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 of Newtonian mechanics occasioned by the discovery of Neptune (DW:52-53). 3 Though Cartwright is closer to Collier’s revised interpretation of Bhaskarian tendencies, which drops the distinction between tendencies 1 & 2 (AC:59-68,123-130).

Radu Andrei Pârvulescu 3 analytically special, and typically require great care and ingenuity on our part to successful engineer (DW:48,89). Consequently, because many of the phenomena for which we desire rigorous knowledge are not (and cannot be made to be) subject to ceteris paribus conditions we must study them as wholes, each of which is potentially unique (DW:23-31; compare to Bhaskar’s “compounds” – RST:227 – and conjunctures – RST:122).4 A corollary is the argument that explanation and prediction are coterminous only in closed systems, which means that predictive success is not an appropriate measure for explanatory success (or vice versa) in research on open systems (DW:31-33, PN:9-11). This implies that the scientific action lies in finding or obtaining closure, which is certainly true of some fields (cf. Cartwright’s descriptions of gravity probes in NCTM:66-71; also AC:33). But Bhaskar and Cartwright are highly suspicious of the possibility of closure in human phenomena, largely because social scientific attempts in this direction typically lead to social atomism, which they both agree has a very poor track record (NCTM:156-158; AC:160-167).5

Intransitive and Transitive Dimensions of Science

Another key aspect of core critical realism is the division of science into intransitive and transitive dimensions. The intransitive is the real object that we study, which exists independently of the researcher and in relation to which our knowledge can be or less true: trees, comets, languages, etc. The transitive dimension is what we work through, it is the previous knowledge that we extend and transform, the shoulders on which we stand (AC:50-51). This latter is what people typically think is science: theorems, protocols, tacit knowledge, publications, etc. Cartwright also uses such a distinction, though it usually remains implicit. The most obvious statement can be found in NCTM:55-62: the title of that section (“New Knowledge Requires Old Knowledge”) foreshadows Cartwright’s commitment to a transitive dimension, and her elaboration of the necessity of observationally checking one’s postulates leaves no doubt of her belief in an intransitive dimension.

Transcendental Method Applied to Scientific Practice

Both Bhaskar and Cartwright present their approach as “transcendental” in the Kantian sense (AC:20- 29; DW:23). While the accuracy of this self-description has been contested (Clarke 2010),6 the fact remains that both authors structure their enquiries by asking “how must the world be for modern science to be possible?” Aiming this transcendental argument to routine scientific practice – namely, people building tools to generate, measure, and ultimately explain events – forms their common methodological core (epigraph of Ch.1, SRHE:1; DW:2), and bears fruit in two ways. First, it restores the notion of science as creative and hard work, reducible to neither simple perception, as in pure empiricism, nor to systematic reflection on ultimately untouchable reality, as in variants of idealism (AC51-59, DW:24-28,49-50). This allows scientific work to be analysed as labour

4 Their agreement here is so complete that they use the same linguistic argument that transitive verbs uncover base-level causal concepts and descriptors. For Bhaskar, see RST:118-126, esp.121 on transitive verbs; for Cartwright, consult DW:64-70, esp.66. 5 It is telling that both Cartwright and Collier (the first populariser of Bhaskar) approvingly refer to the same passage in Marx that offers abstraction as a replacement for experimental closure: “In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both.” (NCTM:203, itself a re-citation; AC:166; originally from Karl Marx, the Preface to the First Edition, Capital Vol.1, Penguin Classics, p.90). 6 This article is, to my knowledge, the only explicit comparison of Bhaskar and Cartwright, and is primarily focused on evaluating whether Bhaskar’s and Cartwright’s positions may properly be called “transcendental” in the Kantian sense.

4 Bhaskar and Cartwright: Common Ground process, making such metaphysics very useful for a sociology of science: on the rare occasions they stray into social scientific explanations, Bhaskar prefers Marx (SRHE:242-247) while Cartwright emphasises generic organisational processes, like delegation (EBP:91-93). The labour process view also opens up the possibility of counter-phenomenality, i.e., when underlying structures contradict appearances. Thus Bhaskar can argue that empiricist science belies its own premises because its explanatory action induces epistemological and ontological contradiction, thereby permitting scientists to reach opposite conclusions from the same information, a flexibility which systematically benefits under capitalism (AC:101-104; SRHE, Ch.3). Likewise, Cartwright can claim that verified and more empirically promising research is passed over in favour of research that affirms and performs the hegemonic view of science as uncovering the one, great system of scientific laws – aesthetics trump substance (DW:6-19). In both cases they critique a scientific ideology which induces an organisation of scientific research that undermines its own explanatory activity and ambition. The second fruit of the application of transcendental method to scientific practice is the reclamation and refinement of Aristotle. Both Bhaskar and Cartwright decry his abandonment in the philosophy of science, and both use his four-fold schema of causes (NCTM:211-214; RST:194-195). More importantly, both shift Aristotelian essentialism from “natures and essences” to “natures/structures and capacities”, anchoring the latter in an empirical and open-ended process of verification, which constitutes philosophical progress (Cartwright herself claims this in DW:80-81; I claim it for Bhaskar, based on RST:229-238). If science does advance by standing on the shoulders of giants, Bhaskar and Cartwright have done us a favour by showing us how to climb onto Aristotle’s.

Emergence and Stratification

On Bhaskar’s account (summarised in AC:107-118), real phenomena are composed of strata; the higher layers emerge from the lower; the laws of lower strata apply to the higher, but not vice versa; and higher strata contain structures and causal powers that are not reducible to the lower strata. For example, single-celled life emerges from (and is composed of) “lifeless” chemicals; cells are subject to laws of chemical interaction (e.g. lipid hydrophobia), but chemicals are not subject to laws of cell wall structure; and the laws of cell walls cannot be reduced to, and therefore cannot be wholly explained or predicted by, knowledge of lipid chemistry, no matter how complete. While higher strata can obviously act on lower ones (indeed must act, as higher strata are often composed of lower) this is different from the constitutive constraint that the lower strata place on the higher. This last point on causal irreducibility distinguishes Bhaskar’s stratum emergentism from reductionism, in which everything is ultimately a function of one or more strata: explanation then takes the form of a reduction, either up (holism), down (atomism), or across (synchronic functionalism).7 This other side of the emergentist coin is the step theory of scientific explanation. Research fronts in everything from literary theory to astronomy are typically busy conceptualising, measuring, and explaining the “more basic thing” that (it is claimed) will fill current explanatory gaps. As this process unfolds we are left with numerous theories/results, each explaining a “more basic” aspect of the original phenomenon (AC:45-50). Only in some cases will the theories be “nested,” because only in some cases (e.g., physical structure) does the “more basic” also become smaller. For a variant, see

7 It is important to note that the emergentism of core critical realism is not merely about stratum nesting, but can accommodate co-emergence, at varying time scales. Both a theory of the co-emergence and mutual reinforcement of a mind, language, and society triangle over the span of human history (e.g. White 1995) and one of flash-in-the-pan emergence of quick, powerful, and unstable crowd dynamics (e.g. Collins 2014) can be grounded in, and critically interrogated by, core critical realism; cf. the transformational model of social activity (AC:141-51).

Radu Andrei Pârvulescu 5 identity studies of culture, which often posit an ignored dimension and then explain how it has been present, causal, and sometimes co-emergent all along: “uncovering” gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. The stratified view of ontology and scientific explanation is the basis of Bhaskar’s argument for the possibility of a science of freedom, a rarity in the philosophy of science. First, because of their emergent natures, mind and society can rightly sustain the separate (if connected) sciences of psychology and sociology, and defend each from reduction either into one another or into neurology, semiotics, or whatever else the zeitgeist has to offer (AC:141-160). Then, Bhaskar concludes that because self-determination is an emergent property of mind in society there can be a science of freedom – with explanatory, but not predictive, power – irreducible to psychology, sociology, or anything else (AC:118-123). This is the first step towards emancipatory critique – on which more below. At first glance Bhaskar and Cartwright disagree on emergence, with the latter’s opposition justified on grounds of nomological pluralism, i.e., “the doctrine that nature is governed in different domains by different systems of laws not necessarily related to each other in any systematic or uniform way” (DW:31). With this (and physics) in mind, she calls emergence the view “that, where there is no supervenience [a cousin of reductionism], macro properties must miraculously come out of nowhere” (DW:33). This disagreement is only apparent, because core critical realism is consistent with nomological pluralism. Neither Bhaskar nor Cartwright deny that different systems of laws can be systematically related to one another (AC:132, DW:32), and both maintain the possibility of phenomena unexplained by any law (AC:130, DW:32);8 they are also deeply sceptical of putative descriptive closure (DW:57, AC:128). In sum, Cartwright is not opposed to Bhaskarian emergence, agreeing in fact on several key points. The thesis of scientific explanation as “plunging ever deeper” presents another apparent tension. Cartwright dislikes the research habitus (entailed by the fundamental belief in systematic cross-domain coherence) that constantly posits new “things,” thereby inflating the inventory of reality with as-yet- unwarranted theoretical constructs (DW:35-37). Again though, her ire is directed not so much to the hunt for more basic explanations as to a particular idealism, that which is willing to sacrifice external validity for internal tractability; this explains her siding with William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) in his distaste for Maxwell’s equations (NCTM:4-5). And here too she and Bhaskar are actually in agreement: his refutation of idealism and derivative approaches in the philosophy of science is similarly suspicious of the idea that an internally coherent (and tractable) interpretation of the situation reduces the need for (or worse, makes impossible) confronting said interpretation with the intransitive object, i.e. real thing; cf. his critique of hermeneutic (PN:132:152), and specifically of Kuhnian incommensurability (AC:89- 95). Consequently, Bhaskar and Cartwright are compatible on scientific stratification.

Explanatory Critique

A key implication of core critical realism is the breakdown of the fact-value dichotomy (AC:170-181). Consequently, social scientific explanation can also always be critique, because the more truthful an explanation is the better it can threaten the power of those benefiting from ignorance (AC:181-200). Cartwright’s work does not contradict, and I argue is consistent with, these points. She plainly states that much science, especially for public policy, is research ideology which benefits particular interests and fails at its self-appointed tasks (DW:18, EBP:160-171). This she takes for granted and does not theorise explicitly (like Bhaskar), focusing instead on its critique and, later, on specific ways in which

8 Compare “The dappled world that I describe is best supported by the evidence, but it is clearly not compelled by it (DW:12)” with “But I do think that a very natural reading of the section on ‘autonomy and reduction’ up to this quoted passage [in Bhaskar’s RTS] is as depicting a world in which, while things do no break the laws of nature, they do behave for ways unaccounted for by any laws (AC:130).”

6 Bhaskar and Cartwright: Common Ground to do better, and therefore emancipatory, science. Evidence-Based Policy (co-authored with Hardie) and Hunting for Causes and Using Them are pragmatic programmes for explanatory critiques within specific fields, as plainly stated in the latter’s opening page: “Metaphysics, method and use must march hand in hand.” (HCUT:1). It is this complementarity between the unrelentingly general Bhaskar and the perpetually specific Cartwright that holds the greatest promise for their integration.

Conclusion

This paper has sought to show how core critical realism (i.e. the early Roy Bhaskar) and the philosophy of Nancy Cartwright agree on a set of fundamental points: strong realism, depth ontology, closed and open systems, intransitive and transitive dimensions of science, philosophical method, emergence and stratification, and explanatory critique. For every argument in favour of similarity I have provided page-level references to both authors, so that the doubtful reader can easily consult the original texts. My aim has been to uncover the common ground between Bhaskar and Cartwright, and therefore to underlabour for the integration of their philosophies. The reader familiar with both Bhaskar and Cartwright will have noticed one large and potentially troublesome omission: a discussion of each author’s views on formalisation and quantification, especially of its role in determining causality in open systems. Addressing this, however, requires a close look into each school’s evaluation of contemporary economics, a substantial effort in textual comparison that I defer for a future essay. Grafting Cartwright’s detailed and model-oriented views onto Bhaskar’s broad and philosophically catholic approach is, in my view, the most promising avenue for future research.

Works Cited

Bhaskar, Roy. 1975. A Realist Theory of Science. London, UK: Verso.

Bhaskar, Roy. 1986. Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. London: Verso.

Bhaskar, Roy. 1998. The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. 3rd ed. London: Routledge.

Cartwright, Nancy. 1989. Nature’s Capacities and Their Measurement. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Cartwright, Nancy. 1999. The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cambridge University Press.

Cartwright, Nancy. 2007. Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cartwright, Nancy, and Jeremy Hardie. 2012. Evidence-Based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing It Better. Oxford University Press.

Clarke, Stephen. 2010. “Transcendental Realisms in the Philosophy of Science: On Bhaskar and Cartwright.” Synthese 173(3):299–315.

Collier, Andrew. 1994. Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy. London: Verso.

Radu Andrei Pârvulescu 7 Collins, Randall. 2014. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton University Press.

White, Harrison C. 1995. “Network Switchings and Bayesian Forks: Reconstructing the Social and Behavioral Sciences.” Social Research 1035–1063.

8 Bhaskar and Cartwright: Common Ground