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ix All interpretation is inherently dialogical and we bring all the resources at our command to the task of understanding a text.
p.8 The primary aim of this study is the development of a systematic realist account of science.
p.14 The real basis of causal laws are provided by the generative mechanisms of nature. Such generative mechanisms are, it is argued, nothing other than the ways of acting of things. And causal laws must be analysed as their tendencies. Tendencies may be regarded as powers or liabilities of a thing which may be exercised without being manifest in any particular outcome.
p.16 the epistemic fallacy... statements about being can always be transposed into statements about our knowledge of being.
p.16-17 it is argued that knowledge is a social product, produced by means of antecedent social products; but that the objects of which, in the social activity of science, knowledge comes to be produced, exist and act quite independently of men.
p.17 It is the overall argument of this study then that knowledge must be viewed as a produced means of production and science as an ongoing social activity in a continuing process of transformation. [JLJ - Luhmann-esque, if you ask me. I see knowledge as anything which helps us determine how to "go on" - predicament-specific, and including inputs to decision points of a scheme, which directs us to perform certain actions, including gathering more knowledge.]
p.20 It is the argument of this book that if science is to be possible the world must consist of enduring and transfactually active mechanisms; society must consist of an ensemble of powers irreducible to but present only in the intentional actions of men; and men must be causal agents capable of acting self-consciously on the world.
p.22 we cannot imagine the production of knowledge save from, and by means of, knowledge-like materials. Knowledge depends upon knowledge-like antecedents.
p.23 social products, antecedently established knowledges capable of functioning as the transitive objects of new knowledges, are used to explore the unknown (but knowable) intransitive structure of the world. Knowledge of B is produced by means of knowledge of A, but both items of knowledge exist only in thought.
p.109 By an agent I mean simply anything which is capable of bringing about a change in something (including itself).
p.111 Laws leave the field of the ordinary phenomena of life at least partially open. They impose constraints on the type of action possible for a given kind of thing. But they do not say which out of the possible actions will actually be performed.
p.117 It is relatively easy to show that all (and not just scientific) action depends upon our capacity to identify causes in open systems. For all action depends upon our capacity to bring about changes in our physical environment... we not only act on it, in the sense of bringing about changes that would not otherwise have occurred; we act on it purposefully and intentionally, i.e. so as to bring about these changes (as the results and consequences of our actions) and knowing that we are acting in that way. This depends upon our being able to identify features of our environment as the objects of our causal attention and as part of the system to which causality applies. Thus we must be capable of identifying and ascribing causes in our environment, and knowing ourselves as a causal agent among others. Unless we could do this, we could not act intentionally at all. Thus all human action depends upon our capacity to identify causes in open systems
p.117 Men are not passive spectators of a given world, but active agents in a complex one.
p.118 closed systems are a presupposition of the actualist account of science... Actualism cannot... show how the practical application of our knowledge is possible in open systems.
p.185 The basic conception of scientific activity that I have been concerned to advance here is that it is (consists in or involves) work... Science is produced by the imaginative and disciplined work of men on what is given to them. But the instruments of the imagination are themselves produced by means of knowledge. Thus knowledge is produced by means of knowledge. [JLJ - Yes, and this can be as simple as asking "How might I proceed?" and following up whatever musings we are able to produce, with "How much should I care about that?".]
p.238 When we know what a thing is we know what it will tend to do, if appropriate circumstances materialize.
p.242-243 I have argued that knowledge depends upon knowledge-like antecedents [JLJ - one could argue that we perceive as part of a scheme that we are executing - we are following a script in a way that tells us what kind of scanning to perform and what kind of interpretation to make of the signs and symbols we see. A scheme is knowledge of how to act, in order to "go on". Without such a scheme, can there be perception?]
p.248 Science must be conceived as an ongoing social activity; and knowledge as a social product which individuals must draw upon to use in their own critical explorations of nature. Science is a process in motion, continually on the move from manifest behaviour to essential nature, from the description of things identified at any one level of reality to the construction and testing of possible explanations and thus the discovery of the mechanisms responsible for them.
p.250 Things exist and act independently of our descriptions, but we can only know them under particular descriptions.
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