Roy Bhaskar Interviewed
Questions by Professor Chris Norris
...Q. Can you tell us what is distinctive about critical realism as compared with other realist epistemologies and philosophies of science?
A. The answer to this question would take an interview in its own right! But very briefly, it used a transcendental method of argument, which most philosophies of science didn't use, and then the transcendental argument became a dialectical one in which the force was immanent critique. Secondly, it had the various propositions about ontology, about the necessity of ontology, about the particular place or shape of ontology - that the nature of the world is presupposed by science - which it explicitly thematised, and it was shown that rival philosophies of science tacitly secreted or implicitly presupposed some distinctive, normally Humean, ontology that was quite inadequate to the real nature of being and the true character of science. The sort of ontology I was arguing for was the kind of ontology in which the world was seen as structured, differentiated and changing. And science was seen as a process in motion attempting to capture ever deeper and more basic strata of a reality at any moment of time unknown to us and perhaps not even empirically manifest....
Q. The concept of stratification is extremely important in your own thinking and much of the work produced by your colleagues in the CR movement. It has to do with the need for complex, differentiated grasp of the various strata or levels of reality, some of them exerting their causal powers wholly independent of human intervention, while others are affected by the kinds of observation we make or the sorts of experiment we carry out. Could you say a bit more about this aspect of your thinking and how it links up with ethical issues - for example, the scope for responsible choice in matters of applied scientific research?
A. I think Marx somewhere observed that the whole of science would be pointless unless there was a possibility of a distinction between essence and appearance - unless there was the possibility that what we thought about natural reality or any other form of reality was wrong.
Therefore, this notion of stratification is already necessary to sustain the idea of critique. The critique of some kinds of understanding or reflection - or the nature of a level of reality, including social reality - in terms of its misdescription of a more basic, deeper or autonomous level of reality. That is essential for the notion of critique or argumentation generally.
Additionally, the development of science has revealed a process of a continual stratification of knowledge, as we attempt to capture ever deeper or wider strata of reality. This is an evident fact about the nature of scientific process, only sustainable by a critical realist ontology in which the world itself is seen as stratified.
Putting these two points together, the critical impulse in science is one of demystification and the central norm with which I have been concerned recently is that of human freedom. Human freedom depends upon understanding the truth about reality and acting towards it, so it is essential that science and philosophy should be concerned with human liberation. This takes us into the realm of ethical issues in scientific research. Because we are very far from perfect or free, by which I mean we are far from the full realisation of our potentials, and because we're dominated by a capitalist society in which reification, alienation, dualism, illusion, categorial error are dominant and manifesting themselves in modalities of instrumental reason and a whole complex of master/slave relationships, there must be necessary constraints on generating anything that goes by the empirical name of science. So people have recently, quite rightly, become worried about the abuses of science involved in genetic engineering research. We have very good reason to believe that many increases in scientific understanding will actually be abhorrent.
This raises the important question that we cannot prosecute science in an intellectual or moral vacuum. It may be necessary for morality to correct bad science, but it corrects it in the name of a higher norm, true freedom. And that is guided by a highest norm of all - fundamental truth.
Q. Some present day cultural theorists - e.g. Lyotard - would say that we have moved into an era where the very idea of scientific knowledge has undergone a kind of dramatic mutation, a large scale Khunian paradigm shift . Thus Lyotard argues that post-modern science is no longer concerned with such old fashioned values as truth, accuracy, theoretical rigour, causal explanatory power, etc. Rather, it is concerned with undecidability, uncertainty, the limits of precise measurement, and a range of other currently fashionable themes, often drawn from the field of quantum mechanics and field theory. What is wrong with this, from your point of view?
A. I think the familiar point that it is inherently auto-destructive is basically correct. For what are this strand of post-modernist thinkers doing but making certain truth claims about uncertainty? They seem to be very certain about the truth of their claims. Therefore, in no way does their discourse presuppose that truth ceases to be a fundamental and overriding value.
Now what I think they in fact do is to subjectivise the true impact of contemporary physics. This indeed has a fundamental implications for our understanding of notions of events, of things, etc. For example, we must differentiate the classical notion of a mass event, by which it is meant a mass or collectivity of events, from the quantum mechanical notion of an event as a mass or collectivity, as a distribution or spread in space, or a succession or flow in time. This is much more in keeping with our ordinary commonsensical notion of an event, than it is with the classical Newtonian mechanical conception of an event as punctual, atomistic and so on.
And again we need to rethink our notion of a thing. Why do we model it on a billiard ball or a solid compact material object. In fact, no such things exist, we know that billiard balls are full of empty space and couldn't sustain themselves unless they were....
Basically, what's wrong with this line of reasoning is that it subjectivises the true impact of contemporary scientific thinking....
Q. I'd like to hear your views about the strong programme in the sociology of knowledge, since it comes into conflict with critical realism on a number of crucial issues.
A. What critical realism does is that it allows us to sustain and to argue the mutual implication of ontological realism in the intransitive dimension, epistemological relativism in the transitive or social dimension of science and judgement rationalism in the intrinsic aspect of science. This means that there is no conflict between seeing our scientific views as being about objectively given real worlds, and understanding our beliefs about them as subject to all kinds of historical and other determinations. At the same time, there will a be a right or wrong of the matter in any one discursive domain, which defines the possibility of judgmental rationalism in the normative aspect of science.
I think many of the objections in the strong programme of the sociology of knowledge confuse judgmentalism and realism. Realism is not judgmentalist, and realism is in fact a condition for the possibility of the strong programme in the philosophy of science. The strong programme wants to argue that all beliefs are causally generated. I have no problem with this, but the thing is that some beliefs are causally generated by the truth of the matter, other beliefs are generated by illusion, prejudice, superstition, which veil deeper structures from the protagonists supporting them. And hence there can't be a normative parity between true and false beliefs. I think articulating the distinction between ontological realism, epistemological relativism, and judgmental rationalism, and understanding the difference between ontological and epistemological realism, which is silly, ontological and epistemological relativism being at best an assertion of the historicity of the world, and between judgmental rationalism and judgmentalism, allows a certain rapprochement between the best sociologists of knowledge and realism....
Q. Would you want to name any one thinker who in your view has exerted a harmful influence on the way that philosophy gets done nowadays? If our roles were reversed and you were asking me the question, I would nominate Wittgenstein and go on at great length about the kinds of cosily Wittgensteinian doctrine that have a regular mind-numbing effect whenever one comes across them.
A. Well, I think I'll talk about Wittgenstein! He is one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, but I do think he has had a baneful influence. As is well known, he moved through two phases - the first was a very vigorous and beautiful form of practical reason, the second was a form of transcendental idealism. I think the most baneful influence of Wittgenstein was to linguistify that important criterion of philosophy I refer to as reflexivity. This was important in so far as it made philosophers aware of language as perhaps the indispensable vehicle of our expression and understandings of the world - and to situate language as a topic of investigation.
But now the linguistic fallacy has almost become the orthodoxy. The linguistic fallacy is the idea that one can analyse or define being in terms of our language about being. Language can only be understood in terms of the co-ordinates of a matrix where human nature is defined in terms of the stratification of the personality, transactions between human agents, social structure and our material transactions with nature. Language is really only a fitting paradigm for our transactions with nature. It is not a good paradigm for the social structure. And even our interactions with each other have many dimensions which are non-linguistic. I think that only by situating language within the context of a human and social totality, which encompasses the natural world and dimensions of existence of which we are perhaps only partially or dimly aware, can we do justice to it. To do justice to language, one has to break from the linguistic fallacy. And therefore, perhaps in order to understand the true greatness of Wittgenstein, one has to be non-Wittgensteinian.
Q. Some philosophers argue that the realist versus anti-realist debate is one that will never be settled or achieve any genuine progress, since it is one that involves two utterly different world views and maybe two quite different sorts of ingrained philosophical temperament, so that the parties will always be talking at cross purposes and failing to see how the other could possibly want to maintain such an extravagant position. Then there is the case of someone like Hilary Puttnam, who seems to have flipped right across from the one to the other camp, and recently half-way back again, and produced all manner of supporting arguments on both sides of the issue. So its easy for a sceptic like Richard Rorty to treat this as evidence that the whole issue is a non-starter like most of the classical philosophical debates, and therefore that we should stop discussing it and find something better to occupy our minds. Your own book on Rorty gives plenty of clues as to what you might say in response to his diagnosis. Still I would like to hear your reaction in this currently widespread post-philosophical line of thought.
A. One of the things that I have tried to show is that arguments against ontology, in fact presuppose ontology. You can see this in the case of an anti-ontologist like Habermas, who in his generation of the knowledge constitutive interest in prediction and control, definitely presupposes a Humean theory of causality as constant conjunction or empirical regularity, and the Hempelian, Popperian idea of explanation as deductive, nomological. You can't get away without ontology. It's not a question of being a realist, or not a realist. It is a question of what kind of realist you are going to be - explicit or tacit. Insofar as you are not a realist, you secrete an ontology and a realismŠ.You can't get far in the world unless you are implicitly realist in practice. And I would say that the whole categorial structure of transcendental, dialectical critical reason could be teased out of any remark or action in the world of any significance. This is a very strong claim to make: I would argue that critical realism, in its transcendental, dialectical forms, is the only form of philosophy which can do justice to the categorial structure of the world and so to the axiological necessity of the particular positions, arguments, actions and responses that we make in our ordinary life. From this standpoint, the development of philosophy can be seen as a progression in self-consciousness, in an understanding of what we're doing, when we're doing things about which we are normally unconscious....
Q. One current version of anti-realism is the denial that we can ever have reason or adequate grounds for asserting the existence of objective transcendental truths. To the realist, about mathematics, for example, this would seem clearly wrong since truth in such matters, has nothing to do with the current, or indeed the ultimate scope of human knowledge. I wonder where you stand on this issue - and whether critical realism has anything to say about the more technical anti-realist stances.
A. I argue that truth has four aspects. First, fiduciary this is, if you like, the intrinsic aspect of science or knowledge - and to say that something is true is to say 'trust me, act on it'. It is quite obvious that we have to have a workable notion of truth to enable us to get around in a world we have only a limited grasp of. This is a pragmatic necessity. The more strongly this aspect can be backed by other aspects, the stronger it is.
The second aspect of truth is truth as warrantedly assertable. This is truth as epistemological. There is no way of getting around the notion of best possible grounds for acting one way rather than another, in a world in which we must act one way rather than another.
Moving now to the notion that lies behind the first two notions, the idea of truth as absolute. To say something is true is to say this is the way reality is. This is absolutely indispensable for any notion of intentional action and hence for any notion we as human beings can have. For intentionality presupposes two things, firstly a belief, and secondly, an orientation to act on the belief in some manner. Without beliefs human beings just aren't humans. So commitment to beliefs as expressive of reality, are transcendental features of any form of social life.
Now, what lies behind the truth of a well attested scientific or moral proposition - e.g., the fact that emeralds reflect light of a certain wavelength - is a higher order proposition, the truth of that truth - the reality that generates it, that is, the atomic structure of the crystal, the nature of the wavelength of light that is reflected in a certain way. What makes it true, for example, to say that if Socrates is a Man he must die is that it is the nature of human beings to be mortal. It is a proposition at a higher level, and it is this higher level truth that grounds the truth of the universal generalisation, the proposition which is expressed in the absolute conception of truth.
So truth at this higher level just is reality, and it is the reality that grounds or accounts for the mundane realities that we invoke in the absolute conception of truth, and it is that absolute conception of truth that backs our epistemological or social conception of truth. There is no getting away from ontology. And the only solution to all the forms of scepticism that the whole tradition of empiricist epistemology has generated, which encompasses the anti-realism to which you refer, is to see that what we're trying to do in science or morality or any other form of life, is to make fallible claims about the world, claims which if they are true are true in virtue of the real nature of beings, entities, things, the real nature of the universe quite independently of our claims. And it is the real nature of being that grounds well attested, universal empirical generalisations or other propositionalised claims of reality, without which no science, no discourse, no action, or no intentionality is possible. There is no escape from truth....
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