from Larval Subjects (Levi R. Bryant), I thought this was an interesting insight to share (while reading up on object-oriented ontology):

... Bhaskar asks how science is possible and why, in particular, we must have recourse to experiment in science. As such, Bhaskar is engaged in a transcendental inquiry. However, what distinguishes Bhaskar’s transcendental inquiry so much from prior transcendental inquiries is that it does not have recourse to mind, culture, language, or the human in formulating its answer, but rather to the world. In effect, Bhaskar asks not what our minds must be like for science to be possible, but rather, in a jaw dropping and audacious move, what the world must be like for science to be possible. In short, if our science is to be possible– and since it is actual we know that it is possible –the world must be a particular way. And this way in which the world must be is intimately linked to the fact that we must engage in experiment in order to conduct our science.

Bhaskar outlines two general features that the world must have in order for 1) our science to be possible, and 2) to explain why experiment is necessary. Let us take the second question first. Why is experiment necessary? If the empiricists were right and all our knowledge originated in sensation then we would be hard put to explain why experiment is necessary. Here it is noteworthy that Kant fully takes over the empiricist line of thought which holds that knowledge must be grounded in sensation. Rather, if experiment would be superfluous, then this is because it would be sufficient to simply observe nature passively and link the appropriate sensations, whether through a priori categories as in the case of Kant or modes of association as in the case of Hume. No, if experiment is indispensable, then this can only be because objects do not manifest their powers or capacities under ordinary conditions. Objects do not manifest or “give” their powers under ordinary conditions. Rather, it is only under the highly structured and isolated conditions of the experimental setting that we are able to encounter– or better yet, dis-cover –the powers that lie within objects. As a consequence, passively given sensations are not the origin of knowledge. Ontologically, then, the condition under which experiment is both possible and necessary is only in a world where objects can act without manifesting their act in either nature or for a perceiving subject.

As such it is necessary to distinguish the being of objects from the manifestation of objects. While objects are acts, these acts are not identical with their performance in either nature (events where no humans are about to perceive them) or with their performance for humans. Rather, the proper being of the object is not its performance or manifestation, but the generative mechanism that serves as the condition under which these performances or manifestations are possible. As Graham Harman will argue– though in a very different theoretical constellation –the being of objects is essentially withdrawn or hidden. No one has ever perceived a single object, but we do perceive all sorts of effects of objects. Traditional epistemology has confused these effects with the objects themselves. Fortunately we do occasionally manage to cognize objects through a sort of detective work that infers these generative mechanisms from their effects; without, for all this, ever exhausting the infinity of a single object. At any rate, if objects were not withdrawn in this way, the practice of experiment would be unintelligible.

This leads to Bhaskar’s answer to the first question: What must the world be like for science to be possible? Note, this is not a question about mind or culture, but about the world itself, regardless of whether or not humans exist. Once again, knowledge is an accident of objects, not objects an accident of consciousness or cognition. If science is to be possible– and I would argue, if any human practice is to be possible –then the world must be structured and differentiated. The world must have joints or, as Harman puts it, the world must be composed of “chunks”. Why is this the case? Let us return to the question of experimentation and the conditions under which experiment is possible. We will adopt two possible hypotheses pertaining to the ontological nature of the world independent of humans:

1) As certain mystics and contemporary crypto-mystics would have it, the world is an undifferentiated One-All that is only subsequently segmented or partitioned into discrete beings by some form of human agency whether this be through cognition or language (in the case of language we might think of Saussure’s and Hjelmslev’s undifferentiated “sonorous matter”).

2) Entities are the sum totality of their relations to all other entities in the universe.

The first hypothesis is easily dispatched on two grounds:  read on ... (on Bryant's blog) ...