Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar's Philosophy

by Andrew Collier

The work of Roy Bhaskar has had far-reaching effects in the philosophy of science and for political and moral theories of human emancipation. It shows how to overcome the atomistic and narrowly human-centered approaches which have dominated European thought for four centuries. In this readable introduction to his work, Andrew Collier expounds and defends the main concepts of Bhaskar’s philosophy.

The first part of this book looks at the philosophy of experimental science and discusses the stratification of nature, showing how biological structures are founded on chemical ones yet are not reducible to them. This paves the way, in part two, for a discussion of the human sciences which demonstrates that the world they study is also rooted in and emergent from nature. Bhaskar’s concept of an “explanatory critique” (an explanation that is also a criticism, not in addition to, but by virtue of, its explanatory work) is discussed at length as a key concept for ethics and politics. Collier concludes by looking at the uses to which critical realism has been put in clarifying disputes within the human sciences with particular reference to linguistics, psychoanalysis, economics and politics.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Sociology, Nonfiction, Social Science, Economics

292 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1994

Reviews

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andrew Collier has a knack for making the abstruse mostly coherent. Although the book ostensibly has a very narrow focus, i.e., the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar, it will certainly help anyone who is interested in Critical Realism. Critical realism is actually a blending of two projects developed by Bhaskar: scientific realism, and critical philosophy, whereby science is to under-labor the process of emancipation and philosophy in general.

Prior to reading this book I had read some Bhaskar. Bhaskar is often criticized, at least according to Wiki, for being precise to a fault in his writing. I agree with these quasi-criticisms. Oddly his precision can makes things obscuring and dense. Fortunately Collier takes the density and precision of Bhasker into real world examples, filled with various bits of left-wing jokes. If you're not of the far left you might find his examples aggravating and unfunny, but they still serve their purpose of elucidating Bhaskar's theories.

After reading Collier I feel fairly confident in venturing into the dense waters of Bhaskar's and other critical realists' writings.

[Petra · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's not terrible, and it has its moments of insight and very sharp wit, but ultimately I think this book is lacking, and one would be better served by just reading Bhaskar's early works in the first place (I'm currently 35% of the way through *A Realist Theory of Science*, and it's infinitely clearer and much more rigorous).

Collier adds many superfluous diversions that don't add anything to the overall argument, including an extensive section on Althusser that is simultaneously of no use to beginners who are not already embedded in a narrow lane of Marxist structuralism, and a simplistic rehash for those already in the know.

He also repeatedly, infuriatingly, gets his scientific examples wrong. Not all of them are bad- the explanation of actuation of mechanisms through the compass experiment was good.

On the other hand, one is greeted with infuriating phrases like "natural selection only comes into play upon random mutation" (wrong , natural selection also happens between extant variation within a species, e.g. peppered moth evolution).

There is also an unpleasantly structuralist take on base/superstructure, which he uses as an example of "vertical explanation" (i.e., base strongly preceding superstructure ontologically). Collier falls to realise that a base *must* exist with, and indeed only exists through a superstructure of laws/dispute resolution, political decision making, family structure etc (even though there may be many viable superstructures for a given base).

A different example of "vertical explanation" would be how atoms in some sense emerge from subatomic particles, but not the other way around. I hope it's now clear why base and superstructure are a bad example of this: it would be as if subatomic particles could only ever exist within an atom, not the other way around.

Another strange diversion happens when Collier makes fun of feminist critiques of certain judicial torture metaphors in regards to mother nature. He says that nature isn't actually a woman and can't be tortured, which is so wilfully missing the point it's unreal. No, no one is literally trying to save mother earth from being tortured in a courtroom, it's a critique of the implicit sexism in our metaphors and ways of thinking.

Whether or not this is even worth discussing is another point: I've certainly never heard anyone use this judicial torture metaphor (though mother nature is alive and kicking as a concept). But for Collier to present this as a "gotcha" is just bizarre. I went back and read through it three times, because I was sure I was missing something. Nope, that's actually the argument he makes.


It's just... sloppy. To the reader: if you want a better explanation, read Bhaskar. It might be, in some sense, higher level than this book, but it's arguments are clear, it makes abundant references and explains it's terminology as it's introduced.

[Ian Zimmermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Collier's wonderful book provides an amazingly lucid (and surprisingly humorous) introduction to Critical Realism. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in thinking about what science is generally (that is to say, what it is we humans do when we "do science") and, more specifically, about what we can hope for in the "scientific" study of human beings and human activity.

[William Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read one book by Roy Bhaskar it seems like Collier’s explication of the former’s “critical realism” philosophy is accurate and enormously more understandable. Bhaskar’s focus is on philosophy of science, and his main argument is that science attempts to understand the causal connections (“mechanisms,” he calls them) in nature.

You can’t discover those mechanisms just by looking. You can stare at a pot of boiling water all day and you will never know why water boils at 212 degrees F. Science is not simply about observation and hard-core Empiricists and especially the Positivists were way off base in that idea. Rather, science is mainly about conceptualization. You do need observations, but the scientific question is, what must the world be like in order for this observation to have occurred?

After many cycles of that loop we know that the boiling point of water is caused by its molecular structure and the energy levels binding the atoms of H2O, among other factors.

Bhaskar says that multiple causal mechanisms in nature are hierarchically organized, and that’s why some are more easily uncovered than others. It is fairly easy to infer that application of heat to water is necessary to make it boil, so there is definitely a heat-to-boil causal connection there, but that superficial mechanism won’t explain why water boils only when it does. You have to dig deeper.

The second aspect of Bhaskar’s philosophy is development of a theory of social organization and change based on principles from the social sciences. His favorite sources there are Freud and Marx. I found this part of Bhaskar’s thinking especially unconvincing, and Collier doesn’t make it look any better.

Collier’s exegesis of Bhaskar’s philosophy is quite good but it is not critical. Collier is totally on board with Critical Realism. When he brings in an alternative view, he often bats it down by fiat, equivalent to “That’s just wrong!” Another favorite rebuttal is the straw man, stating the alternative as an extreme or exceptional case, then ridiculing that. Bhaskar himself preferred those two techniques, so Collier has learned well.

Serious alternatives are not seriously engaged in this book. It’s 100% Bhaskar all the way, and if that’s what you want, this is the book for you.

Collier, Andrew (1994). Critical Realism. New York: Verso, 276 pp.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Critical Realism, although published in 1994, happens to confront directly and urgently one of the most surprising and topical problems of the moment. Behind a number of currently important political movements is the insistence that knowledge is socially constructed and we have no good ground for insisting that one account of the world is superior or more meaningful than another; the effort to do so is oppressive and reflects relationships of political, economic and social power. This is often described as an assault against the values of the Enlightenment but it is actually a product of one major strand in the Enlightenment and it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to defeat. In fact, it’s infuriating that it has been allowed to achieve such influence. Roy Bhaskar has produced a coherent and persuasive case for the capacity of science to describe and explain the real world including the social world and this is the urgently needed antidote to the current craze for ideas of social construction.

I have read several books by Bhaskar and found him fascinating, capable of very fine expressions but dense. I was delighted by this survey of Bhaskar’s philosophy, which to be fair is also sometimes dense but nevertheless gives a very accessible and well structured account of Bhaskar’s work, including critical observations in some parts. Fortunately, I had just finished reading about Kant, and found that gave a helpful context to the problems addressed by Bhaskar. This guide makes a similar division [in different words] into pure reason, or epistemology, and practical reason, or morality and value. It covers a lot of ground and along the way offers all sorts of insights and useful arguments, some of which I found highly thought provoking. It was published in 1994 and a lot has happened since then but it remains absolutely topical and directly addresses arguments that are the subject of heated debate at this moment.

Some Quotes

…our minds are formed by historically specific societies and that is the only way they can be formed at all. And of course different societies will inculcate different ideas, practices, etc… since at any given time we are full of all sorts of ideas which will later turn out to be false, this also means that one cannot become a ‘knowing subject’ without being suckled on all sorts of falsehoods ‘at the breast of the universal ethos’ (Hegel). But that is no objection to such suckling, without which our minds would not just be ‘blank sheets’, but destined to stay that way forever. One sometimes encounters a sort of romanticized empiricism which supposes that if only we were not subject to ‘indoctrination’ or ‘conditioning’ we would be able to see the truth. But those words should only arouse our anger when they are used to mean the intentional misleading of the young. For it is absurd to imply that any society or culture or generation can do better than pass on its own sincerely held beliefs to its successors – who may then be able to criticize, correct and improve on those beliefs. A mind unsullied by second-hand prejudices would be a mind incapable of experience of a recognizably human kind, and hence of ‘finding out for itself’. [p55]

As Bhaskar puts it, ‘the hypothetical mechanisms of yesterday may become today’s candidates for reality and tomorrow’s phenomena.’ It is ultimately Bhaskar’s conception of the development of science, in which yesterday’s explanation becomes what is to be explained, in an ever deepening stratified account of nature, which warrants – and on thoroughly empirical grounds – going beyond empiricism. [p68]

Bhaskar defines the epistemic fallacy as ‘the view that statements about being can be reduced to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge.’ … [This is] what Bertrand Russell has called ‘the subjectivist madness which is characteristic of most modern philosophy.’… In fact this epistemic fallacy pervades not only classical empiricism, where it originates (though Descartes must take much of the blame for setting philosophers off in this direction), but also Kant, the absolute Idealists, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, pragmatism, logical positivism, linguistic philosophy, poststructuralism, and, in a rather different form, phenomenology and existentialism. [p76]

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 (in different ways). [p84]

Bhaskar accepts what he calls ‘epistemic relativism’, i.e. the recognition that our beliefs are socially produced, transient and fallible. But he claims that this does not commit us to judgemental relativism, i.e. the idea that ‘ all beliefs are equally valid in the sense that there are no rational grounds for preferring one to another… we need to distinguish the sense of the two theories – the meanings, definitions, etc. of the terms used – from their reference, i.e. their referring to some object, their ‘referent’… this makes possible a rational choice between the theories on the grounds: which theory explains more of the same phenomena under its own description. … For instance… Lavoisier could explain more by his theory about oxygen than Priestley could by his theory about de-phlogisicated air. [p90,91]

Bhaskar points out that we are never in fact able to predict a higher level mechanism from our knowledge of a more basic one. We always have to discover the higher level mechanism first; it then becomes the phenomenon to be explained in the next stage of ever-deepening scientific knowledge… We never reach rock-bottom – so the prejudice that only rock-bottom explanations are real ones would leave us forever without real explanations… far from rendering an explanation redundant, a deeper explanation underwrites it and reinforces its position in the structure of science. [p110]

Bhaskar refers to the relation between a higher level mechanism and the underlying one in terms of rootedness and emergence. The higher level one is rooted in, and emergent from, the more basic one. … Emergence theories are those that, while recognizing the more complex aspects of reality (e.g. life, mind) presuppose the less complex (e.g. matter) also insist that they have features which are irreducible, i.e. cannot be thought in concepts appropriate to the less complex levels… Thus if we want to explain the proliferation of brightly coloured objects (flowers, colourful birds, etc.) at a certain stage of natural history we have to appeal to the laws of natural selection (the value of colours for pollinating, mating, etc.); the laws of physics will tell us nothing. [p110, 111]

[Kieran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good writing style and enjoyable read but It didn't help all that much in writing my thesis

[Mikejones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Out of print, but the best introduction there is.

[Trashy Pit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kick Ass. Explains it all in a simple manner.

[Johnny Go · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great lucid introduction to Critical Realism by the late Andrew Collier. Really helpful!