Critical Realism

Owned by Darlene Edgar
Nov 25, 2023
2 min read

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.