Guest post: Varieties of realism by Jamie Morgan

[Jamie Morgan accepted my invitation to contribute a guest post to Understanding Society on the topic of the varieties of realism in the philosophy of social science. Jamie is Professor of Economic Sociology at Leeds Beckett University. He co-edits the Real-World Economics Review with Edward Fullbrook. He has published widely in the fields of economics, political economy, philosophy, sociology and international politics. Jamie is well positioned to provide this assessment. Thanks, Jamie!]

VARIETIES OF REALISM

BY JAMIE MORGAN

j.a.morgan@leedsbeckett.ac.uk

Scientific realism has many overlapping and parallel forms and one of the more prominent has been critical realism (CR). If we date from the original publication of Roy Bhaskar’s A Realist Theory of Science in 1975, then CR has endured for nearly half a century. Longevity, moreover, invites reflection in order to build institutional memory, and with this in mind the Critical Realist Network is engaged in a project to interview proponents, innovators and fellow travelers (link). Some, such as Tim Rutzou’s interview with Chris Smith, author of What is a Person? are available on YouTube. Others take a more longform ‘life and times’ approach and are published in the Journal of Critical Realism. Dan Little's is the latest in this ongoing process (link).

The interviews are a rich conceptual and bibliographic resource on CR as well as general issues in social theory, philosophy, history, methodology and social science, but in addition to this they serve a number of purposes. For those unfamiliar with CR, it tends to be most closely associated with Bhaskar’s work. However, many others have contributed to CR over the years. For example, in addition to Bhaskar’s transformational model of social activity (TMSA), CR associated thinkers have developed several different theorisations that deal with what is often described as the ‘agent-structure problematic’, but more broadly deal with the dynamics of social constitution. Readers are likely most familiar with the sociologist, Margaret Archer's structure, agency and culture (SAC), and morphostatic/morphogenetic (M/M) approach; but others include the political economist, Bob Jessop's strategic-relational approach (SRA), the economic philosopher, Tony Lawson's social positioning theory and the social theorist, Dave Elder-Vass's norm circles. As Dan notes in his interview, there are numerous points of convergence with his own advocacy of an actor-centred theory.

Dan Little, of course, is not merely a social theorist or philosopher, like many of those interviewed his work spans a variety of fields and numerous interests over the years. As Andrew Sayer, author of numerous influential books, such as Method in Social Science and Why Things Matter to People, notes in his interview, he has not found it necessary to always begin each thing he writes with an exhaustive list of CR concepts. They have often formed the background to how he approaches his work. Others, in contrast, have devoted most of their career to development of fundamental concepts. Since Bhaskar's untimely death, Ruth Groff, for example, has perhaps done more than any other within CR to develop realist conceptualizations of causation.

The interviews, then, establish that CR has a long history, is diverse and continues to develop. That said, most CR associated people subscribe to the triad of ontological realism, epistemological relativism and judgmental rationality, as well as use of concepts of depth realism, stratification, emergence, open system cumulative causation and identification of ontic and epistemic fallacies. As the interviews also establish, there is, however, a great deal of debate within CR and continual engagement with interlocutors. Regarding the former (disagreement), there are different takes on various concepts, but also argument focused on different lines of development. Alan Norrie (a leading figure in UK legal studies) and Priscilla Alderson (who has done seminal work on the rights of the child and patient rights in healthcare), for example, are advocates of dialectics, but by no means all CR proponents agree. Regarding the latter (engagement), there are, as the recent special issue of Journal of Critical Realism on pragmatism and a previous interview with Nicholas Rescher illustrate, numerous instances of productive interchange.

Moreover, as readers of this blog are no doubt aware, positions evolve and a great deal of debate has taken place in various threads within Understanding Society, written by Dan and others and taking in reference to and commentary from many of those interviewed and already mentioned, as well as George Steinmetz, Peggy Somers, Guus Duindam, Tuuka Kaidesoja, Justin Cruickshank, Mervyn Hartwig, Phil Gorski and Doug Porpora. Doug Porpora is currently President of the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) and is another who has been interviewed for the project. Mention of IACR, furthermore, is an important reminder that CR is a growing global community and the interviews conducted so far are no more than a snapshot, able to indicate something of the flavour of CR but not fully convey its organizational form, extent and significance. The Network provides access to various on-line courses and other educational resources, proponents can be found all over the world (from Scandinavia to Asia Pacific), works are available in many languages and the next IACR conference, organized by Johnny Go, is scheduled for August 2023 in Manila, the Philippines.

Finally, as the interviews and also Hubert Buch-Hansen and Peter Nielsen’s recent book Critical Realism makes clear, CR is not, to mix metaphors some ossified dogma, it is a living body of thought. CR at its best is philosophy and social theory to some purpose and advocates work on some of the most pressing issues of our time.

*****

Here is a list of interviews conducted by Jamie Morgan and published in Journal of Critical Realism:

Nicholas Rescher, Jamie Morgan, 2020. Philosophical purpose and purposive philosophy: an interview with Nicholas Rescher, JCR, 19:1, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2019.1695085

Margaret S Archer, Jamie Morgan, 2020. Contributions to realist social theory: an interview with Margaret S. Archer, JCR, 19:2, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2020.1732760

Douglas V Porpora, Jamie Morgan, 2020. American sociology, realism, structure and truth: an interview with Douglas V. Porpora, JCR, 19:5, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2020.1782708

Alan Norrie, Jamie Morgan, 2021. Realism, dialectic, justice and law: an interview with Alan Norrie, JCR, 20:1, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2021.1881274

Tony Lawson, Jamie Morgan, 2021. Cambridge social ontology, the philosophical critique of modern economics and social positioning theory: an interview with Tony Lawson, part 1, JCR, 20:1, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2020.1846009

Tony Lawson, Jamie Morgan, 2021. Cambridge social ontology, the philosophical critique of modern economics and social positioning theory: an interview with Tony Lawson, part 2, JCR, 20:2, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2021.1914904

Dave Elder-Vass, Jamie Morgan, 2022. 'Materially social' critical realism: an interview with Dave Elder-Vass, JCR, 21:2, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2022.2028233

Andrew Sayer, Jamie Morgan, 2022. A realist journey through social theory and political economy: an interview with Andrew Sayer, JCR, 21:4, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2022.2049078

Bob Jessop, Jamie Morgan, 2022. The strategic-relational approach, realism and the state: from regulation theory to neoliberalism via Marx and Poulantzas, an interview with Bob Jessop, JCR, 21:1, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2021.1995685

Daniel Little, Jamie Morgan, 2022. Understanding society: an interview with Daniel Little, JCR, Latest Articles, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2022.2134617

Ruth Porter Groff, Jamie Morgan, 2022. Philosophy, metaphilosophy and ideology-critique: an interview with Ruth Porter Groff, JCR, Latest Articles, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2022.2101342

Priscilla Alderson, Jamie Morgan, 2022. Realist by inclination, childhood studies, dialectic and bodily concerns: an interview with Priscilla Alderson, JCR, Latest Articles, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2022.2068261

Heikki Patomäki & Jamie Morgan, 2023. World politics, critical realism and the future of humanity: an interview with Heikki Patomäki, Part 1, Journal of Critical Realism, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2023.2188527

Heikki Patomäki & Jamie Morgan, 2023. World politics, critical realism and the future of humanity: an interview with Heikki Patomäki, Part 2, Journal of Critical Realism, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2023.2188541

Berth Danermark & Jamie Morgan, 2023. Applying critical realism in an interdisciplinary context: an interview with Berth Danermark, Journal of Critical Realism, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2023.2188710

Journal of Critical Realism CFP on Judgemental Rationality

Roy Bhaskar is best known for his ideas about social ontology. However, he also had a substantial interest in "the epistemology of social science" -- the means through which social scientists provide their theories with rational credibility. The Journal of Critical Realism is planning a special issue on the key concept that Bhaskar introduced in this area, "judgemental rationality". Readers can find the full Call for Proposals here.

Here is how Robert Isaksen, on behalf of the editorial committee of JCR, introduces and defines the concept of judgemental rationality:

Judgemental rationality is the critical realist concept that deals with issues relating to the possibility to make claims to knowledge and truth, and to claims about false beliefs. As such, it is relevant to empirical researchers and philosophers of knowledge alike. 

Isaksen continues:

Judgemental rationality has a central place in critical realism, being one part of what has been termed the Holy Trinity of Critical Realism (Bhaskar 2016). Though judgemental rationality was an implicit part of critical realism from the start, a more complete explication is made in Bhaskar’s third book, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation ([1986] 2009), in particular sections 1.3, 1.5, 1.6, 1.8, and 2.4. The argument, in short, is that the necessity of ontological realism implies the actuality of epistemic relativity (and which in turn mutually implies ontological realism), and together these make for the possibility of judgemental rationality (24), i.e. of rational theory choice, even between theories from competing paradigms (92). Such rational choice of one theory over another is predicated upon choosing the theory which has comparatively greater explanatory power, using specific criteria (73, 82), and that there is an agent able to make such a comparison (e.g. 87). In critical realist research this would come in addition to searching for underlying causal mechanisms, and indeed can be seen as central to this very process.

Here is an earlier post on the need for an epistemology for the theory of critical realism (link). There I suggest that CR's historical allergic response to "positivism" is a barrier to formulating an evidence-based epistemology for this approach to thinking about the social sciences.

Like a left handed quarterback, CR has a disadvantage in formulating an epistemology because of its blind side. In the case of CR, the blind side is the movement's visceral rejection of positivism. CR theorists are so strongly motivated to reject all elements of positivism that they are disposed to avoid positions they actually need to take.

I conclude with an affirmation of the centrality of empirical standards:

Critical realism seeks to significantly influence the practice and content of social science theory and research. In order to do this it will need to be able to state with confidence the commitments made by CR researchers to empirical standards and evidence-based findings. This will help CR to fulfill the promise of discovering some of the real structures and processes of the social world based on publicly accessible standards of theory discovery and acceptance.

Given the centrality of good thinking about scientific rationality for pursuing the program of critical realism in the social sciences, I encourage readers to consider submitting an article to the JCR special volume on judgemental rationality. This is an important and strategic subject within the philosophy of the social sciences, and will help to bridge between "philosophical theory" and "scientific practice". Here is the link for the CFP.

Realism about social entities

Critical realism depends on the key notion that sociologists are justified in construing their statements about social entities as real, objective features of the social world — “intransitive” objects, in Bhaskar’s somewhat idiosyncratic vocabulary. But does a realist ontology actually require this assumption? Or are there realist interpretations of sociological theory that do not “reify” entities like social structures, ideologies, or normative systems? Could we be realist about the social analogues of atoms and forces but nominalistic about larger ensembles like proteins? In chemistry there would be no reason to ask this question; but in the composition of the social world, it is possible that the linkages between "micro" and "macro" are sufficiently loose as to make it plausible that the ensembles have less permanence and fixity than their components. It is possible that the social world is more akin to a jigsaw puzzle in which all the pieces are square and can be fitted together in countless different ways; so there is no reason to attribute "existence" to the various combinations that occur.

This probably sounds needlessly paradoxical. But I think there are problems in asserting the independent, objective reality of a social structure like “the US system of academic tenure” that do not arise with respect to the building blocks of social structures and institutions like incentives, group priorities, property relations, and so on.

The ontological problem about large social entities arises from the open boundaries, multiple dimensions, and heterogeneity characteristic of the great preponderance of social “structures”. Take “tenure”: there are some important features commonly associated with tenure, like “protection of academic freedom,” “peer review,” and “self-governance”. But there is a great range of institutional arrangements, institutional priorities, and processes that make multiple instances substantially different from each other. Harvard’s tenure process looks very different from that practiced at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. And this is not a statement about elitism and status, but rather a reflection of different institutional priorities, needs, and the path-dependency relating to the historical composition of the respective arrangements.

We might be more confident in “realist” reference to a sociological entity when we refer to the particular instances of structures and ideologies, in a time and place, rather than the class of entities. So we might say that both Harvard and Lowell have particular tenure arrangements that are stable and well-defined and that can be selected as social entities. The class of all tenure systems, on the other hand, should be understood nominalistically as referring to a group of substantially different individual systems.

A more fundamental approach a realist might take is to abandon realist interpretations of large social things altogether and choose instead to refer realistically to the mechanisms, modular organizations, and interests and actions that make up the large macro structures and systems. This would represent a social realism about underlying processes, forces, and constraints, while adopting a nominalistic view of the higher-level entities. This orientation seems to point back to the view that I call "methodological localism": the view that "the 'molecule' of all social life is the socially constructed and socially situated individual, who lives, acts, and develops within a set of local social relationships, institutions, norms, and rules" (link, link). And it suggests that sociological realism is most clearly justified when applied to social circumstances at the micro- and meso-levels -- not the grand macro level.

This modest version of social realism preserves the key ideas of the objectivity, independence from the observer, and persistence and recurrence in the social world of the object of investigation. And this sustains the primary features of a realist understanding of social research and theorizing. On this more limited interpretation of realism, the social world exists independently from the researcher; causes, actions, incentives, and constraints exist, and social actors interact with each other in a variety of ways. Large structures, however, are too indefinite to count as "real" social entities. They have the shape-shifting status of the forest rather than the trees.

And what about the large structures that many of the critical realists care about the most -- capitalism, mode of production, economic structure, forces of production, bourgeois ideology, ...? It seems reasonable to construe these social things as conceptual constructs or ideal types rather than ontological entities. The "capitalist mode of production" is an intellectual construct, not an independent social reality. It is composed of real social actions, institutions, arrangements, and practices, all of which can be empirically investigated and which are independent from the observer. But when we think of the CMP along the lines of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Althusser, Deng Xiaoping, or Hayek, we are thinking of substantially different ways of conceptualizing the social and economic world. Further, the capitalisms in Britain, Germany, Japan, and post-Communist Poland all have important differences when it comes to their fundamental institutions and dynamics. The CMP is not a single abiding and theory-independent social reality.

Does the "economic structure of the United States" exist? It does, in that there are specific and empirically accessible institutions, relations, actions, and organizations that hang together and persist, and which we intellectually organize as the "economic structure". And yet it does not exist, if by "exist" we mean something solid, unchanging, and specific. As Marx once wrote, "all that is solid melts into air" (link).

(An earlier post considers a different kind of retreat from ambitious realism in the natural sciences, structural realism (link).)

Social consciousness and critical realism

Critical realism proposes an approach to the social world that pays particular attention to objective and material features of the social realm -- property relations, impersonal institutional arrangements, supra-individual social structures. Between structure and agent, CR seems most often to lean towards structures rather than consciously feeling and thinking agents. And so one might doubt whether CR has anything useful to offer when it comes to studying the subjective side of social life.

Take for example the idea of a social identity. A social identity seems inherently subjective. It is the bundle of ideas and frameworks through which one places himself or herself in the social world, the framework through which a person conceptualizes his/her relations with others, and an ensemble of the motivations and commitments that lead to important forms of social and political action. All of this sounds subjective in the technical sense -- a part of the subjective and personal experience of a single individual. It is part of consciousness, not the material world.

So it is reasonable to ask whether there is anything in a social identity that is available for investigation through the lens of critical realism.

The answer, however, seems to be fairly clear. Ideas and mental frameworks have social antecedents and causal influences. Individuals take shape through concrete social development that is conducted through stable social arrangements and institutions. Consciousness has material foundations. And therefore, it is perfectly appropriate to pursue a realist materialist investigation of social consciousness. This was in fact one important focus of the Annales school of historiography.

This is particularly evident in the example of a social identity. No one is born with a Presbyterian or a Sufi religious identity. Instead, children, adolescents, and young adults acquire their religious and moral ideas through interaction with other individuals, and many of those interactions are determined by enduring social structures and institutional arrangements. So it is a valid subject of research to attempt to uncover the pathways of interaction and influence through which individuals come to have the ideas and values they currently have. This is a perfectly objective topic for social research.

But equally, the particular configuration of beliefs and values possessed by a given individual and a community of individuals is an objective fact as well, and it is amenable to empirical investigation. The research currently being done on the subcultures of right wing extremism illustrates this point precisely. It is an interesting and important fact to uncover (if it is a fact) that the ideologies and symbols of hate that seem to motivate right wing youth are commonly associated with patriarchal views of gender as well.

So ideas and identities are objective in at least two senses, and are therefore amenable to treatment from a realist perspective. They have objective social determinants that can be rigorously investigated; and they have a particular grammar and semiotics that need to be rigorously investigated as well. Both kinds of inquiry are amenable to realist interpretation: we can be realist about the mechanisms through which a given body of social beliefs and values are promulgated through a population, and we can be realist about the particular content of those belief systems themselves.

Ironically, this position seems to converge in an unexpected way with two streams of classical social theory. This approach to social consciousness resonates with some of the holistic ideas that Durkheim brought to his interpretation of religion and morality. But likewise it brings to mind Marx's views of the determinants of social consciousness through objective material circumstances. We don't generally think of Marx and Durkheim as having much in common. But on the topic of the material reality of ideas and their origins in material features of social life, they seem to agree.

These considerations seem to lead to a strong conclusion: critical realism can be as insightful in its treatment of objective social structures as it is in study of "subjective" features of social consciousness and identities.

Guest post by Dave Elder-Vass

[Dave Elder-Vass accepted my invitation to write a response to my discussion of moral realism (link). Elder-Vass is Reader in sociology at Loughborough University and author of Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy, The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency and The Reality of Social Construction, discussed here, here and here. Dave has emerged as a leading voice in the philosophy of social science, especially in the context of continuing developments in the theory of critical realism. Thanks, Dave!]

Moral realism and explanatory critique
By Dave Elder-Vass

Daniel Little's latest blog post "Moral progress and critical realism" raises some important issues for critical realists and indeed social scientists more generally. I'm sympathetic to the general orientation of his piece, and have made similar arguments elsewhere (summarised in this blog post). I thought it would be useful, though, to add some further discussion of how Daniel's argument relates to critical realism itself.

While critical realists agree that there is a real world that exists independently of what we think about it, they need not - and do not - agree on exactly which classes of things exist within that world. Moral realism is a case in point. Roy Bhaskar explicitly identified himself as a moral realist, and offered several different justifications for this in the course of his work. Some critical realists accept all of those justifications, some are ambivalent or selective about which they accept, and others like Andrew Sayer and myself, for example, reject moral realism outright.

I'd like to focus here on one of Bhaskar's arguments: the theory of explanatory critique. Technically this is an argument for ethical naturalism rather than moral realism (I'll come back to that), although it is sometimes regarded as supporting both. The classic statement of the theory can be found in his book Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation:

Let a belief P, which has some object O, have a source (causal explanation) S. I am going to contend that if we possess: (i) adequate grounds for supposing P is false; and (ii) adequate grounds for supposing that S co-explains P, then we may, and must, pass immediately to (iii) a negative evaluation of S (CP); and (iv) a positive evaluation of action rationally directed at the removal of S (CP). (SRHE, p. 177)

This argument can be read and/or employed in a number of different ways. Let me discuss three. First, it is a variation on the classic Marxist critique of ideology - it suggests that there are social institutions (S) which generate false beliefs (P) about other (or the same) social institutions (O) and that we ought to get rid of them. For example: if capitalist-controlled media sources mislead us about the nature of capitalism then we should replace those media sources (note that Bhaskar is careful to qualify the argument with a ceteris paribus clause (CP), and thus acknowledges that other factors must also be taken into consideration). As a critical ethical claim this seems reasonable and attractive, and it gains some of its appeal by being rather more direct than most versions of ideology critique.

But this is not the point of the theory of explanatory critique, which brings us to the second reading. On this reading, the purpose of Bhaskar's statement is to support his advocacy of ethical naturalism: the claim that we can derive ethical conclusions from purely factual premises. Bhaskar maintains that the premises (i) and (ii) are purely factual, and lead logically ("we may, and must, pass immediately to...") to the ethical conclusions (iii) and (iv). But as a number of people have pointed out, there is a flaw in this argument. The premises are indeed purely factual, and the conclusions are indeed ethical, but the premises are not sufficient to entail the conclusions. To arrive at these conclusions, we need a further premise: we must also believe that it is wrong to generate, advocate, or support false beliefs. Of course, most of us DO believe that, and if so we may well be happy to accept the conclusion in reading one. But that doesn't mean that Bhaskar has shown us how to derive an ethical conclusion from purely factual premises: his argument for ethical naturalism is false.

One also finds critical realists who think that the theory of explanatory critique provides a justification for moral realism: the claim that there are moral facts that are objectively right, good, or true regardless of what people may think about them. As far as I am aware Bhaskar himself does not claim that the theory of explanatory critique entails moral realism, and when he does advocate moral realism explicitly in his later work he offers other arguments to support it. But most critical realists are uncomfortable with those later arguments, and so it is important to establish whether or not the theory of explanatory critique does support moral realism. Let me call this a third reading of the argument, although it also depends on the second. On this reading, the argument for ethical naturalism establishes that we can indeed derive ethical claims from non-ethical facts, and this further implies that those ethical claims must therefore be objectively true. The logic is pretty straightforward: if it is objectively true that there are social institutions (S) which generate false beliefs (P) about other (or the same) social institutions (O), and if we can logically derive an ethical claim from these objective facts, then it would seem to be objectively true that we ought to get rid of those social institutions, irrespective of what any person or social group might believe about the issues. But it is quite clear that this is not a tenable conclusion, because reading two is itself false: the ethical conclusions of Bhaskar's explanatory critique depend on ethical as well as factual premises, so even if the factual premises are objectively true there is no basis to conclude that the ethical conclusions are also objectively true.

While this argument may have been a little technical for a blog post, I think it is important to clarify these distinctions. I regularly encounter (and read) fellow critical realists who cite Bhaskar's theory of explanatory critique as support for ethical naturalism and moral realism. I suspect that some of them have been seduced by the attractiveness of the argument in the first reading discussed above into believing that this justifies the second and third readings as well. It does not!

Moral progress and critical realism

Critical realists share a rejection of the fact-value distinction as a fundamental criterion of scientific rationality -- and rightly so (link). They believe that social research and theorizing involve value commitments all the way down. Further, they commonly believe that good social science should lead to improvement in the world and in our system of moral judgments.

So far, so good. But some critical realists think that this points to "moral realism" as well as scientific realism. Moral realism maintains that there are objective and timeless answers to the questions, what is justice? what should we do? what rights do people have? Moral realists hold that the moral facts are out there and waiting for discovery; there is a domain of "moral facts" that ultimately goes beyond the limits of rational disagreement.

This impulse towards moral realism is a problem. Moral realism and scientific realism are not analogous. There is no philosophical or theological method that will resolve moral questions into an unquestionable foundation or set of universal moral truths. Neither Kantianism, nor Aristotelianism, nor utilitarianism, nor traditional religious systems have the capacity to establish universal and unquestionable moral conclusions. The impulse towards moral realism has the perilous possibility of morphing into a dogmatic view of morality that substitutes one's own convictions for eternal moral truths. In my view, this is farfetched and ultimately implies an unreflective dogmatism about values. Fortunately there is a better and more modest position available that derives from the same pragmatist origins that are inspiring other advances in critical realism.

The better approach is based on a coherence epistemology. This approach is explicitly anti-realist when it comes to moral values. Ethical reasoning always has to do with conversation, disagreement, and sometimes progress. Moral practices have social reality, to be sure; but there are no "moral facts" consisting of moral principles and values that are beyond the possibility of further rational debate. This approach to moral theory emphasizes corrigibility and pragmatic debate about ends, means, and values. It converges with coherence epistemology along the lines of Quine and Rawls; it deliberately replaces a foundationalist approach to moral thinking with a corrigible ongoing series of discussions by moral equals. This allows for an epistemology based on dialogue, and it comes out of the pragmatist tradition.

This is the approach that John Rawls adopted in his theory of reflective equilibrium. Rawls explicitly links his approach to the anti-foundationalist thinking of philosophers like Quine. (Here is a 1985 paper in which I tried to summarize Rawls's moral methodology of reflective equilibrium; link.) Moral reasoning involves a back-and-forth between a set of considered judgments (current moral judgments about concrete issues) and more abstract moral principles. Both considered judgments and abstract principles are adjusted until the system of beliefs is reasonably consistent and coherent. Here is how Rawls describes this process of moral navigation with respect to the idea of the original position in A Theory of Justice 2nd edition:

In searching for the most favored description of this situation [the hypothetical original position] we work from both ends. We begin by describing it so that it represents generally shared and preferably weak conditions. We then see if these conditions are strong enough to yield a significant set of principles. If not, we look for further premises equally reasonable. But if so, and these principles match our considered convictions of justice, then so far well and good. But presumably there will be discrepancies. In this case we have a choice. We can either modify the account of the initial situation or we can revise our existing judgments, for even the judgments we take provisionally as fixed points are liable to revision. By going back and forth, sometimes altering the conditions of the contractual circumstances, at others withdrawing our judgments and conforming them to principle, I assume that eventually we shall find a description of the initial situation that both expresses reasonable conditions and yields principles which match our considered judgments duly pruned and adjusted. This state of affairs I refer to as reflective equilibrium. It is an equilibrium because at last our principles and judgments coincide; and it is reflective since we know to what principles our judgments conform and the premises of their derivation. At the moment everything is in order. But this equilibrium is not necessarily stable. It is liable to be upset by further examination of the conditions which should be imposed on the contractual situation and by particular cases which may lead us to revise our judgments. Yet for the time being we have done what we can to render coherent and to justify our convictions of social justice. We have reached a conception of the original position. (TJ 18)

This approach leads to two important features. (i) There are no fixed and final moral facts; moral facts are not part of the furniture of the world. But (ii) our moral frameworks have the potential of improving over time, as we grope reflectively with our moral responses, sympathies, and principles. There is a bootstrapping kind of progress here.

What Rawls adds is the idea that our efforts to move toward reflective equilibrium permit us to increase the overall adequacy of our system of beliefs and considered judgments. And this ties directly to his treatment of Political Liberalism -- an ongoing discourse allowing us to refine and reform our convictions on the basis of communication with fellow members of our communities and groups. (Habermas and the public communicative process converges here as well.)

It is clear enough that no group is likely ever to reach full unanimity in a discussion like this. This is implied by Rawls's own conception of a liberal society including people with conflicting conceptions of the good. And ultimately a society can be very stable even as it embraces multiple conceptions of the good and other important questions of value.

These considerations suggest that we should abandon the idea of absolute moral truth (moral realism) and embrace instead the goal of securing a respectful, thoughtful dialogue that creates a possibility of moral progress. We may have the optimistic hope that a community or society improves its ability to make moral perceptions and distinctions over time, through the practice of debating and testing the normative ideas that are shared and those that divide the population.

The ongoing work by various theorists on deliberative democracy sheds some light on the concrete ways in which this kind of moral clarification can work within a group of citizens and otherwise unrelated people. (Here is a programatic statement from the Center for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance; link.) Everyone brings a moral and value sensibility to their interactions and reactions to the world, and sometimes those sensibilities can change through interaction with other individuals. Consideration of facts, complications, and alternative ways of stating various value commitment permit the individuals to honestly reflect on their commitments and social reactions and perhaps adjust them. (Here is a discussion of deliberative democracy; link. And here is a recent paper by Archon Fung on deliberative democracy and progressive social change; link.)

(Richmond Campbell's entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on "Moral Epistemology" is excellent as background on this topic; link.)

Time for a critical-realist epistemology

The critical realism network in North America is currently convened in Montreal in a three-day intensive workshop (link). In attendance are many of the sociologists and philosophers who have an active interest in critical realism, and the talks are of genuine interest. A session this morning on pragmatist threads of potential interest to critical realists, including Mead, Abbott, and Elias, was highly stimulating. And there are 29 sessions altogether -- roughly 85 papers. This is an amazing wealth of sociological research.

Perhaps a third of the papers are presentations of original sociological research from a CR point of view. This is very encouraging because it demonstrates that CR is moving beyond the philosophy of social science to the concrete practice of social science. Researchers are working hard to develop research methods in the context of CR that permit concrete investigation of particular social and historical phenomena. And this implies as well that there is a growing body of thinking about methodology within the field of CR.

CR theorists began with ontology, and a great deal of the existing literature takes the form of theoretical expositions of various ontological theses. And this was deliberate; following Bhaskar, theorists have argued that we need better ontology before science can progress. (This seems particularly true in the social realm; link.) So ontology needs to come first, then epistemology.

I believe the time has come when CR needs to give more explicit and extended attention to epistemology.

What is epistemology? It is an organized effort to answer the question, what is (scientific) knowledge? It attempts to provide a justified theory of empirical justification. Epistemology is an attempt to articulate the desired relationship between evidence and assertion; more specifically, it is an attempt to uncover the nuances of the domain of "evidence" across the realm of social research. Most fundamentally, it is an attempt to articulate how the practices of science are "truth-enhancing": a given set of epistemic practices (methodologies) are hoped to result in a higher level of veridicality over time.

Like a left handed quarterback, CR has a disadvantage in formulating an epistemology because of its blind side. In the case of CR, the blind side is the movement's visceral rejection of positivism. CR theorists are so strongly motivated to reject all elements of positivism that they are disposed to avoid positions they actually need to take. For example, The two following statements sound very similar:

A "Sociological claims must be evaluated on the basis of objective empirical evidence"

B "Sociological claims need to be confirmed or falsified"

And so the CR theorist is inclined to reject A as well as B. But this is a philosophical misstep caused by fear of the blind side. A is actually a perfectly valid requirement of epistemological rationality.

So what do we need from a developed epistemology for CR? Essentially we need three things.

First, we need an explicit commitment to empirical evaluation.

Second, we need a nuanced discussion of the complications involved in identifying "empirical evidence" in social research; for example, the impossibility of theory-independent or perspective-independent social data, the constructive nature of most historical and social observation, and the problem of selectivity in the collection of evidence.

Third, we need a discussion of the modes of inference -- deductive, inductive, statistical, causal, and Bayesian -- on the basis of which social scientists can arrive at an estimate of likelihood for a statement given a set of evidence statements.

Finally, our CR epistemology needs to give an appropriate discussion of the fallibility of all scientific research.

The epistemological frame that I currently favor is the coherence methodology described by philosophers like Quine and Goodman. The social sciences constitute a web of belief, and provisional conclusions in one area may serve to establish a method or valuation for findings in another area of the web. both ontological positions and epistemological maxims may require adjustment in light of future empirical and theoretical findings. Rawls's conception of reflective equilibrium illustrates this epistemology in the moral field. This approach has an unexpected affinity for CR, because there is an emerging interest in the pragmatist philosophy from which this approach derives.

Epistemology allows us to place various specific methodological approaches into context. So we can locate the method of process tracing into the context of justification, and therefore into epistemology. It also validates the idea of methodological pluralism: there are multiple avenues through which researchers can create evidence through which to prove and evaluate a variety of sociological claims.

Critical realism seeks to significantly influence the practice and content of social science theory and research. In order to do this it will need to be able to state with confidence the commitments made by CR researchers to empirical standards and evidence-based findings. This will help CR to fulfill the promise of discovering some of the real structures and processes of the social world based on publicly accessible standards of theory discovery and acceptance.

Morphogenesis and social norms

Critical realism pays particular attention to the enduring structures that underlie various social orders and processes. But as argued in an earlier post, CR also needs to be able to provide a vocabulary for describing the "subjective" and normative aspects of the social order. Margaret Archer's evolving theory of morphogenesis provides resources for discussing precisely this dimension of the social world. The most recent volume of collaborative research emerging from Archer's morphogenesis research project, Morphogenesis and the Crisis of Normativity (2016), is highly relevant to the ontology of normative features of the social world. The book focuses on the stability of legal systems in changing societies; but it is relevant to broader issues of normative coherence as well. The book includes contributions from a dozen contributors, and there is an admirable degree of focus and coherence across the chapters. Particularly interesting to me were chapters by Doug Porpora, Phil Gorski, Colin Wight, Emmanuel Lazega, and Mark Carrigan; but every essay is excellent. The volume provides the basis for a very important conversation about the nature of norms and laws in the context of rapid social change.

Here is how Archer frames the central issue in this volume:

Do shared values promote social stability and social integration, or is it the other way round? Is it rather that social stability fosters normative consensus about the legitimacy of the rule of law, the appropriateness of prevailing rules and attachment to existing conventions? This question has a long history in the philosophy of law and the sociology of development, whose respective thinkers often took different positions during the twentieth century. (1)

Archer and her colleagues introduce a new circuit of social interaction for this set of topics: social normativity, social integration, and social regulation (NIR) (1). In a thumbnail, the central insight of the volume is that much writing on the sociology of law has assumed a setting of morphostasis; but this leaves entirely open the question of the role and stability of legal and normative systems during periods of morphogenesis. The presumption has been that periods of significant, rapid social change are entirely destabilizing for legal and normative structures. And the project of the volume is to show how legal and normative structures can persist, evolve, or emerge within a period of morphogenesis. In other words, the collaborators here are interested in the topic of "normativity in changing times" (5).

One way of construing the puzzle under consideration here is the status of the "bindingness" of a normative or legal system. What circumstances or forces lead participants of a given society to internalize the prescriptions of a given set of norms or laws? And in particular, what could create this fact of norm internalization in a period of substantial and rapid social change?

There are a few features of normativity in society that are reasonably self-evident. One is a point that Archer herself emphasizes (8) and attributes as well to Dave Elder-Vass in The Causal Power of Social Structures: the fact that there are almost always multiple normative systems at work in a given society, rather than a single overarching and universal normative system. This point refutes key assumptions of both Durkheim and Parsons -- the assumption that a social order requires a fundamental and universal set of norms if it is to function coherently at all. This observation is implicit in Elder-Vass's idea of norm circles; but it is also quite visible through even cursory study of the norms of family, gender, fairness, etiquette, or life-aspiration that are current across different groups in one's own society. Archer makes a similar point here:

The hallmark of cultural relations in modernity was one of 'competitive contradictions' between the respective corpuses of ideas activated critically and conflictually by opposed groups for purposes of legitimation. (16)

But the idea that these normative conflicts must or will be resolved or eliminated in a period of greater stability is mistaken.

It is also unpersuasive to insist that a group (ethnic, racial, gender) only exists if it possesses a universal and common set of norms defining behavior for members of the group. (This appears to be the view of various theorists of "we" identities.) The same point about heterogeneity of the whole of society applies equally to groups within society. Protestants, Muslims, mid-westerners, or surfers can all construe their identities in terms of affinities with these various constructions, without being subject to a single and uniform normative code. Norms are more like strands within a woven fabric than like essential features of a group's identity. (Here is an earlier post that makes this point; link.)

Archer closes her introduction by highlighting three emerging hypotheses about morphogenesis and normativity:

1. Where (N) is concerned, intensified morphogenesis has entailed a retreat from public, deontic normativity in the developed world.
2. Where (I) is concerned, the increase in accessible cultural variety serves to decrease social uniformity and in consequence, social integration.
3. Where (R) is concerned, social regulation becomes increasingly preoccupied with coordination and attends to fostering co-operation and redistribution only in so far as these are needful for coordinating different societal sectors.

What is somewhat surprising to me in these conclusions is the underlying sense of discomfort that Archer conveys with the conditions of change and transformation that they imply. The conservative critique of modernity is that the old normative foundations of social solidarity are disappearing, and chaos is the result. Archer seems almost to agree with some version of this critique; she seems to accept that morphogenesis leads to "disorderliness, destructiveness, unfairness, inhumaneness, and other iniquities" (26). This same discontent seems to underlie her critique of Bauman's view of "liquid modernity" (link). In this volume she introduces the idea of "anormative social regulation" as an alternative to norm-based social cohesion:

In forging the link between anormative bureaucratic regulation and the intensification of morphogeneisis one socio-political characteristic of regulations is crucial. Regulations themselves can be innovatory, independent of any previous precedent and faster to to introduce than legislation. Since they do not rely upon consensus among or consultation with the public affected, neither are they dependent upon the relatively slow development, typical of social conventions and of norms. This feature recommends their suitability for ready response to the novel changes introduced through morphogenesis and its generic tendency for new variety to generate more variety. (149)

This is not Archer's whole answer to the question of the role of norms within a society undergoing morphogenesis; but it is the most concrete idea she advances. And it is a very limited conception of the ways in which individuals and groups within a society might seek to preserve and promote the common good.

What seems much more promising is a view of transformation and social change that permits constant "morphogenesis" and yet witnesses a reasonably stable patchwork of continuing normative communities that permit new solutions to the constant challenges created by rapid change. Perhaps surprisingly, John Rawls's conception of a "liberal society" with a constantly shifting set of ideas across society about justice and the common good seems more suitable to the conditions of change that Archer herself is most concerned with (Political Liberalism; link). We are indeed passengers on Neurath's raft riding on currents of "liquid modernity"; but we have the ability to continually recreate the conditions of a humane and just social order around us. Critical realism and the theory of morphogenesis can perhaps help us make greater progress in formulating an ontology of "progress and stability through ongoing change".

Guest post by Guus Duindam

Guus Duindam is a J.D./Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Michigan. His primary areas of interest are Ethics and Kant. Thanks, Guus, for providing this rigorous treatment of Bhaskar's philosophical argument for critical realism.

Bhaskar contra Kant: Why Critical Realism is not Transcendental Realism

Let me start by thanking Dan Little for inviting me to write this guest-post. I’d like to take the opportunity to examine Roy Bhaskar’s arguments for critical realism, in particular those presented in his A Realist Theory of Science (RTS). The aim of that work is remarkable: to establish by transcendental argument the mind-independence and structured nature of the objects of science.

Bhaskar’s views are explicitly grounded in Kantian arguments. But the rejection of Kantian transcendental idealism is a central feature of Bhaskar’s critical realism. For Bhaskar, critical realism is also transcendental realism, a position he posits as an alternative to both Kantian and (neo-)Humean philosophy of science.

Transcendental idealism is, at minimum, the idea that the conditions on human cognition – especially space and time, the forms of human intuition – in part determine the objects of knowledge. According to transcendental idealism, we cannot know things as they are ‘in themselves’, but rather only as they appear to beings like us. Kant thus distinguishes between things-in-themselves, the epistemically inaccessible noumena, and phenomena, things as they appear to us given the conditions on human cognition. The former are transcendentally real – unknowable but entirely mind-independent. The latter are empirically real – knowable, but in part dependent on the conditions on cognition. For Kant, science can study only the empirically real: to study the transcendentally real would require that we transcend the conditions on our own cognition – that we erase the distinction between the knower and the object of knowledge – a mystical feat of which we are evidently incapable.

Bhaskar makes a different distinction, between the intransitive and the transitive. Intransitive objects do not depend on human activity; they are entirely mind-independent (RTS 21). To say that some object is intransitive is therefore equivalent to saying that it is transcendentally real (this is clear throughout RTS; see also The Possibility of Naturalism 6). Hence, it is Bhaskar’s aim to prove the transcendental reality (intransitivity) of the objects of science and perception. According to Bhaskar, we can know the objects of science as they are in themselves.

Bhaskar defends this ambitious thesis by means of transcendental arguments. An argument is transcendental insofar as it shows that some commonly accepted claim x necessarily presupposes a controversial claim y; where y is the conclusion of the argument. Thus, a transcendental argument claims that its conclusion is the only possible way to account for the uncontroversial phenomenon which it takes as its premise. Unlike other arguments for scientific realism, then, Bhaskar’s make a claim to necessity.

Bhaskar’s analysis of perception contains the first of his transcendental arguments: call it the argument from perception. It has roughly the following form: multiple agents can, at the same time, perceive the same object in different ways (x). This could be possible only given the mind-independence of the object (y). Therefore, given the occurrence of differential perception, the objects of perception must be transcendentally real.

Here’s Bhaskar himself making the argument:

If changing experience of objects is to be possible, objects must have a distinct being in space and time from the experience of which they are the objects. For Kepler to see the rim of the earth drop away, while Tycho Brahe watches the sun rise, we must suppose that there is something they both see. (RTS, 31)

Earlier, he appears to be making the even stronger claim that perception simpliciter presupposes the intransitivity of the perceived:

The intelligibility of sense-perception presupposes the intransitivity of the object perceived. For it is in the independent occurrence or existence of such objects that the meaning of ‘perception’, and the epistemic significance of perception, lies. (Ibid.)

Let’s take the argument from perception to involve the weaker claim that differential experience by different agents necessarily presupposes the intransitive nature of the object perceived. If the argument fails to ground this claim, we know a fortiori that it fails to ground the stronger conclusion.

If it is possible for Brahe and Kepler to have different perceptions of the same object, there must be an object which they both see: this much seems clear. But the inference from this to the object’s intransitivity is fallacious, for the presupposition that the objects of sense-perception are empirically real is sufficient to explain differential perception. For the transcendental idealist, there is something which Brahe and Kepler both see: they both see the sun. The sun is empirically real, i.e., it partially depends on the conditions on human cognition. But Brahe and Kepler, being human, share the conditions on cognition and interact with the same mind-independent reality. Thus, there is nothing unintelligible about their different perceptions under the assumption that what they perceive is empirically real (partially mind-dependent). Bhaskar supposes that we must assume it is also transcendentally real (i.e., that Brahe and Kepler see the sun ‘as it is in-itself’) but does nothing to establish this. The argument from perception does not show that the objects of knowledge must be intransitive given the occurrence of (differential) perception. It fails as a transcendental argument for critical realism.

Bhaskar’s second argument is much more central to the critical realist endeavor, and it is presented in his analysis of experimental activity. Call it the argument from experimentation. For Bhaskar, “two essential functions” are involved in an experiment:

First, [the experimental scientist] must trigger the mechanism under study to ensure that it is active; and secondly he must prevent any interference with the operation of the mechanism. […] Both involve changing or being prepared to change the ‘course of nature’, i.e. the sequence of events that would otherwise have occurred. […] Only if the mechanism is active and the system in which it operates is closed can scientists in general record a unique relationship between the antecedent and consequent of a lawlike statement. (RTS, 53)

Bhaskar notes that the experimenter who sets up a causally closed system thereby becomes causally responsible for a constant conjunction of events, but not for the underlying causal mechanism. Contra Humean accounts of law, Bhaskar’s account of experimentation entails an ontological distinction between constant conjunctions and causal mechanisms.

For Bhaskar, the intelligibility of such experimental activity can be used to transcendentally establish the intransitivity of the objects of science. “As a piece of philosophy,” he claims, “we can say (given that science occurs) that some real things and generative mechanisms must exist (and act),” where by ‘real’ Bhaskar means ‘intransitive’ (RTS 52). In “Transcendental Realisms in the Philosophy of Science: On Bhaskar and Cartwright,” Stephen Clarke provides the following helpful gloss on the argument:

Premise 1: Scientific explanatory practice (in particular the practice of exporting explanations from laboratory circumstances to general circumstances) is experienced by us as intelligible. 

Premise 2: Scientific explanatory practice could not be experienced by us as intelligible unless causal powers exist and those causal powers are governed by universal laws of nature.

______________________________________________________ 

Conclusion: causal powers exist and are governed by universal laws of nature. (Clarke 302)

Clarke calls this an “attack on idealism” (303) but Bhaskar explicitly frames it as an attack on transcendental idealism (RTS 27). Clarke’s gloss is telling, for it is indeed unclear how the argument could work as an attack on the latter view.

Bhaskar argues that we must suppose the world to be intransitively ordered if scientific explanatory practice is to be intelligible. But, he claims, “transcendental idealism maintains that this order is actually imposed by men in their cognitive activity” (RTS 27). And if order were imposed in cognitive activity, all experience would be ordered, eliminating the need for explanatory export from the closed causal systems of experimentation to the open causal systems of uncontrolled experience (RTS 27, Clarke 303).

This argument is invalid. It does not follow from the premise that all experience is ordered that there is no need for explanatory export from closed to open causal systems. To the contrary: the very occurrence of such export presupposes that experience is ordered. After all, the aim of experimentation is to discover causal mechanisms and universal laws of nature. But to suppose that the causal mechanism discovered in a replicable scientific experiment generalizes to open causal systems is to suppose that the same laws operate in open causal systems, even if other mechanisms sometimes obscure them. And to presuppose that there are such things as knowable universal laws of nature – operative in closed and open causal systems alike – just is to presuppose that all experience is ordered. The ordered nature of experience is, therefore, a necessary presupposition for experimentation.

Now there are at least two ways in which experience could be thus ordered: because order is imposed on it in cognitive activity, or because the order is intransitive. Bhaskar supposes the former would render experimentation superfluous. This is a flummoxing claim to make. Surely Bhaskar does not mean to accuse the transcendental idealist of the view that the projection of order onto the world is somehow a conscious activity – that we already know every scientific truth. That would render experimentation superfluous, but I don’t think it is a view anybody defends. Science is as much a process of gradual discovery for the Kantian as it is for everyone else.

Maybe confusion arises from the fact that for Kantians genuinely universal scientific laws must be synthetic a-priori. Perhaps Bhaskar supposes that, because positing a universal law involves making a claim to synthetic a-priori knowledge, we should be able to derive the laws of nature by a-priori deduction, rendering experimentation superfluous. But this would be a misunderstanding of transcendental idealism. Suppose that because my perceptions of sparks and wood are frequently followed by perceptions of conflagration, I come to associate sparks and wood with fire. I can ask whether this association is subjective or objective. To claim that it is objective is, for the Kantian, to apply one of the Categories. For instance, one way of taking my association of sparks and dry wood with fire to be objective is to make a claim like “sparks and wood cause fire,” applying the Category of causation. This claim is a-priori insofar as it involves the application of an a-priori (pure) concept, a-posteriori insofar as it is about the objects of experience.

Transcendental idealism entails we are entitled to make causal claims, but it does not entail the empirical truth of our claims. Experimentation with sparks and wood may lead me to modify my claim. For instance, I may discover that sparks and wet wood do not jointly give rise to fire, and adjust my claim to “sparks and dry wood cause fire.” Further experimentation may lead to further refinements. I could not have deduced any of these conclusions about sparks and wood a-priori. The thesis that scientific claims have an a-priori component does not render experimentation either superfluous or unintelligible.

As it turns out, Bhaskar supposes that, for the Kantian, causal mechanisms are mere “figment[s] of the imagination” (RTS 45). If true, this would provide an independent argument against the intelligibility of experimentation on a transcendentally idealist account. But, as should by now be clear, this is an incorrect characterization of transcendental idealism. It is only for skeptics and solipsistic idealists that causal mechanisms are figments of the imagination. Kantians and transcendental realists agree causal mechanisms exist: they disagree only about whether they are transcendentally or empirically real.

Bhaskar’s transcendental arguments for critical realism fail, and the Kantian view to which Bhaskar opposes his own is frequently misinterpreted. Most problematically, the meaning of the Kantian distinction between the transcendentally and empirically real is ignored, and the latter category is treated as if it contained only figments of our imagination. Bhaskar maintains that epistemic access to the transcendentally real is a necessary condition for science and perception. But, as we have seen, it is merely epistemic access to the empirically real that is necessary. Bhaskar does not prove that we have knowledge of things as they are in-themselves. Critical realism is not transcendental realism.

Explanation and critical realism

To explain something is to provide a true account of the causes and circumstances that brought it about. There is of course more to say on the subject, but this is the essential part of the story. And this normative account of explanation should work as well for investigations created within the framework of critical realism as any other scientific framework.

Moreover, CR is well equipped with intellectual resources to produce explanations of social outcomes based on this understanding. In particular, CR emphasizes the reality of causal mechanisms in the social world. To explain a social outcome, then -- perhaps the rise of Trumpism -- we are instructed to identify the causal mechanisms and conditions that were in play such that a novice from reality television would gain the support of millions of voters and win the presidency. So far, so good.

But a good explanation of an outcome is not just a story about mechanisms that might have produced the outcome; instead, we need a true story: these mechanisms existed and occurred, they brought about the outcome, and the outcome would not have occurred in the absence of this combination of mechanisms. Therefore we need to have empirical methods to allow us to evaluate the truth of these hypotheses.

There is also the important and interesting point that Bhaskar makes to the effect that the social world involves open causal configurations, not closed causal configurations. This appears to me to be an important insight into the social world; but it makes the problem of validating causal explanations even more challenging.

This brings us to a point of contact with the theme of much current work in critical realism: a firm opposition to positivism and an allegiance to post-positivism. Because a central thrust of positivism was the demand for substantive empirical confirmation or verification of substantive claims; and that is precisely where we have arrived in this rapid analysis of explanation as well. In fact, it is quite obvious that CR theories and explanations require empirical validation no less than positivistic theories. We cannot dispense with empirical validation and continue to believe we are involved in science.

Put the point another way: there is no possible avenue of validation of substantive explanatory hypotheses that proceeds through purely intuitive or theoretical avenues. At some point a good explanation requires empirical assessment.

For example, it is appealing in the case of Trumpism to attribute Trump's rise to the latent xenophobia of the disaffected lower working class. But is this true? And if true, is it critical as a causal factor in his rise? How would we confirm or disconfirm this hypothetical mechanism? Once again, this brings us into proximity to a few core commitments of empiricism and positivism -- confirmation theory and falsifiability. And yet, a rational adherence to the importance of empirical validation takes us in this direction ineluctably.

It is worth pointing out that the social and historical sciences have indeed developed empirical methods that are both rigorous and distinctive to the domain of the social: process tracing, single-case and small-N studies, comparative analysis, paired comparisons, and the like. So the demand for empirical methods does not imply standard (and simplistic) models of confirmation like the H-D model. What it does imply is that it is imperative to use careful reasoning, detailed observation, and discovery of obscure historical facts to validate one's hypotheses and claims.

Bhaskar addresses these issues in his appendix on the philosophy of science in RTS. He clearly presupposes two things: that rigorous evidence must be used in assessment of explanatory hypotheses in social science; and flat-footed positivism fails in providing an appropriate account of what that empirical reasoning ought to look like. And, as indicated above, the open character of social causation presents the greatest barrier to the positivist approach. Positivism assets that the task of confirmation and refutation concerns only the empirical correspondence between hypothesis and observation.

Elsewhere I have argued for the piecemeal validation of social theories and hypotheses (link). This is possible because we are not forced to adopt the assumption of holism that generally guides philosophy in the consideration of physical theory. Instead, hypotheses about mechanisms and processes can be evaluated and confirmed through numerous independent lines of investigation. Duhem may have been right about physics, but he is not right about our knowledge of the social world.

The soft side of critical realism

Critical realism has appealed to a range of sociologists and political scientists, in part because of the legitimacy it renders for the study of social structures and organizations. However, many of the things sociologists study are not "things" at all, but rather subjective features of social experience -- mental frameworks, identities, ideologies, value systems, knowledge frameworks. Is it possible to be a critical realist about "subjective" social experience and formations of consciousness? Here I want to argue in favor of a CR treatment of subjective experience and thought.

First, let's recall what it means to be realist about something. It means to take a cognitive stance towards the formation that treats it as being independent from the concepts we use to categorize it. It is to postulate that there are facts about the formation that are independent from our perceptions of it or the ways we conceptualize it. It is to attribute to the formation a degree of solidity in the world, a set of characteristics that can be empirically investigated and that have causal powers in the world. It is to negate the slogan, "all that is solid melts into air" with regard to these kinds of formations. "Real" does not mean "tangible" or "material"; it means independent, persistent, and causal.  

So to be realist about values, cognitive frameworks, practices, or paradigms is to assert that these assemblages of mental attitudes and features have social instantiation, that they persist over time, and that they have causal powers within the social realm. By this definition, mental frameworks are perfectly real. They have visible social foundations -- concrete institutions and practices through which they are transmitted and reproduced. And they have clear causal powers within the social realm.

A few examples will help make this clear.

Consider first the assemblage of beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral repertoires that constitute the race regime in a particular time and place. Children and adults from different racial groups in a region have internalized a set of ideas and behaviors about each other that are inflected by race and gender. These beliefs, norms, and attitudes can be investigated through a variety of means, including surveys and ethnographic observation. Through their behaviors and interactions with each other they gain practice in their mastery of the regime, and they influence outcomes and future behaviors. They transmit and reproduce features of the race regime to peers and children. There is a self-reinforcing discipline to such an assemblage of attitudes and behaviors which shapes the behaviors and expectations of others, both internally and coercively. This formation has causal effects on the local society in which it exists, and it is independent from the ideas we have about it. It is by this set of factors, a real part of local society. (If is also a variable and heterogeneous reality, across time and space.) We can trace the sociological foundations of the formation within the population, the institutional arrangements through which minds and behaviors are shaped. And we can identify many social effects of specific features of regimes like this. (Here is an earlier post on the race regime of Jim Crow; link, link.)

Here is a second useful example -- a knowledge and practice system like Six Sigma. This is a bundle of ideas about business management. It involves some fairly specific doctrines and technical practices. There are training institutions through which individuals become expert at Six Sigma. And there is a distributed group of expert practitioners across a number of companies, consulting firms, and universities who possess highly similar sets of knowledge, judgment, and perception.  This is a knowledge and practice community, with specific and identifiable causal consequences. 

These are two concrete examples. Many others could be offered -- workingclass solidarity, bourgeois modes of dress and manners, the social attitudes and behaviors of French businessmen, the norms of Islamic charity, the Protestant Ethic, Midwestern modesty. 

So, indeed, it is entirely legitimate to be a critical realist about mental frameworks. More, the realist who abjures study of such frameworks as social realities is doomed to offer explanations with mysterious gaps. He or she will find large historical anomalies, where available structural causes fail to account for important historical outcomes.

Consider Marx and Engels' words in the Communist Manifesto:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

This is an interesting riff on social reality, capturing both change and persistence, appearance and reality. A similar point of view is expressed in Marx's theory of the fetishism of commodities: beliefs exist, they have social origins, and it is possible to demystify them on occasion by uncovering the distortions they convey of real underlying social relations. 

There is one more perplexing twist here for realists. Both structures and features of consciousness are real in their social manifestations. However, one goal of critical philosophy is to show how the mental structures of a given class or gender are in fact false consciousness. It is a true fact that British citizens in 1871 had certain ideas about the workings of contemporary capitalism. But it is an important function of critical theory to demonstrate that those beliefs were wrong, and to more accurately account for the underlying social relations they attempt to describe. And it is important to discover the mechanisms through which those false beliefs came into existence.

So critical realism must both identify real structures of thought in society and demystify these thought systems when they systematically falsify the underlying social reality. Decoding the social realities of patriarchy, racism, and religious bigotry is itself a key task for a critical social sciences.

Dave Elder-Vass is one of the few critical realists who have devoted attention to the reality of a subjective social thing, a system of norms. In The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency he tries to show how the ideas of a "norm circle" helps explicate the objectivity, persistence, and reality of a socially embodied norm system. Here's is an earlier post on E-V's work (link).

A new exposition of assemblage theory

Manuel DeLanda has been a prominent exponent of the theory of assemblage for English-speaking readers for at least ten years. His 2006 book A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity has been discussed numerous times in this blog (link, link, link). DeLanda has now published a new treatment of the subject, Assemblage Theory. As I've pointed out in the earlier discussions, I find assemblage theory to be helpful for sociology and the philosophy of social science because it provides a very appropriate way of conceptualizing the heterogeneity of the social world. The book is well worth discussing.

To start, DeLanda insists that the French term "agencement" has greater semantic depth than its English translation, assemblage. "Assemblage" picks up one part of the meaning of agencement -- the product of putting together a set of heterogeneous parts -- but it loses altogether the implications of process and activity in the French term. He quotes a passage in which Deleuze and Parnet explain part of the meaning of assemblage (agencement) (1):

What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns -- different natures. This, the assemblage's only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a 'sympathy'. It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind. (Dialogues II, 69)

This passage from Deleuze and Parnet highlights the core idea of an assemblage bringing together heterogeneous pieces into a new whole. It also signals the important distinction for Deleuze between interiority and exteriority. DeLanda explicates this distinction as indicating the nature of the relations among the elements. "Interior" relations among things are essential, logical, or semantic; whereas exterior relations are contingent and non-essential. Identifying a pair as husband and wife is to identify an interior relation; identifying a pair as a female architect and a male night club bouncer is an exterior relation. This is what Deleuze and Parnet refer to when they refer to alliances, alloys, contagions, epidemics: conjunctions of otherwise independent things or processes.

Let's look at some of the high-level concepts that play an important role in DeLanda's exposition.

Individuals

DeLanda makes the important ontological point that assemblages are individuals: historically unique persistent configurations. "Assemblages have a fully contingent historical identity, and each of them is therefore an individual entity: an individual person, an individual community, an individual organization, an individual city" (19).

All assemblages should be considered unique historical entities, singular in their individuality, not as particular members of a general category. But if this is so, then we should be able to specify the individuation process that gave birth to them. (6)

In other words, the whole [assemblage] is immanent, not transcendent. Communities or organizations are historically individuated entities, as much so as the persons that compose them.... It is not incoherent to speak of individual communities, individual organizations, individual cities, or individual countries. The term 'individual' has no preferential affinity for a particular scale (persons or organisms) but refers to any entity that  is historically unique. (13)

These passages make it clear that the idea of an individual is not restricted to one ontological level (biological human organism), but is rather available at all levels (individual, labor union, farmers' cooperative, city, corporation, army).

Parameters

Several important meta-level distinctions about relations among components of an assemblage arise in DeLanda's exposition. The distinction between relational interiority and exteriority is familiar from his earlier exposition in New Philosophy. Interior relations are conceptual or intrinsic -- uncle to nephew. Exterior relations are contingent -- street vendor to policeman. A second distinction that DeLanda discusses is coded/decoded. This distinction too is developed extensively in New Philosophy. Relations that are substantially fixed by a code -- a grammar, a specific set of rules of behavior, a genetic program -- are said to be coded; relations that are substantially indeterminate and left to the choices of the participants are decoded. A third distinction that DeLanda discusses in Assemblage Theory is that between stratum and assemblage. An assemblage is a concrete particular consisting of heterogeneous parts; a stratum is a more or less uniform group of things (organisms, institutions).

Here is a passage from New Philosophy on the concept of coded relations:

[Organizations] do involve rules, such as those governing turn-taking. The more formal and rigid the rules, the more these social encounters may be said to be coded. But in some circumstances these rules may be weakened giving rise to assemblages in which the participants have more room to express their convictions and their own personal styles. (16)

And in Assemblage Theory:

The coding parameter is one of the knobs we must build into the concept [of assemblage], the other being territorialisation, a parameter measuring the degree to which the components of the assemblage have been subjected to a process of homogenisation, and the extent to which its defining boundaries have been delineated and made impermeable. (3)

(In a later post I will discuss DeLanda's effort to subsume each of these distinctions under the idea of a parameter or "knob" inflecting a particular concept of assemblage (city, linguistic practice). Also of interest there will be DeLanda's effort to understand the ontology of assemblage and stratum in analogy with the idea in physics of a phase space (gas, liquid, solid).)

Emergence

DeLanda believes that assemblage theory depends on the idea of emergence for macro-level properties:

The very first step in this task is to devise a means to block micro-reductionism, a step usually achieved by the concept of emergent properties, the properties of a whole caused by the interactions between its parts. If a social whole has novel properties that emerge from interactions between people, its reduction to a mere aggregate of many rational decision-makers or many phenomenological experiences is effectively blocked. (9)

Notice that this is a weak conception of emergence; the emergent property is distinguished simply by the fact that it is not an aggregation of the properties of the individual components. This does not imply that the property is not derivable from a theory of the properties of the parts and the causal interactions among them. (Several earlier posts have raised questions about the validity of the idea of emergence; link.)

And in fact DeLanda shortly says some surprising things about emergence and the relations between higher-level and lower-level properties:

The property of density, and the capacity to store reputations and enforce norms, are non-reducible properties and capacities of the entire community, but neither involves thinking of it as a seamless totality in which the very personal identity of the members is created by their relations. (11)

Up to the level of national markets the main emergent property of these increasingly larger trading areas is synchronized price movements. Braudel uncovers evidence that average wholesale prices (determined mostly by demand and supply) move up and down in unison within urban regions, provinces, or entire countries. (15)

These are surprising claims as illustrations of emergence, because all of the properties mentioned here are in fact reducible to facts about the properties of individuals and their relations. Density is obviously so; we can derive density by measuring the number of individuals per unit of space. The capacity of a group to store reputations is also a direct consequence of individuals' ability to remember facts about other individuals and communicate their memories to others. The community's representation of "reputation" is nothing over and above this distributed set of beliefs and interactions. And the fact of synchronized price movements over an extended trading area likewise has perfectly visible microfoundations at the individual level: communications and transportation technologies permit traders to take advantage of momentary price differentials in different places, leading to a tendency for all accessible points within the region to reveal prices that are synchronized with each other (modulo the transportation costs that exist between points).

These observations lead me to suspect that the concept of emergence is not doing much real work here. The paraphrase that DeLanda offers as a summary conclusion is correct:

Thus, both 'the Market' and 'the State' can be eliminated from a realist ontology by a nested set of individual emergent wholes operating at different scales. (16)

But this observation does not imply or presuppose the idea of strong emergence.

It seems, then, that we could put aside the language of emergence and rest on the claim that assemblages at various levels have stable properties that can be investigated empirically and historically; there is no need for reduction to a more fundamental level. So assemblage theory is anti-reductionist and is eclectic with regard to the question of levels of the social world. We can formulate concepts of social entities at a wide range of levels and accommodate those concepts to the basic idea of assemblage, and there is no need for seeking out inter-level reductions. But likewise there is no need to insist on the obscure idea of strong emergence.

Assemblage theory and social realism

This treatment of social theory from the point of view of assemblage theory is distinctly friendly to the language of realism. DeLanda argues that assemblages are real, mind-independent, and ontologically stable. Assemblages are in the world and can be treated as independent individual things. Here is a representative statement:

The distinction between a concept and its cases also has an ontological aspect. The concept itself is a product of our minds and would not exist without them, but concrete assemblages must be considered to be fully independent of our minds. This statement must be qualified, because in the case of social assemblages like communities, organizations, and cities, the assemblages would cease to exist if our minds disappeared. So in this case we should say that social assemblages are independent of the content of our minds, that is, independent of the way in which communities, organizations, and cities are conceived. This is just another way of saying that assemblage theory operates within a realist ontology. (138)

The most important transcendent entity that we must confront and eliminate is the one postulated to explain the existence and endurance of autonomous entities: essences. (139)

Both points are crucial. DeLanda emphasizes that social entities (assemblages) are real items in the social world, with a temporally and causally persistent reality; and he denies that the ideas of "essence", "kind", or "inner nature" have a role in science. This is an anti-essentialist realism, and it is a highly appropriate basis for social ontology.

Appraisal

There is much more to discuss in DeLanda's current treatment of assemblage, and I expect to return to other issues in later posts. What I find particularly interesting about DeLanda's current book are the substantive observations DeLanda makes about various historical formations -- cities, governments, modes of production, capitalism. Assemblage theory is of real value for social scientists only if it provides a better vocabulary for describing social entities and causes. And DeLanda's illustrations make a persuasive case for this conclusion.

For example, in discussing Braudel on the difference between markets and capitalism he writes:

These are powerful words. But how can anyone dare to suggest that we must distinguish capitalism from the market economy? These two terms are, for both the left and the right, strictly synonymous. However, a close examination of the history of commercial, financial, and industrial organizations shows that there is indeed a crucial difference, and that ignoring it leads to a distortion of our historical explanations. (41)

This discussion has some significant parallels with the treatment of the modern economy offered by Dave Elder-Vass discussed earlier (link). And DeLanda's closing observation in chapter 1 is quite insightful:

Much of the academic left today has become prey to the double danger of politically targeting reified generalities (Power, Resistance, Capital, Labour) while at the same time abandoning realism. A new left may yet emerge from these ashes but only if it recovers its footing on a mind-independent reality and if it focuses its efforts at the right social scale, that is, if it leaves behind the dream of a Revolution that changes the entire system. This is where assemblage theory may one day make a real difference. (48)

More than the logical exposition of various esoteric concepts associated with assemblage, it is DeLanda's intelligent characterization of various concrete social and historical processes (for example, his extensive discussion of Braudel in chapter 1) that cements the intellectual importance of assemblage theory for historical and social scientific thinking.

Another important virtue of the treatment here is that DeLanda makes a strong case for a social ontology that is both anti-reductionist and anti-essentialist. Social things have properties that we don't need to attempt to reduce to properties of ensembles of components; but social things are not transcendent, essential wholes whose behavior is independent from the activities of the individuals and lower-level configurations of which they consist. Further, this view of social ontology has an important implication that DeLanda explicitly calls out: we need to recognize the fact of downward causation from social configurations (individual assemblages) to the actions of the individuals and lesser configurations of which they consist. A community embodying a set of norms about deference and respectful behavior in fact elicits these forms of behavior in the individuals who make up the community. This is so through the very ordinary fact that individuals monitor each others' behavior and sometimes retaliate when norms are breached. (This was the view of community social power developed several decades ago by Michael Taylor; Community, Anarchy and Liberty.)