“To some extent, I understand where the advocates of CR are coming from. As Adorno once wrote, the conception of truth is inextricable from the creation of a true society.” A necessary condition of the philosophy of social science, in contrast with Bhaskar’s critical naturalism is a remembrance of its own embeddedness in social and political struggles. It does not admit of the possibility of a structure of scientific anxiousness of a qualitatively different nature in a post-capitalist social formation in which the direct producers are not estranged from the products of their labour-power. Because it refuses to acknowledge its own historicity and the possibility of its own dialectical negation, critical naturalism actually contributes to a reification of the social. His critical naturalism therefore demonstrates far more affinities with positivism in its emphasis on the unity of scientific method. “Despite Bhaskar’s attempt to incorporate Aristotelian insights into his discourse, he fails to pay attention enough to the particularity of the object. Given the subjectivist element in his account of causal relations and his belief that observations between supposedly related events do not allow us to infer anything about what may be the underlying relationship between the objects themselves, Hume is far less positivist than critical realism claims.” This is very different from the critical realist account, but it is not a simple event regularity view of causation nor is it a positivist view of the social world. In one sense, therefore, the assertions of critical realists are clearly at odds with Hume’s account.… Hume thought it impossible to delve so deeply into the nature of the connections between objects about which we might know very little. After all, causality for Hume was principally in the mind of the observer rather than necessarily in the objects observed. “He did not deny the possible existence of causal powers or tendencies, but he did argue that such ideas were not helpful in attempting to construct a theory of causality. They are stuck on it for the long haul, can’t choose bits and pieces of the theory on the premise that it is a sort of pick’n’mix Marxism.” It is a belief system of the greatest ambition – Bhaskarism, with its generative mechanisms, depth structures and general ontology, is yet another ‘philosophical scheme.’ And those paid-up initiates with a ticket on the ocean liner constituted by the Bhaskarian ensemble of ideas – a work in progress, so to speak – cannot get off the moving ship at will, even if they kid themselves they can. For ‘these philosophical schemes, after all,’ he points out, ‘are religious: you either believe in them or you do not.’ Well said, indeed! For this truly ‘Freudian slip’ gets to the emotional heart of the cult of Bhaskar. “ Joseph, in one revealing passage, says contemptuously that neither Hegel, nor Korsch, nor Lukács can provide a proof for the Hegelian philosophy.
To put it slightly bluntly, we are afraid that as long as Archer insists on combining her well-articulated insights about action, knowing-how and embodiment with the realist morphogenetic approach, her pragmatist ideas will not live up to their prospects instead she is in danger of articulating both the acquisition of knowledge and the idea of knowledgeable subject in a way that tends to reify structures and anthropomorphise lifeless objects into actors.” As pragmatists, we start with the idea that, since nobody can step outside of one’s own action, knowledge is only attainable from an actor’s point of view. Research employs just one, linguistic kind of knowledge(-that). “Whereas Archer’s theoretical system presupposes three distinct kinds of knowledge – embodied, practical and discursive – and elaborates the relations they have with each other and with the corresponding orders of reality, our pragmatist standpoint for the purposes of social scientific
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