Chapter 2 a transcendental realist position to the effect that perception gives us access to things, and experiment access to causal structures and generative mechanisms that continue to exist (endure) independently of that access and hence independently of the human operations necessary to achieve it. This forms the basis for distinctions between the domains of the empirical, which is limited to experiences; the actual, which includes events and things as well; and the real, which includes in addition structures and generative mechanisms. This necessitates an analysis of laws as normic rather than nomic; and a shift from an ontology of atomistic events to one of causally efficacious things, theoretically defined by their powers rather than in terms of our perceptions. Both tendency and power ascriptions must be analysed categorically rather than hypothetically, viz. as expressing the real possibilities of things which are irreducible to (a) their exercise and (b) their realisation, which will, in open systems, be in general co-determined by the flux of circumambient conditions. Laws must be seen as situating limits and imposing constraints rather than determining actions.
