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Roy Bhaskar's Core Critical Realism and the Philosophy of Nancy

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Roy Bhaskar's Core Critical Realism and the Philosophy of Nancy Roy Bhaskar’s Core Critical Realism and the Philosophy of Nancy Cartwright: Common Ground Radu Andrei Pârvulescu* March 15, 2020 Abstract This paper compares Roy Bhaskar’s core critical realism with the philosophy of science of Nancy Cartwright. It argues for either profound similarity or exact correspondence between the two on a number of key elements: strong realism, depth ontology, closed and open systems, intransitive and transitive dimensions of science, philosophical method, emergence and stratification, and explanatory critique. Through detailed, side-by-side textual comparison this paper provides a rigorous first step for critically engaging, and ultimately integrating, two influential and highly complimentary philosophies of science. keywords: Bhaskar; Cartwright; critical realism; core critical realism; nomological pluralism Introduction† Roy Bhaskar and Nancy Cartwright have proven to be influential philosophers of science in the late 20th and early 21st century. Differences in style, ambition, and institutional location have unfortunately prevented systematic comparison of their works, obscuring deep similarities; indeed, when reading Cartwright one often feels that she is a Bhaskarian, and vice versa. This agreement on fundamentals holds the promise of integrating these two highly complimentary philosophies, to the mutual benefit of each. First however, one must rigorously show that there is sufficient common ground for an honest and happy marriage. This exegetical essay compares the early philosophy of Roy Bhaskar (i.e. “core critical realism”) with most of the philosophy of Nancy Cartwright. I have limited myself to primary texts by the authors, with the exception of Andrew Collier’s summary of the early Bhaskar, which features clearer statements (with page-level citations) of key points in core critical realism than Bhaskar’s own, usually dense and neologism-heavy, prose. As of this writing there is, unfortunately, no similar introduction to the work of Cartwright. The citing convention I use is (text-acronym:page): (RST:57) means “page fifty-seven in A Realist Theory of Science.” The texts I reference are: * Radu Andrei Pârvulescu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. Address correspondence to Radu Andrei Pârvulescu, Department of Sociology, Uris Hall, 109 Tower Road, Ithaca, NY, 14850, USA; email: [email protected]. † I would like to thank Steven Rytina for pointing out both the fundamental similarity between the philosophies of Bhaskar and Cartwright and the lack of communication between the two. The idea was his, the execution is mine, along with all shortcomings. I would also like to thank participants at a session of the Theory section of the European Sociological Association conference in Manchester, August 2019, where an earlier version of this paper was presented. Special thanks go to Johannes Jäger for encouragement and advice on further reading. Radu Andrei Pârvulescu 1 Early Bhaskar/Core Critical Realism Cartwright • A Realist Theory of Science (1975) – RST • Nature’s Capacities and Their • The Possibility of Naturalism (1998 Measurement (1989) – NCTM [1979]) – PN • The Dappled World: A Study of the • Scientific Realism and Human Boundaries of Science (1999) – DW Emancipation (1986) – SRHE • Hunting Causes and Using Them: • Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Approaches in Philosophy and Economics Bhaskar's Philosophy, by Andrew Collier (2007) – HCUT (1994) – AC • Evidence Based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing It Better, co-authored with Jeremy Hardie (2012) – EBP The approach to comparing the two authors is dictated by the difference in scope. Bhaskar is catholic, touching everything from physics and chemistry to hermeneutics and phenomenology. For the most part he explicitly avoids the content of particular subfields. Cartwright, on the other hand, is much more focused: her works deals with physics, inferential statistics (usually in economics), and evidence- based policy, with pages dedicated to the minutiae of specific models, like lasers and Bayes nets. Since Bhaskar typically works at a higher level of generality I first describe his views, then endeavour to show how Cartwright fits. This style of comparison is strictly for presentational purposes, and should not be taken as implying either the primacy of generality over specificity, or of one author over the other. The comparison goes through the key points of core critical realism, loosely inspired by the structure of Collier’s introduction. Common Ground Strong Realism We begin with the fours senses in which a philosophy – first, Bhaskar’s – can be called “strong realism” (AC:6-7): 1) objectivity: “what is known is real whether or not it were known” 2) fallibility: since claims are made about some real thing (and not just our ideas about it), these claims can always be falsified 3) transphenomenality: we can have knowledge of underlying structures that endure longer than appearances, than the manifestations that they generate; knowledge “not just of family likeness but of the molecular structure of DNA.” 4) counter-phenomenality: knowledge of underlying structures may actually contradict appearances. The sun does not revolve around the Earth (though much evidence points to the contrary); selling your labour power consensually need not be fair. On all counts Cartwright is a realist (albeit a “local” realist [DW:23]), starting with objectivism. She certainly thinks that known things are real and not mere theoretical constructs (NCTM:77), which is why she opposes “[confusing] the world with our theories of it” (DW:110).1 She is sceptical of the 1 Readers of Bhaskar will recognize this as a critique of what Bhaskar calls the “epistemic fallacy” (AC:70-85). This critique is partly grounded in a common rejection of the copy theory of impression held by the British empiricists; 2 Bhaskar and Cartwright: Common Ground generality of scientific theories, but that does not translate into blanket denial of the reality of their objects (DW:34). Regarding fallibility when confronted with reality, Cartwright dedicates an entire book to “the multitude of bad cases, where the models, if available at all, provide a very poor image of the situation” (DW:26).2 Third, Cartwright believes that the real (often unseen) stuff of the world is natures (DW:80) that have capacities (DW:59-70),3 which “are not to be identified with any particular manifestations” (DW:64) – this is plainly transphenomenality. Finally to see that her work allows for and analyses counter-phenomenality, consider her description of a machine which uses Coulomb’s law of repulsion to move charged particles closer together, or of a Hotelling economy in which taxes decrease prices (DW:59-64). Depth Ontology Bhaskar’s intellectual project begins with ontological depth, the thesis that being can occupy three domains, each increasingly fundamental but decreasingly obvious: the empirical (that which we observe), the actual (that which happens) and the real (that which causes) (AC:42-45). Cartwright arrives at an equivalent tripartite hierarchy of modality – fact (Bhaskar’s empirical), law (the actual) and capacity (the real) (NCTM: Ch.4, esp.146-147, Figure 4.1 on p.159), and though she does not subsequently develop the idea it does recur in later work (e.g. EBP:23-27). The congruence on depth ontology is further attested by the similarity of their critique of Humean (and more generally empiricist) accounts of science, which by collapsing the real onto the actual (or both on the empirical) justifies the epistemology of constant conjunctions (RST:33-36; NCTM:187, cf. Ch.5 of NCTM on abstraction versus idealisation). The consequence of this ontological collapse is spurious explanatory reductionism, e.g. claiming that all society reduces to individuals (AC:7-12) or automatically dismissing policy research not based on randomised controlled trials (EBP:126-128). Depth realism implies that there is a generic route to explanatory success, that is, uncovering the real. For students of science this means that differences among scientific fields can often explained by differences in their objects of study: if astronomy and literary critique do not look the same, it is because comets and books are very different things (hence a “dappled” world: HCUT:23, DW:8, Figure 0.2; AC:160-168; epigraph of Ch.2 in SRHE). For practitioners and evaluators of science, the possibility of a generic form of successful science (whose aim is always to uncover the real) means that it can all be science; whether it actually is remains a matter for those fields. The final implication is that depth ontology licenses explanatory analogies and comparisons across domains, without privileging one source of metaphors and models. So when Cartwright titles a chapter (of NCTM) “What Quantum Mechanics can learn from Econometrics,” this does not strike a depth ontologist as surprising, or impudent. Closed and Open Systems No less important for core critical realism is the distinction between closed and open systems. In brief, closed systems are those in which single causal mechanisms can be identified through physical shielding (e.g. experiments in vacuum) or post-hoc factoring out (e.g. calculations of celestial orbits), while in open systems single causes cannot (yet?) be identified (e.g. meteorology, currency fluctuations) (AC:31-41). Cartwright agrees entirely: she holds that closed systems are very rare, Cartwright, DW:70, Bhaskar, RTS:31-32). 2 See also her remark on the revision
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