Critical Realism

Epistemology

As an epistemology, critical realism is an alternative to empiricism and neo-Kantianism alike, in both positivist and postmodern iterations. Against empiricism, critical realism is the view that knowledge is based on experience but not on surface appearances. Against neo-Kantianism, it is the view that neither the active, structuring processes [Page 153]of cognition nor the social character of knowledge production results in a need to distinguish between knowledge of phenomenal objects-for-us and knowledge of things-in-themselves. Bhaskar called the idea that we cannot know what things are “really” like (i.e., that instead we can know only about our own thinking) the epistemic fallacy. From a critical realist perspective, positivists and postmodernists alike commit the epistemic fallacy. For critical realists, the aim of both the natural and the social sciences is to identify the causal powers of things, or kinds of things. In the case of the social sciences, the things in question are thought to be social structures. Mainstream social scientists sometimes talk of causal powers, but what they mean by such talk is that the scientist may add on a theory, into which a law, conceived as a statement of universal regularity, may be seen to fit. From a critical realist perspective, by contrast, laws merely express tendencies that things have to behave in certain ways, in virtue of being the kind of object that they are. Adequate explanations, then, require not just knowledge of what an object regularly does but also knowledge of what it is, so that one can say why it does what it does. Bhaskar describes this as being able to give a real definition of a thing's real essence. Real definitions are not analytic. They follow upon empirical investigation into the nature of different kinds of thing.

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