Engaging with the World

Agency, Institutions, Historical Formations

Margaret S Archer, Andrea Maccarini, Margaret S Archer, Andrea Maccarini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135077013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title reflects the general theme of the 2010IACR annual conference that was held in Padova, Italy, the aim of which was to provide a fresh view on some cultural and structural changes involving Western societies after the world economic crisis of 2008, from the point of view of Critical Realism.

Global society is often regarded as disrupting identities and blurring boundaries, one which entails giving up ideas of structure and fixity. Globalization supposedly introduces a "liquid" era of fluidity where everything is possible, and anything goes. Nevertheless, its current dynamics are developing into a harder reality: wars, economic crisis, the haunting risk of pandemics, the ever worsening food supply crisis, and the environmental challenge. These social facts call for a dramatic shift in the optimistic cosmopolitan mood and the thought that we can build and rebuild ourselves and our world as we please, at least for the most developed countries. The challenges we face produce new forms of social life and individual experience. They also require us to develop new frameworks to analyze emergent contexts, institutional complexes and morphogenetic fields, and new ways to understand human agency and the meaning of emancipation.

The book broadlyfalls into three parts:

The first, "Social Ontology and a New Historical Formation", deals with mainly social ontological issues, insofar as they are connected to social scientific and public issues in the emerging society of the XXI century.

The second, "Being human and the adventure of agency", is concerned with the way human beings adapts to the "new world" of "our times", and comes up with innovative models of agency and socialization.

The third, "The constitutionalization of the new world", explores critical realist perspectives, as compared to system-theoretical ones, on the issue of global order and justice.

In all of this, the challenge is to engage with this "new world" in a meaningful way, a task for which a realist mind set is badly needed. Critical realism provides a strong theoretical framework that can meet the challenge, and the book explores its contribution to making sense of, and coming to terms with, this historical formation.

Part I

Social ontology and a new historical formation

1 Prolegomenon

The consequences of the revindication of philosophical ontology for philosophy and social theory

Roy Bhaskar

1.1 Preamble: distinctive features of critical realist philosophy

1.1.1 Underlabouring

‘Philosophical underlabouring’ is most characteristically what critical realist philosophy does. The metaphor of ‘ underlabouring ’ comes from 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 every one 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 underlabours for (1) a science, and (2) practices of human emancipation.

1.1.2 Seriousness

‘Seriousness’, a Hegelian term of art, involves the idea of the unity of theory and practice, being able to walk one's talk. Most modern, including contemporary, Western philosophy is palpably unserious. When Hume, for example, suggests that there is no better reason to leave the building by the ground floor door than by the second floor window, he cannot be ‘serious’ – for if he really believed it, then he should leave such buildings by their second foor windows on at least 50 per cent of all occasions! Similarly, when he says that there is no better reason to prefer the destruction of one's little fnger to that of the whole world, then again he cannot be ‘serious’ – because if he were to opt for the destruction of the whole world, then surely he would lose his little fnger too! What Hume is tacitly doing, of course, is hypostatising extruding himself (and philosophy) from the totality that is the world and he includes philosophy and social theory.

1.1.3 Immanent critique

Immanent critique is an essential part of the method of critical realist philosophy. It specifes that criticism of an idea or a system should be internal that is, involving something intrinsic to what is (or the person who is) being criticised. If you say ‘everyone should eat more meat’ and I, being a vegetarian, disagree, what I have to do to begin to be rationally persuasive is to find something within your belief or value system, or customary practices, that would be undermined by eating more meat.

1.1.4 Categorial realism and the idea of philosophy as explicating presuppositions

For critical realism, philosophy does not speak about a world apart from the world of science and everyday life. Rather, it speaks about the most abstract features of just such a world. These abstract features are expressed by philosophical categories such as causality, substance, etc. For critical realism, such, categories are real. Thus, the world contains not only specific causal laws but causality as such. And it is the characteristic task of philosophy to explicate these higherorder or abstract features, which are normally not topicalised in, but rather only tacitly presupposed by, our practices. What philosophy typically does, then, is to explicate presuppositions of our activities, which are ‘given’, but as ‘tacit’ and, often, ‘confused’.

1.1.5 Enhanced reflexivity or transformed practice

Pre-existing philosophy has seriously misdescribed the presuppositions of most of our everyday and scientific practices. So, it involves a theory/practice disjuncture or incoherence and a performative contradiction, characteristically constituting what I have called a TINA formation, where basically a truth in practice is combined or held in tension with a falsity in theory.² The aim of critical realist philosophy is, when the practice is adequate, to provide a better or more ad equate theory of the practice; and when it is not, to transform the practice in the appropriate way. That is to say, the aim of critical realist philosophy is enhanced reflexivity or transformed practice (or both).

1.1.6 The principle of hermeticism

Since there is only one world, the theories and principles of critical realist philosophy should also apply to our everyday life. If they do not, then something is seriously wrong. This means that our theories and explanations should be tested in everyday life, as well as in specialist research contexts.

1.2 On the origins of critical realism and the duplex argument for (a new) ontology

The context of philosophy of science in the 1970s was one in which Humean empiricism provided the baseline for most contemporary discussion. In particular, the Humean theory of causal laws – the idea that a constant conjuction of atomistic events was either necessary and sufficient (the empiricist variant) or at least necessary (the neo Kantian variant) for the attribution of a law – underpinned the standard (Popper—Hempel) deductive nomological model of explanation and almost all the other theories of orthodox philosophy of science.³

This theory went alongside a metatheory, championed by Hume and especially Kant, that ontology was impossible, a mistake; that it was sufficient for philosophy, in the words of the early Wittgenstein, ‘to treat only of the network, and not what the network describes' (6.35).⁴ This metatheory is what critical realism calls the ‘epistemic fallacy’. It is clearly wrong, because the Humean theory of causal laws implies that the world is fat and repetitive, undifferentiated, unstructured and unchanging, and it is evident that this is not the case. However, it is one thing to know this and another to establish it in the discourse of philosophy. This set the double task of the work which initiated critical realism, namely to establish that ontology was possible and necessary; and to establish the outlines of a new, non Humean ontology.

Employing the method of immanent critique, a transcendental argument from experimental activity (which everyone agreed was important in science) produced at once an argument for ontology and an argument for a new ontology. This duplex argument generated:

1 The cardinal distinctions between (a) philosophical and scientific ontology, and (b) the transitive and the intransitive dimensions of science, together with the critique of the epistemic fallacy, or the reduction of ontology to epistemology, and the situation of the mutual compatibility and entailment of ontological realism, epistemological relativism and judgemental rationalism. At the same time, the limits of our ‘natural attitude’, in which we do not distinguish ontology and epistemology, but merely talk (in an undifferentiated way) about the known world, a standpoint that Hume and Kant merely reflected, are clearly visible: this attitude breaks down when there are (as in the contemporary social sciences) competing claims about the same world, for in this case we have explicitly to differentiate the relatively or absolutely independently existing (intransitive) world and our (transitive) socially produced and fallible claims to knowledge of it.

2 The distinctions between open and closed systems and structures and events, or between what I have called the domain of the real and the domain of the actual, together with a corresponding critique of the implicit actualist ontology of empirical realism. Thus, we have the theorem of the irreducibility of structures, mechanisms and the like to patterns of events (or the domain of the real to the actual) and of patterns of events to our experiences (or the domain of the actual to that of the empirical).

1.3 The immediate implications of the ontological turn in the philosophy of science

This transcendental argument from experimental activity, together with other arguments from the context of applied and practical science, establishes the inexorability and irreducibility of philosophical ontology and the necessarily stratified and differentiated character of this ontology. It now becomes important to see science as a creative activity, essentially moving from descriptions of events and other phenomena to their causal explanation in terms of the structures and mechanisms that produced them. Moreover, the history of science reveals a multi-tiered stratification in nature, which accordingly defines a continually reiterated dialectic of discovery and development in science. Following on from this, there is the DREIC model of theoretical explanation, in which science moves continually from the description of phenomena to the retroduction of possible explanatory causal mechanisms for them, the elimination of competing explanations, through to the identification of the generative mechanism at work (followed by the correction of previous results). Science then proceeds to describe this newly identifed level of reality, and a further round of discovery and development follows. On this new view of science, it is a dynamic social activity, continually opening up deeper and more recondite levels of reality to the curious investigator.

1.4 Generalising and developing the core argument

1 The original argument of critical realism raises the question as to whether this characteristic retroductive pattern of activity, involving the movement from descriptions of events to that of the explanatory structures producing them, can take place in other sciences, domains and practices. More generally it raises the question of the transapplicability of the results of the philosophy of the experimental natural sciences to the social sciences;⁵ or (for example) the biological sciences;⁶ and more generally of this kind of ontology to whole new domains, for example of language (cf. critical discourse analysis), and to the contexts of the variety of human practices (from architecture to archaeology).

However, it is important to note that the method of immanent critique prohibits any simple minded or unmediated transapplication from one context to another. There must always be an independent analysis of the new domain before the possibility of any transapplication can be considered. Thus, when I turned to investigate the compatibility of the social (and more generally human) sciences with the new transcendental realist ontology, I had first to latch onto something there which would be of comparable immanent weight to experimental activity in the natural sciences. I found this in the endemic dualism (and dualisms) of contemporary philosophy of social science – an overarching dualism between positivisitic naturalism and antinaturalist hermeneutics, and a plethora of regional or topical dualisms, including structure/agency, individual/collective (or whole), meaning/ behaviour, reason/cause, mind/body, fact/value and theory/practice. The critical realist response to these dualisms is followed up in the next section.

2 The original argument can also be developed in a variety of ways. Thus, there is its concrete and applied development, which involves the move not from events to mechanisms, but into the constitution of the particular concrete event itself. Then there is the critical, including metacritical, development, which involves exploring the conditions of the possibility of false or otherwise inadequate accounts and the practices they inform. Finally, there is the possibility of the theoretical deepening of the ontology to incorporate categories other than structure and difference, such as change and process, or internal as well as external relations, etc. It is this further theoretical deepening of the ontology of critical realism in which I personally have been mainly engaged. This is briefly discussed in section 1.6 (starting on p. 17).

1.5 Critical realism and social theory

The critical realist philosophy of social science is established by the immanent critique and resolution of the dualisms of the contemporary philosophy of social science and social theory. The result is a critical naturalism, which steers a via media between positivistic hypernaturalism and hermeneutical anti naturalism.

The resolution of the antinomy between structure and agency is achieved by the transformational model of social activity (TMSA), in which society, and social forms generally, are conceived as pre existing, but reproduced or transformed by, human agency. This transformational model appears prima facie similar to Tony Gidden's theory of structuration, published in the same year (1979).⁷ However, Margaret Archer pointed out (in Realist Social Theory⁸ and elsewhere) that time and tense are intrinsic to the TMSA but not to structuration theory. Thus, structure always pre exists any round of human agency, and the heavy weight of the presence of the past precludes voluntarism. The transformational model of social activity can be further deepened by situating it in the context of ‘four planar social being’.⁹ On this conception, every social event occurs along each of the following dimensions: material transactions with nature; social interactions between people; social structure proper; and the stratification of the embodied personality.

The antinomy between individu...