Roy Bhaskar
The term was used earlier by Donald Campbell (1974/1988, p. 432), and the concept of combining ontological realism and epistemological constructivism goes back at least to Herbert Blumer (1969).
Having graduated with first-class honours in 1966, he began work on a PhD thesis about the relevance of economic theory for under-developed countries.
His thesis was failed twice, which he believed to be partly for political reasons, but the second version was published largely unchanged in 1975 as his influential text, A Realist Theory of Science.
[10] Bhaskar himself lists ten main influences on his early work, including philosophical work on the philosophy of science and language; the sociology of knowledge; Marx "and particularly his conception of praxis"; structuralist thinkers including Levi-Strauss, Chomsky and Althusser; the metacritical tradition of Hegel, Kant, and even Descartes; and perspectivalism in the hands of Nietzsche, Fanon, Gramsci and Gandhi.
Its approach emphasises the importance of distinguishing between epistemological and ontological questions and the significance of objectivity properly understood for a critical project.
The first 'phase' of Critical Realism accrued a large number of adherents and proponents in Britain, many of whom were involved with the Radical Philosophy Group and related movements.
It argued for an objectivist realist approach to science based on a Kantian transcendental analysis of scientific experimental activity.
What emerged was a marriage of ontological realism with epistemological relativism that formed an objectivist yet fallibilist theory of knowledge.
Bhaskar developed it fully in Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (1987), which developed the critical tradition of ideology critique within a CR framework by arguing that certain kinds of explanatory accounts could lead directly to evaluations and so science could function normatively, not just descriptively, as positivism has assumed since Hume's law.
'Transcendental realism' was the term used by Bhaskar to describe the argument that he developed in his first book, A Realist Theory of Science (1975).
[17] The former is inspired by Kuhnian arguments of how scientific communities develop knowledge and asserts all observation is theory-laden based on previously acquired concepts.
[25] On that basis, Bhaskar argues that the world can be divided into nested domains of the real, the actual and the empirical.
[32] On one hand, Bhaskar argues for naturalism in the sense that the transcendental realist model of science is equally applicable to both the physical and the human worlds.
[37] On that basis, he rejects reductionist explanations of human action as determined purely physiologically, and he argues instead for what he calls "synchronic emergent powers materialism".
[42] One of the core themes of Bhaskar's work, which he returns to several times across its different phases, is that philosophical arguments can be provided to support sociopolitical critique.
The importance of that argument, Bhaskar suggests, is that it underpins the critical potential of the human sciences since they can provide a basis for political action by revealing the falsity of beliefs and their sources.
Indeed, he argues that as long as a belief is known to be false, there is sufficient grounds for a negative evaluation of it and for action directed at its removal.
[48] The main departure, it seems, is an emphasis on the shift away from Western dualism to a non-dual model in which emancipation entails "a breakdown, an overcoming, of the duality and separateness between things."
[50] One of the threads that unites the different phases of his work is a continuing commitment to providing philosophical support for emancipatory politics.
[51] In the same discussion, Bhaskar endorsed some key elements of Marx's thought, including his explanatory account of the deep structures of the capitalist mode of production.
[52] Bhaskar clearly admired Marx as a philosopher of emancipation and both drew on and built on aspects of that work, at least up to and including the period of dialectical critical realism.
However, during the same debate with Callinicos, Bhaskar referred to "The Marxists", as if the term did not include himself, and criticised them for neglecting the role of women in domestic labour.
He rarely involved himself with questions of practical politics, with the exception of his late collaborative work on climate change.
They are not typical transcendental arguments as philosophers such as Charles Taylor have defined them, the distinguishing feature of which is the identification of some putative condition on the possibility of experience.
(However, his arguments function in an analogous way since they try to argue that scientific practice would be unintelligible and/or inexplicable in the absence of the ontological features he identifies.)
[56] Bhaskar, however, repeatedly clarified that "transcendental realism is fallible, as corrigible as the outcome of any other piece of human argument".
[57] Bhaskar's claim that the theory of explanatory critique justifies ethical naturalism and/or moral realism has also been criticised, including by other critical realists, as committing the naturalistic fallacy.
[59] Similarly, Dave Elder-Vass argues that the cognitive version of explanatory critique rests on the ethical premise that false knowledge is a bad thing.
His early books were considered "models of clarity and rigour", but Bhaskar has been criticised for the "truly appalling style" (Alex Callinicos, 1994) in which his "dialectical" works were written.
[62] Bhaskar's most recent 'spiritual' phase has been criticised by many adherents of early critical realism for departing from the fundamental positions that had made it important and interesting without providing philosophical support for his new ideas.
