From the Heights of Metaphysics:

Abstract

I felt I should reply to Andy Pickering's short Response to my long Review of his book; I did not want to leave it uncontested in the literature.1 I will pick up a couple of points from his comments to indicate just what it is that he has failed to grasp about my Review. If these points are understood, then all else falls into place. Though Pickering writes that my critical remarks 'form a disconnected series' [AP, 307], I think on the contrary that the seven sections of my Review raised questions about each of the central themes of his book.2 Of course, for the sake of clarity and to respect the property of a language that is written linearly from left to right and from top to bottom all could not be 'mangled' together, and they were presented in sequence, which may explain their apparent unconnectedness from Pickering's 'point of view'. So let us briefly recall the content of those sections, answering his comments along the way. In the first section, I pointed out that the 'dialectic of resistance and accommodation', which is the central analytical tool proposed in the book, was reminiscent of Piaget's theory of knowledge acquisition, but with one major difference: Piaget was explicitly structural in his analysis (via the concept of'scheme'), whereas Pickering is purely phenomenalist. I thought a comparison of the two would make clear the limitations of Pickering's dialectic, which offers no way (except verbal) to make possible a real integration of different elements of practice through their incorporation into a practical scheme of action, which orients (and thus limits) future action [YG, 319-20]. The second section discussed Pickering's return to realism, and showed that his approach was simply a restatement, in a new language, of classical positions, using terms too loose to effect a 'renewal' of the debate. But on these sections, Pickering has nothing to say. The third section, on agency, again focused on a concept central to Pickering and followed in detail the way in which this 'agency' supposedly works. I concluded that since things 'just happened' (as Pickering writes so many times in his book), agency was in fact a kind of inertia that just resists action, instead of acting by itself. For if words have meaning, 'agency' must be more than 'resistance'. It is in this context that I sketched out the example of the blind man. I insisted that I thought this discussion purely metaphysical, but that it could not be passed over, given the importance it