Explaining Society

Critical Realism in the Social Sciences

Berth Danermark, Mats Ekström, Jan Ch. Karlsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138497795
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351017817
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Fully revised, with an updated bibliography and new, relevant illustrative examples based on work inspired by critical realism, this new edition of Explaining Society constitutes an up-to-date resource connecting methodology, theory, and empirical research. Including discussions of more recent scholarship in the field which connects critical realism with interdisciplinary research, this second edition also clarifies concepts – such as retroduction and retrodiction – so as to render them consistent with developments within critical realism, which are covered in a new chapter. An accessible account of the nature of society and social science, together with the methods used to study and explain social phenomena, Explaining Society will appeal to scholars of sociology, philosophy, and the social sciences more broadly.

1

Introduction

The main concern in this book is to discuss some methodological implications of a critical realist approach to social science. However, this cannot be done without an introduction to the basic ideas in this approach. We therefore devote the first part of the book to introducing some of the most elementary parts of critical realism. We will address some fundamental ontological and epistemological claims, and show how these by necessity have implications for investigating social phenomena.

Critical realism is not a homogeneous movement in social science. There are many different perspectives and developments. For instance, some authors discuss it from a philosophical angle, while others try to ground an analysis of current social phenomena in the approach. As will be obvious to the reader of this book, we try to avoid the current philosophical discussion revolving around critical realism, since this is not within the scope of the book. Instead, the reader will find that we argue that the methodological implications of the basic ideas in critical realism make a difference in regard to issues such as generalization, scientific inferences, explanations, the role of theory, and so forth.

Our main arguments in this book can be summarized in the following way: critical realism helps us to develop and more sharply argue for, first, that science should have generalizing claims. Second, the explanation of social phenomenon by revealing the causal mechanisms that produce them is the fundamental task of research. Third, in this explanatory endeavor, abduction and retroduction/retrodiction are very important tools. Fourth, the role of theory is decisive for research. However, few would dispute this claim. In this book, we emphasize that it is a claim that should be taken more seriously than is often the case, in the sense that theory should guide research and not be subordinate to specific methodological rules of how research should be conducted. Fifth, research involves a wide range of methodological tools and we have to use many of these tools in a concrete research project. In other words, there is often a need to mix methods. However, we argue that this mix cannot be done without taking the ontological and epistemological dimensions into account. We call this perspective a “critical methodological pluralism.” Sixth, there is a need to overrule the categorizing of methods in quantitative and qualitative terms. Instead, we argue that in research we can apply either an intensive design or an extensive design (often using both). Seventh, and last, the nature of society as an open system makes it impossible to make predictions as can be done in natural science. But, based on an analysis of causal mechanisms, it is possible to conduct a well-informed discussion about potential consequences of mechanisms working in different settings. These seven claims are developed in Part II.

Since this book is an introduction to critical realism and an outline of its consequences for doing research in social science, our target readers are undergraduate or postgraduate students, but we also address researchers in social sciences.

Some unhappy dualisms

There is often an intense debate within social science about approaches and methodologies. Positivism is contrasted with hermeneutics, quantitative method with qualitative method, and universalism with particularism – just to mention a few examples of such polarization. This dualistic perspective has to a large extent marked the debate. We might simplify it by calling it the “either–or” approach. In this book, we maintain that scientists are abandoning this approach in favor of one characterized by “both–and” in many of the important issues that challenge social science today. We, too, shall advocate this viewpoint. It does not mean, however, that we see this as a simple mixture, drawing in an eclectic way on various elements, without thoroughly reflecting on the fundamental epistemological foundations on which they rest. We will, instead, present an attempt to create something new out of a number of different – sometimes irreconcilable – perspectives. This new perspective preserves the knowledge and insights from previous positions, but offers a distinct alternative.

In the methodology of social science the either–or perspective has been prevalent for a long time. This is particularly obvious in methodology disputes in which there has been a clash between the proponents of the quantitative and the qualitative methodologies. However, it is perhaps in this area that a both–and perspective has gained most ground in recent years. Further, social science practice has often been characterized by either a theoretical or an empirical attitude. Such division jeopardizes the sometimes difficult but necessary work on linking empirical research with theorizing. It may result in empirical descriptions lacking in theory. A third field in social science characterized by the either–or perspective is the gap between philosophy of science and social science practice. During the latter half of the twentieth century, developments in the philosophy of science have provided insights that could noticeably influence social science research if they were allowed to have an impact. Unfortunately, these insights have far too often lived their own life, separated from social science. In this book, we argue for a both–and perspective in these three areas, a both–and perspective building on a philosophy of science that demonstrates how a new standpoint, which draws partly on previous perspectives, is possible – that of critical realism.

Let us dwell briefly on these three dichotomies, since they are of vital importance for the theme of this book. We start with the last mentioned, that between a more philosophical discussion about the base of social science, metatheory, on the one hand, and social science research practice, on the other. Metatheories deal with ontological and epistemological issues, that is, questions about the nature of reality and how we gain knowledge about it. The metatheoretical discussions that have influenced social science have to a large extent been about the role of theories in research practice. The question has been discussed ever since the social sciences were established as independent disciplines at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time a debate developed within the scientific world, where proponents of two basic viewpoints challenged one another: on the one hand, those who advocated a social and human science that should – after the pattern of the natural sciences – try to ascertain general laws by applying and developing abstract theoretical models: a nomothetic approach. On the other hand, their critics who held that social science should describe empirical reality in all its complexity and diversity: an idiographic approach. If research is to be successful, such underlying assumptions must be highlighted and problemized. A consistent stance on these issues will improve the conditions for scientific progress. The history of science shows that theoretical and methodological development is closely connected to metatheoretical development.

Another and perhaps more serious division is evidenced by the fact that the theoretical part of scientific work is sometimes discussed separately from the more practical part, the empirical and methodological aspects. However, method and theory cannot be treated as two separate entities of social science. There are at least two reasons for this. First, theorizing is an inherent and absolutely vital part of the research method itself. Social scientific workmanship is basically about analyzing and developing the theoretical language, about developing theoretical starting points for empirical analyses, and about linking, in various ways, theory with empirical research. Second, our objects of study are always theoretically defined. The theory-governed definition of the object determines which methods are suitable and which are unsuitable. These two unfortunate dichotomies should thus be surpassed and we claim that the following tripartite regulatory relationship should prevail in social science: Ontology → Methodology → Social theories and Practical research.

A third unfortunate division is that between quantitative and qualitative methods. A common reaction we meet in our tutoring is how surprised the students are about the lack of connection between what we teach about social science methods and how practical research work is often carried out. In many of the scientific theses that our students read, different methods are combined; the fruitfulness of such an approach is also more and more frequently emphasized in the literature. The arguments for it may vary, as we shall see later, but common to them all is an increasingly positive attitude towards use of a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. However, it is still a common situation that education is conducted in a manner that does not allow students to learn what a fruitful combination, firmly established in a metatheoretical position, can mean. There is a certain discrepancy between, on the one hand, what is said to be interesting and fruitful, and how more and more research work is actually done in this way and, on the other hand, how the teaching itself is too often organized.

This book stems from the conviction that it is important, crucial even, for social science research systematically to reflect on these problems and allow the positions one takes to permeate the research practice. Metatheory should therefore be a central feature in all planning of social science study, and should not be introduced in an ad hoc fashion, since there is otherwise a great risk of the work being conducted in an unsystematic and inconsequent manner. In other words, there should always be a clear connection between the ontological and epistemological starting points and the practical research work. It is against this background that we have written this book on methodology – a book about the relation between metatheoretical questions and the methods of concrete research.

The emergence of critical realism

Critical realism is associated with the British philosopher Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014). When he presented the first thorough description, at the end of the 1970s – A Realist Theory of Science (1978) – he was strongly influenced by his teacher, Rom Harré, who in his book, The Principles of Scientific Thinking (1970), had laid the foundations with his comprehensive criticism of positivism. Harré argued that there had to be underlying generative mechanisms were it to be at all possible to analyse the world in terms of cause and effect. The philosopher of science who at an early stage presented ideas very much like those that Bhaskar and others later advocated is Mario Bunge (see, e.g., Bunge 1979, 1993). Bunge argues, for instance that:

1. reality is arranged in levels
2. something qualitatively new can emerge from a lower level (emergence)
3. there is a distinction between a real world and a conceptual one, between our descriptions of it and the factual reality
4. empiricism is to be criticized for its reduction of reality to the observable.

The development of critical realism has undergone several distinct phases. The first phase is called “basic critical realism.” In fact, it was originally called “transcendental realism” by Roy Bhaskar (1989), but the term subsequently disappeared. To some extent, this is unfortunate. The term transcendental realism directs one’s mind to one of the revolutionary ideas in critical realism: the critique of orthodoxy at the level of ontology, i.e., a critique of how both positivists and neo-Kantians (idealists) approached the issue of ontology in philosophy. The endeavor of the first phase of critical realism was to go beyond empiricism and transcendental idealism. In these philosophies an elaboration of ontology, i.e., the real, was absent. As researchers, however, we deal with the real; hence, we need a notion of the real world. Otherwise, the ultimate result is a collapse into some form of relativism. In this phase of critical realism, ontological issues such as causal laws, the structure of the world, mechanisms on different strata, and the distinction between beliefs and being (in critical realist terminology, transitive and intransitive) were developed. However, the aim of this phase was not to articulate for the first time an in-depth philosophical critique of empiricism and idealism. Rather, it was to develop a new logic of scientific discovery. This included elements such as complexity, experimental activity, and emergence. Bhaskar often writes about critical realism and its relation to alternative metatheories such as empiricism, neo-Kantianism, hermeneutics, and social constructivism, emphasizing their fundamental ontological differences while at the same time claiming critical realism to be epistemologically all-inclusive, calling it “the critical realist embrace” (Bhaskar et al. 2018: 82).

The following phase of its development is known as dialectical critical realism. Bhaskar became more and more aware of the need to develop a philosophically robust understanding of change. Reality is constantly in a process of change and with regard to social science, it is crucial to have an understanding of change. This challenge was implicit from the beginning of Bhaskar’s writing, but it took him about 10 years to develop an understanding of change. In that time, it became clear to him that absence was crucial. But how does one address “the not?” In his book Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (1993), he expands the ontology by introducing and developing the concept of absence and stresses the importance of agency in terms of dialectical categories. He underscores the importance of the absence of something, which gives rise to a want or the relieving of a need, and states that “we must see the agency as a radically transformed transformative praxis” (9). Process, negation, and transformation are key concepts here. The concept of absence, and hence the dialectical phase of critical realism (dialectical critical realism), plays an important – we would say fundamental – role in social research.

In relation to needs, Bhaskar claims that self-determination, or the desire for self-determination, is absolutely fundamental to being human. Human beings want to change the world. This might mean abolishing slavery, poverty, war, hunger, global warming, or other fundamental aspects of human life. Hence, the issue of transformative praxis in the social sciences becomes crucial. This leads us to the third phase of critical realism, a phase called meta-Reality (Bhaskar 2002) that focuses on transformative agency and emancipation. Sometimes this is called the spiritual turn. In this phase, Bhaskar incorporates issues such as self-reflexive human praxis, goodness, and evil. The focus shifts to the inner world, but the theory avoids taking a stance on the question of the existence of a deity or deities. It is possible, claims Bhaskar, to have a thoroughly secular spirituality. This is actually what he does in the philosophy of meta-Reality. In this phase, he stresses that spirituality, or an understanding of the subjective side of our agency, is a presupposition of the human emancipatory project as such, the ultimate goal being to overcome alienation and achieve universal self-realization. This requires a transformation of capacities into capabilities, of abstract powers into concrete powers, and so forth.

We could also talk about a fourth phase of Bhaskar’s work on critical realism, but it is not a philosophical phase like the other three. It is related more to practical research, focusing on the logic of concrete research. Beginning in 2000, Bhaskar spent a lot of time at Örebro University in Sweden conducting research on disability (Bhaskar and Danermark 2006). Since disability is related to the body, the psyche, and the social and physical context, it actualized the question of preconditions for interdisciplinary research. Bhaskar and Danermark argued that critical realism provides us with the best ontological and epistemological point of departure for doing interdisciplinary research. The outcome of this more than 10-year collaboration was Interdisciplinarity and Wellbeing: A Critical Realist General Theory of Interdisciplinarity (Bhaskar, Danermark, and Price 2018). At the end of the collaboration, Leigh Price became involved and contributed to important and deepening aspects of interdisciplinary research. Conducting interdisciplinary research involves integrating knowledge, the most challenging phase in the research process (see, for example, Holland 2014), and we will return to this subject in Chapter 7.

So, what are the fundamental traits of critical realism? The question cannot be exhaustively answered here. We shall discuss the issue more thoroughly in the next two chapters. What we will do now is to relate some of the fundamental notions in critical realism to other ways of understanding reality, thereby attempting to gain an insight on, first, what questions critical realism is trying to answer, and second, how these answers differ from other attempts to answer the same questions. Hopefully this will allow the “distinctive character” of realism to become visible.

Within philosophy, critical realism involves a switch from epistemology to ontology, and within ontology a switch from events to mechanisms. This is the core of critical realism, and it indicates a metatheory with far-reaching consequences for scientific work. What Bhaskar wants to emphasize here is that the fundamental question in philosophy of science is this: “What properties do societies and people possess that might make them possible objects for knowledge?” (1978: 13). This ontological question must be the starting point for a philosophy of reality – not the epistemological question of how knowledge is possible, which in the past has most often been the case. In short, the point of departure in critical realism is that the world is structured, differentiated, stratified, and changing.

The conclusive part is also central. To switch from events to mechanisms means switching the attention to what produces the events – not just to the events themselves. Reality is here assumed to consist of several domains (to which we will return in Chapter 2). One of these is that of structures and mechanisms (the domain of real). These mechanisms sometimes generate an event (the domain of actual). When they are experienced, they become an empirical fact (the domain of empirical). If we are to attain knowledge about underlying causal mechanisms we must focus on these mechanisms, not o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Introduction to critical realism
• Part II Methodological implications
• Glossary
• Index