Ram Roy Bhaskar (; 15 May 1944 – 19 November 2014) was an English philosopher of science who is best known as the initiator of the philosophical movement of critical realism (CR). Bhaskar argued that the task of science is "the production of the knowledge of those enduring and continually active mechanisms of nature that produce the phenomena of the world", rather than the discovery of quantitative laws, and that experimental science makes sense only if such mechanisms exist and operate outside the lab as well as inside it.
Roy Bhaskar is certainly the most prominent advocate for "critical realism," but he did not initiate either the term or the concept. The term was used earlier by Donald Campbell (1974/1988, p. 432), and the concept of combining ontological realism and epistemological constructivism goes back at least to Herbert Blumer (1969).Blumer, H. (1969). The methodological position of symbolic interactionism. In H. Blumer, Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.Campbell, D. T. (1974). Evolutionary epistemology. In P. A. Schlipp (Ed.), The philosophy of Karl Popper, pp. 413–463. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Co. Bhaskar went on to apply that realism about mechanisms and causal powers to the philosophy of social science, and he also elaborated a series of arguments to support the critical role of philosophy and the human sciences. According to Bhaskar, it is possible and desirable for the study of society to be scientific.
Bhaskar was a World Scholar at the Institute of Education, University College London. In 2003–2004, he was a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden.
Background Bhaskar was born on 15 May 1944 in Teddington, London, the first of two sons. His Indian father and English mother were Theosophists. Bhaskar said his childhood was unhappy, with his father having high expectations of him.Hartwig, M (2008), 'Introduction', in Bhaskar, R., A Realist Theory of Science (Routledge 'With a new introduction' edition), Abingdon: Routledge.
In 1963, Bhaskar attended Balliol College, Oxford, on a scholarship to read philosophy, politics and economics. The scholarship freed him from his father's influence over his chosen academic path. Having graduated with first-class honours in 1966, he began work on a PhD thesis about the relevance of economic theory for under-developed countries. His DPhil changed course and was written at Nuffield College, Oxford, where Rom Harré became his supervisor, on the philosophy of social science and then the philosophy of science. His thesis was failed twice, which he believed to be partly for political reasons, but the second version was published largely unchanged in 1975 as his influential text, A Realist Theory of Science.
Bhaskar lectured at the University of Edinburgh from 1975 and later moved to the University of Sussex. He held visiting positions in several Scandinavian universities - adjunct professor in philosophy at the Centre for Peace Studies at the University of Tromsø, Norway, and guest professor in philosophy and social science, Department of Caring Sciences, Örebro University, Sweden. From 2007, Bhaskar was employed at the Institute of Education, in London, where he was working on the application of CR to Peace Studies. He was a founding member of the Centre for Critical Realism, International Association for Critical Realism and the International Centre for Critical Realism (2011), the latter at the Institute of Education.
Bhaskar married Hilary Wainwright in 1971. The couple remained close lifelong friends after their separation and never divorced. He died in Leeds with his partner, Rebecca Long, by his side on 19 November 2014.
Influences Bhaskar himself lists ten main influences on his early work, including philosophical work on the philosophy of science and language; the sociology of knowledge; Marx (particularly his conception of praxis); structuralist thinkers including Lévi-Strauss, Chomsky and Althusser; the metacritical tradition of Hegel, Kant, and even Descartes; and perspectivalism in the hands of Nietzsche, Fanon, Gramsci and Gandhi.
His dialectical turn engaged more deeply with Hegel, and he called his work in that phase "a non-preservative sublation of Hegelian dialectic" since it draws heavily on Hegel's work but moves beyond and improves on it. He also saw it as preserving and building on his own earlier work and on Marx's work and claimed that "Marx was a proto-dialectical critical realist" but that there remained residues of Hegelian thought in his work.
He abandoned further work on dialectical critical realism, however, after he experienced transcendental meditation. He turned his attention to a variety of Eastern traditions of philosophy, which were the major influences on his later turn to the philosophy of metareality.
Critical realism Bhaskar's consideration of the philosophies of science and social science resulted in the development of critical realism, a philosophical approach that defends the critical and emancipatory potential of rational (scientific and philosophical) enquiry against both positivist, broadly defined, and 'postmodern' challenges. Its approach emphasises the importance of distinguishing between epistemological and ontological questions and the significance of objectivity properly understood for a critical project. Its conception of philosophy and social science is socially situated but not socially determined; it maintains the possibility for objective critique to motivate social change, with the ultimate end being a promotion of human freedom.
The term "critical realism" was not initially used by Bhaskar. The philosophy began life as what Bhaskar called "transcendental realism" in A Realist Theory of Science (1975), which he extended into the social sciences as critical naturalism in The Possibility of Naturalism (1978). The term "critical realism" is an elision of transcendental realism and critical naturalism and was accepted by Bhaskar after it had been proposed by others.
Critical Realism should not be confused with various other critical realisms, including Georg Lukács' aesthetics, and Alister McGrath's Scientific Theology (or Theological Critical Realism) although they share common goals. In contemporary critical realist texts, "critical realism" is often abbreviated to CR.
Bhaskar's critical realism can be divided into several phases, but he insisted that the later phases preserved and extended the earlier phases of his work, rather than invalidating them. The simplest and most common division is into three phases: original, dialectical, and transcendental. However, original critical realism can also be divided further into transcendental realism and critical naturalism.
Original critical realism The first 'phase' of Critical Realism accrued a large number of adherents and proponents in Britain, many of whom were involved with the Radical Philosophy Group and related movements. The Radical Philosophy journal was where much of the early CR scholarship first appeared. It argued for an objectivist realist approach to science based on a Kantian transcendental analysis of scientific experimental activity. Stressing the need to retain both the subjective epistemological, or 'transitive', side of knowledge and the objective ontological, or 'intransitive', side, Bhaskar developed a theory of science and social science that he thought would sustain the reality of the objects of science and their knowability but would also incorporate the insights of the 'sociology of knowledge' movement, which emphasised the theory-laden, historically contingent and socially-situated nature of knowledge.
What emerged was a marriage of ontological realism with epistemological relativism that formed an objectivist yet fallibilist theory of knowledge. Bhaskar's main strategy was to argue that reality has depth and that knowledge can penetrate more or less deeply into reality without ever reaching the bottom. Bhaskar said that he reintroduced ontology into the philosophy of science when that was almost heresy. He argued for an ontology of stratified emergence and differentiated structure, which supported the ontological reality of causal powers independent of their empirical effects. Such a move opened up the possibility for a non-reductivist and non-positivistic account of causal explanation in the human and social domain.
That explanatory project was linked with a critical project, the main idea of which is the doctrine of Explanatory Critique. Bhaskar developed it fully in Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (1987), which developed the critical tradition of ideology critique within a CR framework by arguing that certain kinds of explanatory accounts could lead directly to evaluations and so science could function normatively, not just descriptively, as positivism has assumed since Hume's law. Such a move, it was hoped, would provide the Holy Grail of critical theory, an objective normative foundation.
Transcendental realism 'Transcendental realism' was the term used by Bhaskar to describe the argument that he developed in his first book, A Realist Theory of Science (1975). (Not to be confused with F. W. J. Schelling's transcendental realism, or Arthur Schopenhauer's transcendental realism.) The position is based on Bhaskar's transcendental arguments for certain ontological and epistemological positions based on what reality must be like for scientific knowledge to be possible.
Transitive and intransitive domains A Realist Theory of Science starts with a proposed paradox: how do people create knowledge as a product of social activities since knowledge is of things that are not at all produced by people?
The former is inspired by Kuhnian arguments of how scientific communities develop knowledge and asserts all observation is theory-laden based on previously acquired concepts. As such, it is not a naïve realist perspective of knowledge being a direct acquisition of facts through observation of the real world, but it rather considers knowledge to be fallible. That aspect of knowledge is described as the transitive domain of knowledge in that knowledge can change over time.
The second part of the paradox is asserted to be based on a real world, which exists and behaves in the same manner regardless of whether or not people exist or whether they know about the real world. That is described as the intransitive objects of knowledge.
Bhaskar refers to the elimination of the intransitive objects of knowledge and thus the reduction of ontology to epistemology as the epistemic fallacy, which Bhaskar asserts has been made repeatedly over the last 300 years of philosophy of science. The epistemic fallacy "consists in the view that statements about being can be reduced to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge".
Transcendental argument from experimental science The core argument of A Realist Theory of Science begins as a critique of positivist/empiricist understandings of how science works. Bhaskar focuses on the empiricist argument that science produces true knowledge of invariant causal laws by observing causal regularities: "a constant conjunction of events perceived". Bhaskar develops what he calls an immanent critique of empiricism in which he takes some of its core assumptions as correct for the purpose of the argument and then shows that to lead to an incoherence in the empiricist argument. In particular, he accepts the premise that experimental science produces useful knowledge (although he does not commit himself to the claim that the knowledge that it produces is true) and then asks what the world must be like if that is the case. In that sense, his arguments take a similar form to Kant's transcendental arguments, a term that he employs to describe them.