Critical Realism

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14767430.2020.1734736?scroll=top&needAccess=true

Core Concepts:

• Critical realism focuses on agency, human agents, and the self rather than persons.

• It distinguishes between the real world and the observable world.

• Bhaskar suggests viewing people through the philosophy "I am because you are."

Ontological Framework:

• Ontology can be dissolved into epistemology.

• New ontology distinguishes between the real, the actual, and the empirical, as well as between open and closed systems.

• Reality has multiple tiers and emergence, with criteria including unilateral dependence, taxonomic irreducibility, and causal irreducibility.

• Implicit or infolded potentiality exists, where higher order levels are implicit in lower order levels.

• Synchronic and diachronic emergence in people involve emergent power and unfulfilled potentialities.

Developmental Levels in Ontology:

1. Being as just being/non-identity and as structured.

2. Being as process, involving absence, negativity, and change.

3. Being as together a hold of.

4. Incorporating transformative praxis.

5. Incorporating reflexivity, inwardness, and spirituality.

6. Being as re-enchanted.

7. Incorporating the primacy of identity over difference and unity over split as non-duality.

Phases:

• Basic (1-4)

• Dialectical (1-4)

• Philosophy of metareality (5-7)

Resolving Dualisms:

• Aims to rationally resolve dualisms between mind and body, reason and cause, fact and value, naturalism, and positivism.

Social Event Dimensions:

• Social events occur across material transactions with nature, social interactions, social structure sui generis, and the stratification of embodied personality.

Social Structure and Human Well-being:

• Explores the kind of social structure conducive to human well-being.

• Questions how goals can be better achieved on various planes and levels of social life.

Concrete Utopianism:

• Advocates for visionary intellectuals and funding agencies to play a role in concrete utopianism.

Encouraging Critical Realist Work:

• Explores how to encourage critical realist work at rich, detailed, and specific levels of description.

Meta-real Development of Critical Realism:

• Differentiates the conception of self into the ego (illusion), embodied personality (real but limited), and the transcendental real self or ground state (higher or better self).

Guiding Questions:

• How can individuals or groups satisfy their dharma (vocation or calling)?

• How can we move toward the good society?

• How can we progress toward a society better than the current one?

Meta-reality Principles:

• Develops principles of universal solidarity, emphasizing everyone's capacity to empathize and axial rationality.