Critical Realism

Background

Critical realism (alternatively termed transcendental or complex realism) is most closely associated with the early works of the philosopher Roy Bhaskar. It has been developed mostly in the social and health sciences, evaluation, and economics.

Critical realism is one of a range of postpositivist approaches positioned between positivism/objectivism and constructivism/relativism. Critical realism simultaneously recognizes the existence of knowledge independent of humans but also the socially embedded and fallible nature of scientific inquiry. Among other criticisms, positivism is viewed as failing to acknowledge the inherent social nature of knowledge development, the influence of underlying unobservable factors/powers, and the meaning-centered nature of humans. However, constructivist philosophies are also criticized for overprivileging these human perspectives and attendant problematic variations of relativism that cannot adequately resolve competing claims to knowledge or account for knowledge development.

To resolve these epistemological issues, the early work of Bhaskar conceived the existence of three realms of reality: the actual, the real, and the empirical. The actual domain refers to events and outcomes that occur in the world. The real domain refers to underlying relations, structures, and tendencies that have the power to cause changes in the actual realm. Most often these causal influences remain latent; however, under the right circumstances, factors in the real domain can act together to generate causal changes in the actual domain. These causal changes are neither uniform nor chaotic but are somewhat patterned. The empirical dimension refers to human perspectives on the world (i.e., of the actual and real domains). This could be perspectives of an individual or, in a wider sense, of scientific inquiry. The real and actual domains can be perceived only fallibly. Hence, this ontology advocates the existence of an objective reality formed of both events and underlying causes, and although these dimensions of reality have objective existence, they are not knowable with certainty.

Other tenets of critical realism tend to emerge from this ontological basis. A strong focus in theorizing and research informed by critical realism is placed on understanding causality and explaining events in the actual domain. This movement from events to their causes, known as abduction, is contrasted with other [Page 168]common goals of research to describe, predict, correlate, and intervene.

Critical realism attempts to respond to and understand reality as it exists in the actual and real domains. Hence, being led by the nature of that reality is of overriding importance and takes precedence over disciplinary, methodological, or ideological predisposition because each of these could distort perceptions of reality. This results in a postdisciplinary vent that seeks to be led by reality in all its complexity and to avoid simplification, narrowness, and distortion.

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