Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Critical Realism
[T]o what extent can society be studied in the same way
as nature? Without exaggerating, I think one could call
this question the primal problem of the philosophy of
the social sciences (Bhaskar, 1998, p. 1).
In the history of sociological thought, the answer to the above question has been the subject of intense philosophical debate with naturalists on one side and anti-naturalists (or humanists) on the other. While naturalists believe that social scientists can and should replicate the methodology of natural science to study human society, anti-naturalists do not.
Both sides of the debate represent intellectual tours de force in the sociological tradition. Naturalists dominated the early beginnings of sociology and anti-naturalists have dominated since the paradigm shift that began in the late nineteenth century.[1] For many contemporary sociologists, the debate is and/or should be over; however, critical realists, such as Roy Bhaskar, argue that a “qualified anti-positivist naturalism” is possible (Bhaskar, 1998, p. 3). But “What is a ‘qualified anti-positivist naturalism’?” and “Should social scientists accept it?”
To answer these questions, I begin like Bhaskar with a “real world” divided by an isomorphism of sites and activities where nature as non-manmade is the site of natural processes and society as manmade is the realm of human practices. Despite the division, however, we assume both nature and society are real in the sense that they both affect human activities because every person has both a biological/physical existence and social existence.[2] The army that invades and destroys a village, for example, is no less real than the volcano that erupts and destroys a different village.
Any theory used to explain either a natural or social event, such as the destruction of one of the above villages, is a human construction that is locally and historically situated. For examples, while ancient Romans believed volcanic eruptions and military conquests were caused by gods, a contemporary volcanologist contends that volcanic eruptions are caused by diverse physicochemical processes at depth; and someone who agrees with Joseph Schumpeter believes an army creates a war and destroys a village to validate its existence. Bhaskar and anti-naturalists agree that all theories, whether of the natural sciences or not, are socially constructed; however, Bhaskar and other critical realists argue that natural science theories, as opposed to other theories, are epistemically successful or in other words, better in the sense that they are the result of “practical research work” in a social and historical process that successively unfolds deeper levels of reality (Bhaskar, 1998, p. 18; Steinmetz, Kemp).[3][4] But what is practical or useful depends on the individual or group, and in this sense Bhaskar is an epistemological relativist.[5]
Natural science, according to critical realists, has two dimensions. First, there is the “transitive” dimension, which is comprised of theories which constitute our knowledge of reality and indirectly connect science with reality. As all theories are social constructions, natural science theories are transitory and fallible objects of science, although not equally fallible (Bhaskar, 1998). Second, there is the “intransitive” dimension where mechanisms, which are the permanent and universal objects of science, exist independently of scientific or any other human practice and represent a dimension of reality that transcends our experiences.
Natural or social reality, according to critical realists, has three levels. The first level, the “empirical”, is the subset of reality that is composed of our direct and indirect experiences. For example, we can directly experience through visual observation the beating of a frog’s heart or the execution of a condemned prisoner, and indirectly experience the beating of a frog’s heart by watching blood flow into other parts of the frog’s body or the execution by looking at the prisoner’s death certificate. The second layer, the “actual”, is logically prior to the empirical dimension and is constituted of series of events that occur whether we experience them or not. The third and final dimension is logically prior to the “actual” and is reality as a whole. It is in this third dimension, the “real”, where mechanisms (and structures and powers) that produce the series of events are “intransitive” and may or may not be experienced; (Danermark et al.; Bhaskar, 1998).[6] Thus, mechanisms (and structures and powers) are irreducible to the events they generate, and events generated are irreducible to what is experienced.
Critical realists argue that natural science work has been based upon the above belief that reality is differentiated. They also contend that natural scientists’ observation and creative imagination are and have been useful in discovering what the causal mechanisms of the “real” may be (Bhaskar, 1998).[7] There are many famous examples of natural scientists using both experimental observation and creative imagination to discover causal mechanisms that are otherwise invisible. For example, Danermark et al. gives the example of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Otto Loewi who solved a century’s old biological problem in a dream and then created and conducted an experiment that supported his imagined solution.[8] Before Loewi’s dream and experiment, it was believed that an electrical impulse traveled through a nerve and caused a muscle, such as the heart, to contract. However, it could not be explained why the same electrical impulse could travel through one nerve and cause the heart to beat faster and then travel through a different nerve and cause the heart to beat slower. Loewi’s hypothetical (or dreamt-up) solution to the riddle was that there were different substances found in the different nerves, and consequently, different chemical reactions were produced from the same electrical impulse. Loewi’s experiment supported his hypothesis and showed that the “active mechanism” is chemical substances. In turn, the knowledge that chemical substances caused a muscle to contract motivated the scientific quest to discover what the active mechanism is within the chemical substances, which once discovered motivated the quest to discover its active mechanism, and so on.[9]
Of great importance to critical realists is that although Loewi was responsible for triggering the mechanism (the chemical substances), he did not create the mechanism, that is, the “intransitive object”. The experiment connected him as the experimenter to the intransitive dimension of science and to an intransitive object of natural reality, although his identification/definition of that mechanism was theory-laden and connected him as a scientist to the transitive (social) dimension of science and indirectly to natural reality.
Many natural science experiments are interventions in reality that produce experiences of natural phenomena that otherwise would not be possible.[10] Specifically by creating closed systems in a laboratory, positivist natural scientists are able to observe distinct causal mechanisms that exist in nature but that in open systems are beyond our abilities to experience as unambiguous causes and effects or at all. Experimental closed systems are created and recreated by different positivist scientists at different times and in different places in order to see if empirical (measurable) results are replicated, to put theories to the empirical test, and discover empirical invariances (laws) of reality.[11] This empirical grounding has been considered to be essential to and illustrative of the success of the positivist natural science process. This epistemic success may suggest that critical realists accept positivist naturalism: 1) one that assumes knowledge is ultimately derived from what can be observed, 2) theories can and must be empirically tested to determine their validity, and 3) the goal of science is to discover laws of reality that are constant conjunctions of events, such as “If A, then B.” However, Bhaskar and other critical realists do not.
Critical realists reject both empiricism and positivism, a variant of empiricism. Empiricists believe reality, whether natural or social, is objective and single-layered in the sense that it has only an empirical dimension, and knowledge is obtained from the unity of sensory experience and reality. Thus, for empiricists, knowledge is always a posteriori and infallible, and the creative imagination (as abduction and retroduction) is not a valid mode of inference despite its practical use as illustrated by the example of Loewi’s dreamt-up solution.[12][13] What is observed by empiricists (and positivists) to be an invariance for a subset of distinct objects and events (cause and effect) is generalized to be an invariance for all objects and events and reality as whole. Thus, the generalization of invariance is the law of reality, whether natural or social (Potter and López).[14] In this way, reality is reduced to what is known by experience and it is essentially a system of distinct causes and effects.[15]
Critical realists, as realists, agree with empiricists and positivists that science is about something that exists independently of the individual researcher. However, they vehemently disagree with empiricists and positivists that: 1) reality has one dimension that is observable, 2) science is outside society, 3) knowledge is objective and infallible, and 4) causal laws are empirical measurable regularities. Critical realists also reject the positivists’ claim that scientific knowledge, whether natural or social, is a continuous process of submitting theories of relations between observable events/phenomena to decisive empirical tests to determine their validity because, as anti-positivists, they believe empirical facts/tests are always theory-laden and the relation between theoretical concepts and the objects that the concepts refer to is never unambiguous and simple (Danermark et al.). Instead, critical realists contend that scientific theories, whether natural or social, are descriptions of unobservable structures and mechanisms that “causally generate the observable phenomena” (Keat and Urry, 1978, p. 5). Thus, abduction and retroduction, which are rejected by empiricists and positivists, are included in and important to the critical realists’ “modes of inference” (Danermark et al., p. 73).[16] Moreover, causal laws are not universal empirical regularities, but instead are tendencies, which may include contradictions, and are better understood as statements about what objects are and the powers (mechanisms) they have because of their structure (Danermark et al., p. 55).
Critical realists’ reality, whether natural or social, is triple-layered, has observable and unobservable objects and events, and its “real” or “intransitive” dimension is where mechanisms (and structures and powers) that produce the series of events that may or may not be observed are located. For social scientists, this means society is not reducible to the individuals that constitute it; social structures and mechanisms have emergent powers.[17] It also means that what is real for critical realists is what has causal efficacy. Thus, poverty, class and unemployment, for examples, are real, although they may appear to be no more than abstractions, because they are historically and culturally determined concepts that represent generative mechanisms (of enduring structures) (Danermark et al.).
Of great importance to critical realists is the belief that real objects (causally efficacious abstractions) provide points of reference from which different social theories can be compared. The best theories are those identified as having the greatest explanatory power and advantages. However, limits and problems of theories cannot be ignored nor can one ignore the interests that powerful groups may have in those theories (Bhaskar, 1998, p. 148).
A natural scientist can ignore everyday explanations of natural phenomena and still do good natural science; however, a critical realist cannot. Everyday explanations or meanings of social phenomena, such as the use of money, must be included in social science research because they constitute the mechanisms behind the activities that make up social phenomena (Danermark et al., p. 33). Moreover, these explanations are created and used by “inherently interested and committed co-subjects” as they relate to and take part in the social world that they belong to (ibid., p. 32). This means a social scientist researcher who accepts critical realism is always engaged in participant observation. S/he begins with theories, observations, and lived experiences and constructs an explanation of the underlying structures and mechanisms (and power) that account for such phenomena.[18] This further suggests to this author that critical realist research is essentially ethnographic.
The most contentious aspect of critical realism has been Bhaskar’s argument that a scientific understanding of society is possible.[19] As stated in the beginning of this paper, the possibility of naturalism is part of a long historic debate in sociology. Critical realism may represent for some a return to the errors of prior advocates of naturalism, such as orthodox Marxists, because it dares to invoke claims of an independent reality (Spencer). However, the naturalism that motivated earlier advocates, such as orthodox Marxists, is not the naturalism of Bhaskar’s critical realism. Critical realism is not grounded in the empiricist/positivist natural science of earlier advocates, and certainly is not based in the orthodox Marxists’ mechanistic metaphor with a utopian ending. His approach is novel because he redescribes natural science, knowledge, and reality and their relationships to each other. Thus, what structures, mechanisms and agents are and what their relationships to each are in critical realism are not the same as those postulated by earlier proponents of naturalism. Critical realism should be accepted by sociologists as another approach to making sense of the social world.
ENDNOTES:
1. Early naturalists include Auguste Comte (1798 – 1857), Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903), and Lester Frank Ward (1841 – 1913). Among the early anti-naturalists are Wilhelm Heinrich Rickert (1863 – 1936) and Max Weber (1864 – 1920). Certainly, orthodox Marxists were naturalists.
2. One could argue that social existence is natural as it is the nature of humans to live in society, and the division of society and nature into two separate realms is simply an abstraction to emphasize the differences in humans’ abilities to affect the two.
3. There is always uncertainty. Bhaskar rejects any argument that suggests scientific knowledge follows a path of inevitable progress by successively eliminating uncertainty and in the end results in knowledge that is as permanent and universal as the reality it describes.
4. According to Bhaskar (1998, p. 12), “science identifies a phenomenon (or range of phenomena), constructs explanations for it and empirically tests its explanations, leading to the identification of the generative mechanism at work, which now becomes the phenomenon to be explained, and so on.” This may remind the reader of the following popular story of the search for the ultimate cause. A son asked his father what caused the world to stay in place. The father said the world rested on the back of a giant elephant. In turn, the son asked his father what held the elephant in place. The father answered that the elephant rested on the back of a giant tortoise, which in turn motivated the son to ask what held the tortoise in place. The father answered another tortoise and under that was another tortoise, so that tortoise was on tortoise all the way down.
5. One could argue that a theory about AIDs that leads to a reduction of AIDs deaths is better than a theory about AIDs that increases or does not change the number of AIDs deaths because reducing deaths is always preferable. However, an epistemological relativist is also an ethical relativist, and one theory is never better than the other. Scientific theories are never socially (or ethically) neutral; they can be and have been used to cure and kill, lessen and inflict pain, feed and starve, and perform other acts of compassion and violence.
6. As “intransitive”, they exist and operate independently of our knowledge of them.
7. Critical realists do not suggest that scientific knowledge, whether natural or social, is infallible. Consequently, knowledge of mechanisms and/or other aspects of reality is never the Truth, but is always what “may be”.
8. Another famous example is the discovery of the circular structure of the benzene molecule by Kekulé who is said to have dreamt one night that the molecule was like a snake biting its tail. Whether inspired by his dream or not, Kekulé’s “thought experiment” solved a lingering mystery in chemistry.
9. This further illustrates the belief that empirical facts are theory-laden.
10. One could say that an essential aspect of science is the quest to increasingly expand our opportunities to observe natural phenomena that are beyond our unaided sensory perceptions. This is illustrated by historical technological developments that have allowed scientists to increasingly see smaller and smaller phenomena, so that what can be seen by the unaided eye is expanded to what can be seen with a magnifying glass, which in turn is expanded to what can be seen through a compound microscope, which in turn is expanded to what can be seen through an electron microscope.
11. The same closed system is supposed to yield the same empirical results because reality exists independently of the experimenter. If not, either experimental conditions were changed and it’s not the same closed system or the results were incorrectly measured and/or reported. Similarly, neoclassical economists’ thought experiments, which create closed systems with assumptions of ceteris paribus or mutadis mutandis, represent their positivist beliefs that relationships between economic institutions and agents must be cut off from external influences and experiments should generate universal results.
12. The empiricist’s experience is always objective. Meanings of phenomena are contained within the objects of the experience and are immediate and unambiguous. The following yearning of one of the characters in Jack B. Yeat’s short play, The Green Wave, is fulfilled in the empiricist’s world:
I like things to mean something, and I like
to know what they mean, and I like to know
at once. After all, time is important, … and
why waste it in trying to find out what
something means, when if it stated its
meaning clearly itself we would know at
once.
13. In the history of positivist natural science, photographs of people have been used by scientists to validate their theories of racial and ethnic differences (Sturken and Cartwright, 2001). The subjectivity of the photographer/scientist and persons who view the photographs is not considered. Moreover, technology, like science, is assumed to occur outside society. Positivists assume technology is not a social construction shaped by particular cultures and powerful groups.
14. Danermark et al. (p. 77) define induction as “a process where, from observations of a limited number of events or phenomena … universally applicable conclusions are drawn from a larger population without leaving the empirical level.” Deduction is the process where a conclusion is derived from a set of premises, and is used to “deduce the particular from the general/a universal law” (ibid., p. 83).
15. Bhaskar describes empiricism’s reduction of reality to knowledge of reality as empiricism’s “epistemic fallacy” (Bhaskar, 1978, p. 36; Danermark et al., p. 21).
16. Positivists use both deduction and induction to make inferences. Critical realists use deduction, induction, abduction, and retroduction. Abduction is a creative process of the imagination that makes new connections and relations among phenomena. Retroduction is the process of advancing from an empirical phenomenon to its generating mechanism.
17. Society, according to critical realists, is composed of human actions, but is not reducible to or can be explained by intentional human actions as illustrated by the following statement by Bhaskar (1998, pp. 34, 35):
Society is both the ever-present condition (material cause)
and the continually reproduced outcome of human
agency. And praxis is both work, that is, conscious
production, and (normally unconscious) reproduction of
the conditions of production, that is society. One could
refer to the former as the duality of structure, and the
latter as the duality of praxis.
By the last sentence, Bhaskar means that “people, in their conscious activity, for the most part unconsciously reproduce (and occasionally transform) the structures governing their substantive activities of production” (ibid, p. 35). For example, I
did not marry my husband to reproduce the nuclear family although that action does reproduce the nuclear family, and I did not divorce my first husband to destroy the nuclear family.
18. Retroduction is a fundamental part of the logical reasoning of a critical realist and is illustrated by this process of moving from phenomena to causes of those phenomena.
19. Could Bhaskar have created critical realism without invoking naturalism? I believe he could have. Certainly he could have presented and argued for the philosophical underpinnings of critical realism without making reference to natural science and constructing the philosophical basis of a natural science that is compatible with the philosophical underpinnings of critical realism. However, that would not have been as provocative.
REFERENCES:
Bates, Stephen R. 2006. “Making Time for Change: On Temporal Conceptions within (Critical Realist) Approaches to the Relationship between Structure and Agency” in Sociology, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 143 – 161.
Bhaskar, Roy. 1998. The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, 3rd edition. Routledge, New York.
---------------. 1978. A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd edition. Harvester Press, Brighton.
Danermark, Berth; Ekström, Mats; Jakobsen, Liselotte, and Karlsson, Jan Ch. 2002. Explaining Society: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences. Routledge, New York.
Harré, Rom and Bhaskar, Roy. 2001. “How to Change Reality: Story v. Structure -- A Debate between Rom Harré and Roy Bhaskar” in After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism. Eds., José López and Garry Potter. The Athlone Press, New York, pp. 22 – 39.
Keat, R. and Urry, J. 1975. Social Theory as Science. Routledge, New York.
Kemp, Stephen. 2005. “Critical Realism and the Limits of Philosophy” in European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 171 – 191.
López, José and Potter, Garry. 2001. “After Postmodernism: The Millenium” in After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism. The Athlone Press, New York, pp. 1 - 18.
Murphy, Raymond. 2004. “Disaster or Sustainability: The Dance of Human Agents with Nature’s Actants” in The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, vol. 41, no. 3, (August), pp. 249 – 266.
Pleasants, Nigel. 2002. Wittgenstein and the Idea of a Critical Social Theory: A Critique of Giddens, Habermas and Bhaskar. Routledge, New York.
Spencer, Neville. 1995. “The Rediscovery of Reality” in Green Left Weekly, 190, June 7.
Steinmetz, George. 1998. “Critical Realism and Historical Sociology: A Review Article” in Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 40, no. 1 (January), pp. 170 – 186.
Sturken, Marita and Cartwright, Lisa. 2001. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford University Press, New York.
Thomas, David. 1979. Naturalism and Social Science: A Post-Empiricist Philosophy of Social Science.
as nature? Without exaggerating, I think one could call
this question the primal problem of the philosophy of
the social sciences (Bhaskar, 1998, p. 1).
In the history of sociological thought, the answer to the above question has been the subject of intense philosophical debate with naturalists on one side and anti-naturalists (or humanists) on the other. While naturalists believe that social scientists can and should replicate the methodology of natural science to study human society, anti-naturalists do not.
Both sides of the debate represent intellectual tours de force in the sociological tradition. Naturalists dominated the early beginnings of sociology and anti-naturalists have dominated since the paradigm shift that began in the late nineteenth century.[1] For many contemporary sociologists, the debate is and/or should be over; however, critical realists, such as Roy Bhaskar, argue that a “qualified anti-positivist naturalism” is possible (Bhaskar, 1998, p. 3). But “What is a ‘qualified anti-positivist naturalism’?” and “Should social scientists accept it?”
To answer these questions, I begin like Bhaskar with a “real world” divided by an isomorphism of sites and activities where nature as non-manmade is the site of natural processes and society as manmade is the realm of human practices. Despite the division, however, we assume both nature and society are real in the sense that they both affect human activities because every person has both a biological/physical existence and social existence.[2] The army that invades and destroys a village, for example, is no less real than the volcano that erupts and destroys a different village.
Any theory used to explain either a natural or social event, such as the destruction of one of the above villages, is a human construction that is locally and historically situated. For examples, while ancient Romans believed volcanic eruptions and military conquests were caused by gods, a contemporary volcanologist contends that volcanic eruptions are caused by diverse physicochemical processes at depth; and someone who agrees with Joseph Schumpeter believes an army creates a war and destroys a village to validate its existence. Bhaskar and anti-naturalists agree that all theories, whether of the natural sciences or not, are socially constructed; however, Bhaskar and other critical realists argue that natural science theories, as opposed to other theories, are epistemically successful or in other words, better in the sense that they are the result of “practical research work” in a social and historical process that successively unfolds deeper levels of reality (Bhaskar, 1998, p. 18; Steinmetz, Kemp).[3][4] But what is practical or useful depends on the individual or group, and in this sense Bhaskar is an epistemological relativist.[5]
Natural science, according to critical realists, has two dimensions. First, there is the “transitive” dimension, which is comprised of theories which constitute our knowledge of reality and indirectly connect science with reality. As all theories are social constructions, natural science theories are transitory and fallible objects of science, although not equally fallible (Bhaskar, 1998). Second, there is the “intransitive” dimension where mechanisms, which are the permanent and universal objects of science, exist independently of scientific or any other human practice and represent a dimension of reality that transcends our experiences.
Natural or social reality, according to critical realists, has three levels. The first level, the “empirical”, is the subset of reality that is composed of our direct and indirect experiences. For example, we can directly experience through visual observation the beating of a frog’s heart or the execution of a condemned prisoner, and indirectly experience the beating of a frog’s heart by watching blood flow into other parts of the frog’s body or the execution by looking at the prisoner’s death certificate. The second layer, the “actual”, is logically prior to the empirical dimension and is constituted of series of events that occur whether we experience them or not. The third and final dimension is logically prior to the “actual” and is reality as a whole. It is in this third dimension, the “real”, where mechanisms (and structures and powers) that produce the series of events are “intransitive” and may or may not be experienced; (Danermark et al.; Bhaskar, 1998).[6] Thus, mechanisms (and structures and powers) are irreducible to the events they generate, and events generated are irreducible to what is experienced.
Critical realists argue that natural science work has been based upon the above belief that reality is differentiated. They also contend that natural scientists’ observation and creative imagination are and have been useful in discovering what the causal mechanisms of the “real” may be (Bhaskar, 1998).[7] There are many famous examples of natural scientists using both experimental observation and creative imagination to discover causal mechanisms that are otherwise invisible. For example, Danermark et al. gives the example of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Otto Loewi who solved a century’s old biological problem in a dream and then created and conducted an experiment that supported his imagined solution.[8] Before Loewi’s dream and experiment, it was believed that an electrical impulse traveled through a nerve and caused a muscle, such as the heart, to contract. However, it could not be explained why the same electrical impulse could travel through one nerve and cause the heart to beat faster and then travel through a different nerve and cause the heart to beat slower. Loewi’s hypothetical (or dreamt-up) solution to the riddle was that there were different substances found in the different nerves, and consequently, different chemical reactions were produced from the same electrical impulse. Loewi’s experiment supported his hypothesis and showed that the “active mechanism” is chemical substances. In turn, the knowledge that chemical substances caused a muscle to contract motivated the scientific quest to discover what the active mechanism is within the chemical substances, which once discovered motivated the quest to discover its active mechanism, and so on.[9]
Of great importance to critical realists is that although Loewi was responsible for triggering the mechanism (the chemical substances), he did not create the mechanism, that is, the “intransitive object”. The experiment connected him as the experimenter to the intransitive dimension of science and to an intransitive object of natural reality, although his identification/definition of that mechanism was theory-laden and connected him as a scientist to the transitive (social) dimension of science and indirectly to natural reality.
Many natural science experiments are interventions in reality that produce experiences of natural phenomena that otherwise would not be possible.[10] Specifically by creating closed systems in a laboratory, positivist natural scientists are able to observe distinct causal mechanisms that exist in nature but that in open systems are beyond our abilities to experience as unambiguous causes and effects or at all. Experimental closed systems are created and recreated by different positivist scientists at different times and in different places in order to see if empirical (measurable) results are replicated, to put theories to the empirical test, and discover empirical invariances (laws) of reality.[11] This empirical grounding has been considered to be essential to and illustrative of the success of the positivist natural science process. This epistemic success may suggest that critical realists accept positivist naturalism: 1) one that assumes knowledge is ultimately derived from what can be observed, 2) theories can and must be empirically tested to determine their validity, and 3) the goal of science is to discover laws of reality that are constant conjunctions of events, such as “If A, then B.” However, Bhaskar and other critical realists do not.
Critical realists reject both empiricism and positivism, a variant of empiricism. Empiricists believe reality, whether natural or social, is objective and single-layered in the sense that it has only an empirical dimension, and knowledge is obtained from the unity of sensory experience and reality. Thus, for empiricists, knowledge is always a posteriori and infallible, and the creative imagination (as abduction and retroduction) is not a valid mode of inference despite its practical use as illustrated by the example of Loewi’s dreamt-up solution.[12][13] What is observed by empiricists (and positivists) to be an invariance for a subset of distinct objects and events (cause and effect) is generalized to be an invariance for all objects and events and reality as whole. Thus, the generalization of invariance is the law of reality, whether natural or social (Potter and López).[14] In this way, reality is reduced to what is known by experience and it is essentially a system of distinct causes and effects.[15]
Critical realists, as realists, agree with empiricists and positivists that science is about something that exists independently of the individual researcher. However, they vehemently disagree with empiricists and positivists that: 1) reality has one dimension that is observable, 2) science is outside society, 3) knowledge is objective and infallible, and 4) causal laws are empirical measurable regularities. Critical realists also reject the positivists’ claim that scientific knowledge, whether natural or social, is a continuous process of submitting theories of relations between observable events/phenomena to decisive empirical tests to determine their validity because, as anti-positivists, they believe empirical facts/tests are always theory-laden and the relation between theoretical concepts and the objects that the concepts refer to is never unambiguous and simple (Danermark et al.). Instead, critical realists contend that scientific theories, whether natural or social, are descriptions of unobservable structures and mechanisms that “causally generate the observable phenomena” (Keat and Urry, 1978, p. 5). Thus, abduction and retroduction, which are rejected by empiricists and positivists, are included in and important to the critical realists’ “modes of inference” (Danermark et al., p. 73).[16] Moreover, causal laws are not universal empirical regularities, but instead are tendencies, which may include contradictions, and are better understood as statements about what objects are and the powers (mechanisms) they have because of their structure (Danermark et al., p. 55).
Critical realists’ reality, whether natural or social, is triple-layered, has observable and unobservable objects and events, and its “real” or “intransitive” dimension is where mechanisms (and structures and powers) that produce the series of events that may or may not be observed are located. For social scientists, this means society is not reducible to the individuals that constitute it; social structures and mechanisms have emergent powers.[17] It also means that what is real for critical realists is what has causal efficacy. Thus, poverty, class and unemployment, for examples, are real, although they may appear to be no more than abstractions, because they are historically and culturally determined concepts that represent generative mechanisms (of enduring structures) (Danermark et al.).
Of great importance to critical realists is the belief that real objects (causally efficacious abstractions) provide points of reference from which different social theories can be compared. The best theories are those identified as having the greatest explanatory power and advantages. However, limits and problems of theories cannot be ignored nor can one ignore the interests that powerful groups may have in those theories (Bhaskar, 1998, p. 148).
A natural scientist can ignore everyday explanations of natural phenomena and still do good natural science; however, a critical realist cannot. Everyday explanations or meanings of social phenomena, such as the use of money, must be included in social science research because they constitute the mechanisms behind the activities that make up social phenomena (Danermark et al., p. 33). Moreover, these explanations are created and used by “inherently interested and committed co-subjects” as they relate to and take part in the social world that they belong to (ibid., p. 32). This means a social scientist researcher who accepts critical realism is always engaged in participant observation. S/he begins with theories, observations, and lived experiences and constructs an explanation of the underlying structures and mechanisms (and power) that account for such phenomena.[18] This further suggests to this author that critical realist research is essentially ethnographic.
The most contentious aspect of critical realism has been Bhaskar’s argument that a scientific understanding of society is possible.[19] As stated in the beginning of this paper, the possibility of naturalism is part of a long historic debate in sociology. Critical realism may represent for some a return to the errors of prior advocates of naturalism, such as orthodox Marxists, because it dares to invoke claims of an independent reality (Spencer). However, the naturalism that motivated earlier advocates, such as orthodox Marxists, is not the naturalism of Bhaskar’s critical realism. Critical realism is not grounded in the empiricist/positivist natural science of earlier advocates, and certainly is not based in the orthodox Marxists’ mechanistic metaphor with a utopian ending. His approach is novel because he redescribes natural science, knowledge, and reality and their relationships to each other. Thus, what structures, mechanisms and agents are and what their relationships to each are in critical realism are not the same as those postulated by earlier proponents of naturalism. Critical realism should be accepted by sociologists as another approach to making sense of the social world.
ENDNOTES:
1. Early naturalists include Auguste Comte (1798 – 1857), Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903), and Lester Frank Ward (1841 – 1913). Among the early anti-naturalists are Wilhelm Heinrich Rickert (1863 – 1936) and Max Weber (1864 – 1920). Certainly, orthodox Marxists were naturalists.
2. One could argue that social existence is natural as it is the nature of humans to live in society, and the division of society and nature into two separate realms is simply an abstraction to emphasize the differences in humans’ abilities to affect the two.
3. There is always uncertainty. Bhaskar rejects any argument that suggests scientific knowledge follows a path of inevitable progress by successively eliminating uncertainty and in the end results in knowledge that is as permanent and universal as the reality it describes.
4. According to Bhaskar (1998, p. 12), “science identifies a phenomenon (or range of phenomena), constructs explanations for it and empirically tests its explanations, leading to the identification of the generative mechanism at work, which now becomes the phenomenon to be explained, and so on.” This may remind the reader of the following popular story of the search for the ultimate cause. A son asked his father what caused the world to stay in place. The father said the world rested on the back of a giant elephant. In turn, the son asked his father what held the elephant in place. The father answered that the elephant rested on the back of a giant tortoise, which in turn motivated the son to ask what held the tortoise in place. The father answered another tortoise and under that was another tortoise, so that tortoise was on tortoise all the way down.
5. One could argue that a theory about AIDs that leads to a reduction of AIDs deaths is better than a theory about AIDs that increases or does not change the number of AIDs deaths because reducing deaths is always preferable. However, an epistemological relativist is also an ethical relativist, and one theory is never better than the other. Scientific theories are never socially (or ethically) neutral; they can be and have been used to cure and kill, lessen and inflict pain, feed and starve, and perform other acts of compassion and violence.
6. As “intransitive”, they exist and operate independently of our knowledge of them.
7. Critical realists do not suggest that scientific knowledge, whether natural or social, is infallible. Consequently, knowledge of mechanisms and/or other aspects of reality is never the Truth, but is always what “may be”.
8. Another famous example is the discovery of the circular structure of the benzene molecule by Kekulé who is said to have dreamt one night that the molecule was like a snake biting its tail. Whether inspired by his dream or not, Kekulé’s “thought experiment” solved a lingering mystery in chemistry.
9. This further illustrates the belief that empirical facts are theory-laden.
10. One could say that an essential aspect of science is the quest to increasingly expand our opportunities to observe natural phenomena that are beyond our unaided sensory perceptions. This is illustrated by historical technological developments that have allowed scientists to increasingly see smaller and smaller phenomena, so that what can be seen by the unaided eye is expanded to what can be seen with a magnifying glass, which in turn is expanded to what can be seen through a compound microscope, which in turn is expanded to what can be seen through an electron microscope.
11. The same closed system is supposed to yield the same empirical results because reality exists independently of the experimenter. If not, either experimental conditions were changed and it’s not the same closed system or the results were incorrectly measured and/or reported. Similarly, neoclassical economists’ thought experiments, which create closed systems with assumptions of ceteris paribus or mutadis mutandis, represent their positivist beliefs that relationships between economic institutions and agents must be cut off from external influences and experiments should generate universal results.
12. The empiricist’s experience is always objective. Meanings of phenomena are contained within the objects of the experience and are immediate and unambiguous. The following yearning of one of the characters in Jack B. Yeat’s short play, The Green Wave, is fulfilled in the empiricist’s world:
I like things to mean something, and I like
to know what they mean, and I like to know
at once. After all, time is important, … and
why waste it in trying to find out what
something means, when if it stated its
meaning clearly itself we would know at
once.
13. In the history of positivist natural science, photographs of people have been used by scientists to validate their theories of racial and ethnic differences (Sturken and Cartwright, 2001). The subjectivity of the photographer/scientist and persons who view the photographs is not considered. Moreover, technology, like science, is assumed to occur outside society. Positivists assume technology is not a social construction shaped by particular cultures and powerful groups.
14. Danermark et al. (p. 77) define induction as “a process where, from observations of a limited number of events or phenomena … universally applicable conclusions are drawn from a larger population without leaving the empirical level.” Deduction is the process where a conclusion is derived from a set of premises, and is used to “deduce the particular from the general/a universal law” (ibid., p. 83).
15. Bhaskar describes empiricism’s reduction of reality to knowledge of reality as empiricism’s “epistemic fallacy” (Bhaskar, 1978, p. 36; Danermark et al., p. 21).
16. Positivists use both deduction and induction to make inferences. Critical realists use deduction, induction, abduction, and retroduction. Abduction is a creative process of the imagination that makes new connections and relations among phenomena. Retroduction is the process of advancing from an empirical phenomenon to its generating mechanism.
17. Society, according to critical realists, is composed of human actions, but is not reducible to or can be explained by intentional human actions as illustrated by the following statement by Bhaskar (1998, pp. 34, 35):
Society is both the ever-present condition (material cause)
and the continually reproduced outcome of human
agency. And praxis is both work, that is, conscious
production, and (normally unconscious) reproduction of
the conditions of production, that is society. One could
refer to the former as the duality of structure, and the
latter as the duality of praxis.
By the last sentence, Bhaskar means that “people, in their conscious activity, for the most part unconsciously reproduce (and occasionally transform) the structures governing their substantive activities of production” (ibid, p. 35). For example, I
did not marry my husband to reproduce the nuclear family although that action does reproduce the nuclear family, and I did not divorce my first husband to destroy the nuclear family.
18. Retroduction is a fundamental part of the logical reasoning of a critical realist and is illustrated by this process of moving from phenomena to causes of those phenomena.
19. Could Bhaskar have created critical realism without invoking naturalism? I believe he could have. Certainly he could have presented and argued for the philosophical underpinnings of critical realism without making reference to natural science and constructing the philosophical basis of a natural science that is compatible with the philosophical underpinnings of critical realism. However, that would not have been as provocative.
REFERENCES:
Bates, Stephen R. 2006. “Making Time for Change: On Temporal Conceptions within (Critical Realist) Approaches to the Relationship between Structure and Agency” in Sociology, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 143 – 161.
Bhaskar, Roy. 1998. The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, 3rd edition. Routledge, New York.
---------------. 1978. A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd edition. Harvester Press, Brighton.
Danermark, Berth; Ekström, Mats; Jakobsen, Liselotte, and Karlsson, Jan Ch. 2002. Explaining Society: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences. Routledge, New York.
Harré, Rom and Bhaskar, Roy. 2001. “How to Change Reality: Story v. Structure -- A Debate between Rom Harré and Roy Bhaskar” in After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism. Eds., José López and Garry Potter. The Athlone Press, New York, pp. 22 – 39.
Keat, R. and Urry, J. 1975. Social Theory as Science. Routledge, New York.
Kemp, Stephen. 2005. “Critical Realism and the Limits of Philosophy” in European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 171 – 191.
López, José and Potter, Garry. 2001. “After Postmodernism: The Millenium” in After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism. The Athlone Press, New York, pp. 1 - 18.
Murphy, Raymond. 2004. “Disaster or Sustainability: The Dance of Human Agents with Nature’s Actants” in The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, vol. 41, no. 3, (August), pp. 249 – 266.
Pleasants, Nigel. 2002. Wittgenstein and the Idea of a Critical Social Theory: A Critique of Giddens, Habermas and Bhaskar. Routledge, New York.
Spencer, Neville. 1995. “The Rediscovery of Reality” in Green Left Weekly, 190, June 7.
Steinmetz, George. 1998. “Critical Realism and Historical Sociology: A Review Article” in Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 40, no. 1 (January), pp. 170 – 186.
Sturken, Marita and Cartwright, Lisa. 2001. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford University Press, New York.
Thomas, David. 1979. Naturalism and Social Science: A Post-Empiricist Philosophy of Social Science.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Unit 1, Part 2, Activity 1: Read Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method, Macmillan, 1982, 50 - 60. Apply Durkheim’s argument, identify a social fact and consider your relationship to that fact: in what ways is it ‘external’ to you, and how does it ‘constrain’ you?
[S]tructure is systematic and patterned,
while agency is contingent and random;
… structure is constraint, while agency
is freedom; … structure is static, while
agency is active; … structure is
collective, while agency is individual.
Hays, 1994, p. 57
Common in social theorizing are dualities such as those described above by Hays. Another duality could be that while structure is social, individual is psychological or biological. In The Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim argues against social philosophers and others who contend that social phenomena are no more than epiphenomena of individual biology or psychology and as such, social phenomena are reducible to and appropriately studied as fields of biology or psychology. One could say that for those social theorists, the social is always personal; there are no impersonal phenomena. However, in language, monetary currency, law, time, and other social phenomena, Durkheim observes social facts that are wholly impersonal because they cannot be created or changed by an individual; these social facts are not reducible to an individual. Consequently, he describes social facts as “external” phenomena because they are exogenous to the individual mind, objective, and observable. Moreover and arguably most importantly for Durkheim, these facts represent constraining forces on the individual.
Social facts are essential to the education/socialization of any individual, and every individual becomes (or is) a social being. Having been born and raised in the United States (U.S.), I have communicated and continue to communicate both orally and in writing in the American English language in order to be educated, employed, and otherwise active in the society. Since my birth, I have been exposed to and taught the rules and structure of the American English language and its applications. At no time have I or any other individual created any of the rules or structure of the language nor can I or any other individual change them; the American English language has and continues to exist externally to me and all other individuals. Moreover, no one, including me, forces it upon herself to learn and use the language nor has a political dictator forced me or any other individual to learn and communicate in the language upon punishment of death or imprisonment. However, I cannot act as if the language did not exist or were different than what it is.
The American English language is objective and both empowering and limiting. It is empowering because any individual, such as I, can use it to identify oneself and communicate with others within the society to obtain what s/he wants and needs. At the same time, American English is limiting because it constrains self-expression and communication with others to a particular set of sounds and symbols that I or anyone must duplicate in order to be understood by others in the society. If I were to do something as mundane as to order a restaurant meal in a different language, such as Ojibwe or Finnish, I could be understood and successfully responded to; however, it is more likely that I would receive silence in return, a simple request to communicate in English, or harsh words that other languages are not welcome by that audience. Most likely I would have to restate my order in English in order to get what I want. Although English is not the official language of the U.S. as codified by law, it is an obligation, nonetheless, of living in the country.
A social fact, such as the American English language, is a collective creation not reducible to the sum of actions of (separate) individuals. Although it is external to any individual and coercive, it becomes internal through formal and informal education and voluntary when an individual personalizes that collective creation. For example, American English is my primary and preferred language to hear, speak, read, and write; and I do not feel coerced to use it. However, it is easy for me to imagine my immigrant Finnish grandparents experiencing the frustrations and fears of having to learn and use a language that was until they emigrated unnecessary and undesired. The American English language, like any social fact, is both a product and a force of a particular society.
REFERENCES:
Class Notes to Structure & Agency in Modern Sociological Theory.
Durkheim, Emile. 1982. The Rules of Sociological Method, 8th edition. The Free Press, New York.
Gidden, Anthony. 1972. “Introduction: Durkheim’s writings in sociology and social philosophy” in A. Giddens (ed.) Emile Durkheim: Selected Writings, Cambridge University Press, pp. 1 - 50.
Hays, Sharon. 1994. “Structure and Agency in the Sticky Problem of Culture” in Sociological Theory, vol. 12, no. 1 (March), pp. 57 – 72.
Sharrock, Wes. 1987. “The Individual and society” in R.J. Anderson and W.W. Sharrock (eds.) Classic Disputes in Sociology, Unwin Hyman, pp. 126 – 56.
[S]tructure is systematic and patterned,
while agency is contingent and random;
… structure is constraint, while agency
is freedom; … structure is static, while
agency is active; … structure is
collective, while agency is individual.
Hays, 1994, p. 57
Common in social theorizing are dualities such as those described above by Hays. Another duality could be that while structure is social, individual is psychological or biological. In The Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim argues against social philosophers and others who contend that social phenomena are no more than epiphenomena of individual biology or psychology and as such, social phenomena are reducible to and appropriately studied as fields of biology or psychology. One could say that for those social theorists, the social is always personal; there are no impersonal phenomena. However, in language, monetary currency, law, time, and other social phenomena, Durkheim observes social facts that are wholly impersonal because they cannot be created or changed by an individual; these social facts are not reducible to an individual. Consequently, he describes social facts as “external” phenomena because they are exogenous to the individual mind, objective, and observable. Moreover and arguably most importantly for Durkheim, these facts represent constraining forces on the individual.
Social facts are essential to the education/socialization of any individual, and every individual becomes (or is) a social being. Having been born and raised in the United States (U.S.), I have communicated and continue to communicate both orally and in writing in the American English language in order to be educated, employed, and otherwise active in the society. Since my birth, I have been exposed to and taught the rules and structure of the American English language and its applications. At no time have I or any other individual created any of the rules or structure of the language nor can I or any other individual change them; the American English language has and continues to exist externally to me and all other individuals. Moreover, no one, including me, forces it upon herself to learn and use the language nor has a political dictator forced me or any other individual to learn and communicate in the language upon punishment of death or imprisonment. However, I cannot act as if the language did not exist or were different than what it is.
The American English language is objective and both empowering and limiting. It is empowering because any individual, such as I, can use it to identify oneself and communicate with others within the society to obtain what s/he wants and needs. At the same time, American English is limiting because it constrains self-expression and communication with others to a particular set of sounds and symbols that I or anyone must duplicate in order to be understood by others in the society. If I were to do something as mundane as to order a restaurant meal in a different language, such as Ojibwe or Finnish, I could be understood and successfully responded to; however, it is more likely that I would receive silence in return, a simple request to communicate in English, or harsh words that other languages are not welcome by that audience. Most likely I would have to restate my order in English in order to get what I want. Although English is not the official language of the U.S. as codified by law, it is an obligation, nonetheless, of living in the country.
A social fact, such as the American English language, is a collective creation not reducible to the sum of actions of (separate) individuals. Although it is external to any individual and coercive, it becomes internal through formal and informal education and voluntary when an individual personalizes that collective creation. For example, American English is my primary and preferred language to hear, speak, read, and write; and I do not feel coerced to use it. However, it is easy for me to imagine my immigrant Finnish grandparents experiencing the frustrations and fears of having to learn and use a language that was until they emigrated unnecessary and undesired. The American English language, like any social fact, is both a product and a force of a particular society.
REFERENCES:
Class Notes to Structure & Agency in Modern Sociological Theory.
Durkheim, Emile. 1982. The Rules of Sociological Method, 8th edition. The Free Press, New York.
Gidden, Anthony. 1972. “Introduction: Durkheim’s writings in sociology and social philosophy” in A. Giddens (ed.) Emile Durkheim: Selected Writings, Cambridge University Press, pp. 1 - 50.
Hays, Sharon. 1994. “Structure and Agency in the Sticky Problem of Culture” in Sociological Theory, vol. 12, no. 1 (March), pp. 57 – 72.
Sharrock, Wes. 1987. “The Individual and society” in R.J. Anderson and W.W. Sharrock (eds.) Classic Disputes in Sociology, Unwin Hyman, pp. 126 – 56.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
A Phenomenologist's Nightmare?
"Please tell me about your experience of the storm." he said to her. "Which experience do you want? Do you want the experience as it happened, my experience of it as I remembered it last month, or my experience as I remember it now?" she asked. "Give me anyone of them," he replied. "Well, I think I prefer the experience of describing the experience as I experienced it when it was actually happening" she said, "so that is what I will talk about."
Friday, January 05, 2007
Death of a Very Dear Friend
It's been many months now since my friend, Tony Guglielmi, died. He died on September 13, 2006, in Delaware. Tony was like a brother to me. Well, actually more like a brother than either of my biological brothers. He was a great friend and I miss him very much.
Personal vs. Community Experiences of Disaster & PTSD
I am almost finished reading Kai Erikson's book Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood. One of the chapters is devoted to descriptions of individual trauma and another to collective trauma. The individual traumas are described within the stories of the survivors, many of whom have post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Coupled with those experiences of personally witnessing people drown and seeing and smelling death and destruction were the loss of community: the Buffalo Creek community was destroyed by the flood. What a tragedy to lose both one's sense of self and one's community. A close friend of mine shares something with the survivors of Buffalo Creek; she has PTSD. She did not survive a natural disaster; instead, she is a victim of domestic violence. She was not physically abused, but emotionally abused. In many studies of disaster, there is one event at a specific time, such as an earthquake or flood, that is the cause of individual trauma; however, my friend was a victim of repeated attacks over a period of many years when she was a child in her parents' home. Whereas a natural disaster or technological disaster is a public and often publicized event, what occurred to my friend in her parents' home was private. Her attacker's public and private personas were very different. The attacker played the role of a wonderful Christian and loving parent in public, but turned into a hateful murderous witch within the walls of the home. It seems those who experience individual trauma from public events may have an advantage over those who experience individual trauma from private/domestic events in the sense that the cause of their experience is already out there in the media and it's okay to talk about it. Those who are abused by a parent or other relative are encouraged to remain silent; it remains private, within the home. It took many years for my friend to confide in me about her PTSD and her parent with borderline personality disorder because she was afraid that I (like others) would not want to hear her story and/or would find it unbelievable. The parent with the mental illness certainly affected my friend and her family. There is both a personal and collective trauma. In time I hope my friend finds more people that she can talk to about her painful childhood experiences and cry with, and that by doing so she can further be healed.
