The development of Critical Realism from the 1970s onwards has sought to avoid the polarity of social theory's essentialised alternatives of positivism and interpretism. These two have since been supplemented by queer theory, poststructuralism, and feminism, among other tropes in social theory, and aspects of the influence of these on Critical Realism will be considered in future posts.
Bhaskar's initial intervention was concerned to establish a realist account of science.
One of Bhaskar's central tenets was that modernity has overemphasised the epistemological, reducing all question of status of existence to question about the knowledge of such existence. His 'epistemic fallacy' proposes that 'statements about being can be reduced to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge'. Whitehead would concur: 'all difficulties as to first principles are only camouflaged metaphysical difficulties. Thus also the epistemological difficulty is only solvable by an appeal to ontology'.
Bhaskar investigates the character of ontology via transcendental arguments in 'reflection upon what must be the case for science to be possible'. This requires positing an independent reality - 'given that science does occur, the world must be a certain way'. Rather than take a simple empiricist line, Critical Realism's transcendentalism presupposes and partially discloses that which enables the phenomena to be seen.
Shifting beyond basic facticity toward process and potentiality inherent in existence, Critical Realism makes a move that Michael Halewood lifts to the light for our witness and critique - Critical Realism divides reality up into layers, and takes a post-Kantian line, of limiting the operation of the transcendental to human thought, rather than enabling the world to transcend itself. In this way, Halewood proposes that the bifurcation of mind-in-here versus world-out-there is an unavoidable structural fault line of Critical Realism.
Depth realism, however, acts as redemptive, recouping this initial instance of dualism. The deeper generative mechanisms of world-encountering become apparent, and reality-as-it-appears is not reality-as-it-is, but, working through the appearances uncover a deeper sense of reality-as-it-really-is, with:
The 'real' - the realm of generative mechanisms that suffuse the real world;
The 'actual' - the events that manifest as the world unfolds;
The 'empirical' - the observations made by mere mortal humans of the actual, through which the operations of the real can be discerned.
Mistakes, in the form of human error, thus enter through the empirical (as can the need for research funding, a need so close to mine own heart).
These levels imply a hierarchy to reality, the emergence of one realm out of another is held by Critical Realism as constitutive of reality itself. Once this emergence occurs, new forms of self-contained reality are encountered, having their own causal mechanisms. Critical Realism attempts to deflect problems inherent in linear causation accounts by asserting that causes do exist in nature, but they are neither uniform nor unidirectional. The causes can be understood only in terms of generative, nondeterministic properties which are isolated to the experimental paradigm, and can't be abstracted into/out of full reality, which has it's own autonomous 'real' (would that economists had left their own assumptions in the realm of the laboratory! I hear you cry).
There are two more posts to come on Critical Realism, as enlivened by Halewood's critique, one evincing the possibilities of Speculative Realism, the other addressing the Whiteheadian notion of conformation.
For the moment contemplating the need to problematise the bifurcation, and/or the sense that science is an abstraction of an abstraction with an implicit transcendence of a human inquirer with consciousness is to be borne out onto the asphalt, pounded, as I take my oversized body for an Asics-shod run.
Or perhaps two.
Ref:
Halewood, M. (2011). AN Whitehead and Social Theory. London: Anthem Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment