Critical Realism in just under a 1000 Words
The Philosophy of Critical Realism, a complex philosophical investigation into the real cause or nature of things, has a profound influence on my work and the people I work with. I was recently asked to write a short introduction to Critical Realism without using or at least with the fewest Critical Realism terms. This is what I produced.
In just under 1000 words, I am going to try to introduce critical realism. I am going to cut corners and make some generalisations but I hope that I have explained with some seriousness what critical realism is all about.
To read these words you have to perceive them. Through your perception or senses, you are then judging the words and because you and I speak the same language, your judgements lead to informed interpretations. Even if I spoke a language that you did not understand, this would only be an interpretive issue and you could just go and get a translation.
It is this process of Sense>Judge>Interpret that allows you and I to understand the world. It is also this process that allows you and I to think that the world is something that we create, or that reality is all in how we come to Sense>Judge>Interpret the world, this process is known as Epistemology, or the study of what is known, and Empirical or deriving information from our senses.
The famous philosopher David Hume believed that this was how we came to know the world, it was only in our interpretations that we saw that things appeared to effect things. Therefore, when a snooker ball hits another snooker ball it is only in our imagined interpretation that we know that the second hit snooker ball will move. Alternatively, that because there was a Sunrise today, there will be a Sunrise tomorrow.
Although we might now read this as complete nonsense, it was not really until another famous philosopher called Immanuel Kant came along to challenge Hume’s claims did we start to question what was really real.
Kant suggested that there is the reality that we create from interpretive data of the objects that we sense and judge, he called this the realm of phenomena. Then there is the real object or the thing-in-itself, which exists in the realm of noumenon. This is the realm in which the real thing exists beyond our sensing of it, and Kant said that, okay we know that it is out there but it is beyond the mind and therefore is not knowable, all we can do is use our imagination in trying to imagine what the real thing might be like.
Although this appears to sound better then Hume, it still says that there is a real world out there that we can never know and leaves the idea of creating our own really still the main direction of most of western philosophy.
However, what would we have to do if we wanted to change direction and start to think the unthinkable, if we wanted to know the real, how might we precede?
We might ask a question that goes something like this: “What kind of things exist that form the referent that I am sensing?” The referent is the thing that we are referring to when we create sensory information; it is the disgrace of postmodernism in how it removed the things we refer to when we begin to think about the world. Without things to refer to we only have interpretation, meaning your interpretation is just as good as mine, so all interpretations are relative and no interpretation is wrong.
Which means if we truly want to know and explore Kant’s noumenon as a knowable domain we have to extend our model to include the thing we are referring to that means we need to add the referent to our model, which now looks like this: Referent>Sense>Judge>Interpret.
If we go back to my illustration about words, we might now begin to think what kinds of things need to exist for my words to appear as sensory information. Which means that now we are looking for the supporting mechanisms that bring my words into existence.
This starts to get very complex because we could think about Gary and how he is trying to find the best way of explaining something that he has spent many years thinking about, which we might term the Psychological/Philosophical Level. We could explore the way in which the brain processes information or the Natural Level. We might explore the way that we interpret information such as shared language or class up bringing; this all would be the Cultural/Social Level. We might think about the process of writing and reading, such as schooling, economic factors, or construction of materials, along with political factors in that Gary has freedom to say what he likes, we could also consider religion, as it is possible that Gary is saying something that is anti religious, which would be the Material/Systems View.
We could call this process of exploring levels as Ontology or the study of what things exist.
All of the above are mechanisms that generate my words, and not just my words but also everyone’s words. These mechanisms make up the words as thing-in-itself, independent of our senses.
Now we have started to explore some universal elements that are the same for all word construction. Therefore, before you sense my words, you refer to the things that generate the possibility of my words, and because those possibilities are the possibilities for all words, we have collapsed that our interpretations create reality.
We are able to arrive at the conclusion that there is a world that is independent of our senses that has an actual expression, which we come to know through our senses.
There are generative mechanisms that allow Gary’s words to exist, (which the reader may know or not know about) which appear as dots on a screen or marks on paper which through sensing and judging the reader interprets.
This is critical realism, the proposal that there are (The) Real universal generative mechanisms out in the world that we may know about or may not know about, sense or not sense. That these mechanisms create the possibly of an (The) Actual event, from which we interpret (The) Empirical data, in our own unique way, never forgetting that we are only seeing a very small part of a very big real world we are part of.