I begin by introducing some distinctive features of the critical realist approach to philosophy (section 1.1). These are: (i) its intent to philosophically underlabour for science and practices oriented to human well-being; (ii) its seriousness, that is, commitment to the unity of theory and practice; (iii) its method of immanent critique; (iv) its realism about philosophy, namely, its conception of its goal as the elucidation of the normally unreflected presuppositions of social practices of various kinds and its commitment to transcendental argument (understood as a species of retroduction); (v) its aim of enhanced reflexivity and/or transformed practice; (vi) its endorsement of the hermetic principle, that it should be applicable to and verifiable by everyone and in the context of everyday life; and (vii) its criticality and commitment to dispositional realism.
After this introductory section, I describe the origins of the philosophy of critical realism and explain how the organisation of the book is related to its subsequent development (section 1.2). In this section I also differentiate the philosophy of critical realism, which is relatively new, from its practice, which is not, and distinguish it from some of its namesakes. I then briefly look at some of the consequences of the ontological turn in the philosophy of science for sociology and social theory, anticipating to some extent the argument in Chapter 3.3 (section 1.3). Finally, I survey, topically and thematically, the argument to come in the book (section 1.4).

1.1 Distinctive features of the critical realist approach to philosophy

(i) Underlabouring

Philosophical underlabouring is most characteristically what critical realist philosophy does. The metaphor of underlabouring comes from the eighteenth-century British empiricist philosopher, John Locke, who said:
The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity: but everyone must not hope to be a Boyle or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr Newton, with some others of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.1
Critical realism aspires to clear the ground a little, removing, in the first place, the philosophical rubbish that lies in the way of scientific knowledge, especially but not only in the domain of the social sciences; and in this way to underlabour for science and (partly in virtue of this, it argues) more generally for practices oriented to human well-being and flourishing. These philosophies have been inherited largely unthinkingly from the past. At one time they may have played a progressive role, but they have long since ceased to do so. Indeed, we can say with Albert Einstein that ‘the world we have created today as a result of our thinking thus far has problems which cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them’.

(ii) Seriousness

Seriousness is a term of art deriving from the great German idealist philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel. It involves the idea of the unity of theory and practice, of being able to walk one’s talk, of not saying one thing and doing something completely different. I shall be arguing that much modern, including contemporary, Western philosophy is palpably unserious. For instance, when one of John Locke’s successors, David Hume tells us that there is no better reason to leave the building by the ground-floor door than by the second-floor window, he cannot be being serious.2 For if he really believed what he claimed to believe, then surely he should have left such buildings by their second-floor windows on some 50 per cent of all occasions!
In a similar way, when Hume avers that he has no better reason to prefer the scratching of his finger to that of the destruction of the whole world,3 then again he is not being serious, because if he were to choose the destruction of the world, then since his finger is clearly part of the world he would lose that too! What Hume is tacitly doing here is extruding himself (and philosophy) from the rest of the world, which of course includes himself and philosophy (and the sciences and other human ways of knowing). It is, as we shall see, in such ‘hypostasis’, detotalisation or disconnect that the seeds of academic unseriousness very often lie.
What critical realism would like to do, then, is produce a serious philosophy that we can act on, and one moreover that is relevant to the pressing challenges we face and that ideally at least can illuminate a way forward (telling us something new).

(iii) Immanent critique

Immanent critique is an essential part of the method of critical realist philosophy. It specifies that criticism of an idea or a system should be internal, that is, involve something intrinsic to what (or the person who) is being criticised. It typically identifies a theory/practice inconsistency, showing that the position being disputed involves a claim or analysis that would undermine the point, values or substance of the position; so that it undermines or ‘deconstructs’ itself. A moment’s reflection shows indeed that this is the only way an argument can ever ultimately be won. Merely to assert what one believes will get nowhere unless it impinges in some way on what one’s opponent believes.
Thus, if someone says ‘everyone should eat more meat’ and I disagree, what I have to do to begin to be rationally persuasive is to find something within their belief or value system or customary practices that would be undermined by eating more meat.
The most devastating form of immanent critique is Achilles’ Heel critique. This identifies a weakness or blind spot at a point in a theory deemed by its proponents to be its strongest.

(iv) Philosophy as explicating presuppositions

For critical realism, philosophy does not speak about a world apart from the world of science and everyday life. There is not a separate world for philosophy and another world for everything else: there is only one world,4 and philosophy speaks about it too. What differentiates the discourse of philosophy is that it talks about the most abstract or general features of that world, which are not normally discussed in, but are tacitly presupposed by our practices.
These abstract features are expressed by philosophical categories such as causality, substance, and so on. For critical realism, such categories refer to real but very general features of the world. Thus for it the world contains not only specific causal laws5 but causality as such. (This is a position that can be called categorial realism (see Chapter 6.4).) And it is the characteristic task of critical realist philosophy to explicate these higher-order or abstract features, which are for the most part taken for granted in, or unreflectively but tacitly presupposed by our practices. What philosophy typically does, then, is to explicate the normally undisclosed or otherwise not topicalised assumptions embodied in our activities or underpinning our practices, which are for the most part ‘given’, but as ‘tacit’ and very often ‘confused’.
If philosophy is mainly about elucidating the normally unreflected presuppositions of our practices, then we can begin to see the importance of a key feature of critical realist philosophy, namely its commitment to a form of argument initiated by Immanuel Kant: transcendental argument. A transcendental argument asks what must be the case for some feature of our experience to be possible, or more generally what must the world be like for some social practice (as conceptualised in our experience) to be possible. As such it is clearly a species o...