Critical Realism, Post-positivism and the Possibility of Knowledge

Ruth Groff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134312931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Groff defends 'realism about causality' through close discussions of Kant, Hilary Putnam, Brian Ellis and Charles Taylor, among others. In so doing she affirms critical realism, but with several important qualifications. In particular, she rejects the theory of truth advanced by Roy Bhaskar. She also attempts to both clarify and correct earlier critical realist attempts to apply realism about causality to the social sciences.
By connecting issues in metaphysics and philosophy of science to the problem of relativism, Groff bridges the gap between the philosophical literature and broader debates surrounding socio-political theory and poststructuralist thought. This unique approach will make the book of interest to philosophers and socio-political theorists alike.

1 Introduction
Relativism, anti-realism and causality

The problem at the heart of this book is the recent resurgence of relativism. In the wake of the well-deserved breakdown of positivism, it no longer seems possible to rationally assess competing knowledge claims. In the social sciences in particular, the fashionable post-positivist view is that any belief can be valid, depending upon one's perspective; that truth is simply a term of praise (or, alternately, a display of power); and that there is in fact no such thing as a reality that does not belong in quotation marks.

Relativism is problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its political implications. If all beliefs about the world are equally valid, then no claims may be challenged on cognitive, or epistemic, grounds. At best, relativism can therefore be expected to discourage critical analysis and exchange — for what is the point of attempts to persuade through argumentation, if all claims about the world are by definition equally valid? At worst, it implies that critical exchange ought to be abandoned in favor of the use of force and/or non-rational charismatic appeals. In saying this I do not mean to paint a rosy picture of politics as consisting merely — or even essentially — of rational exchange between well-meaning public servants. It is worth responding to relativism not because ill-informed political leaders need only be enlightened, but because the widespread acceptance of false ideas plays a role in the perpetuation of unjust social relations.

In the following chapters I shall defend the merits of a position called critical realism. I believe that critical realism offers us a way out of the current morass. Specifically, critical realism allows us to cast off the anti-realism about causality that has dominated Western philosophy since Hume, and to replace it with a viable, realist alternative. Realism about the causal relation prohibits relativism on ontological grounds. If the relationship between causes and their effects is one of natural necessity, then, regardless of one's perspective — and notwithstanding the limits of our knowledge — it cannot be the case that all claims about the world are equally valid.

Critical realism is not an epistemic counter to relativism. It does not include a satisfactory account of the concept of truth or of justification. However, by predisposing us to distinguish between knowledge claims, which are socially produced and provisional in nature, and the concept of truth, which, in my view, is a transcendental condition of possibility of inquiry itself, it points us in the right direction in this area as well.

Two potential questions arise from this brief sketch. The first question has to do with method. If relativism has political consequences, why does it require a philosophical rather than an empirical response? The second question has to do with the focus on metaphysics. Why, if one were worried about relativism, would one choose to focus one's attention on a theory such as critical realism, which is primarily an account of causality? The answer to the first question is that relativism about knowledge claims is not just pernicious, but false. An empirical study of the effects of relativism on political culture could, and I believe would, help to demonstrate the former — that relativism undermines the possibility of rational critique, and is therefore antithetical to a just society. Such a study would not, however — and could not — show that relativism is false. Indeed, if one were to handle the matter empirically, one would have to take great care not to implicitly endorse the relativist position, by suggesting that it is false precisely because it is pernicious. It is in the very nature of the case, then, that relativism must be addressed philosophically if one is to challenge it on cognitive grounds.

But why should the concept of causality figure so prominently in such a response? What bearing does metaphysics in particular have on issues of justification and truth? The answer to this second question is that relativism presupposes anti-realism. In order for the claim that all knowledge claims are equally valid to itself be true, the world must be such that it can be described in all possible ways.¹ The view that this is so, that the world has no intrinsic structure, and that it can therefore be described in all possible ways, is the implicit ontology of contemporary relativism.

Realism about causality turns out to be the most interesting way to counter such a position. As we shall see, proponents of what could be called a dispositional theory of causality hold that the relationship between cause and effect is best understood neither as a subjective expectation, as Hume thought, nor as a Category of the Understanding, as Kant believed, but rather as a real feature of the external world, grounded in the nature of the entities and processes to which it refers.² Such an approach presupposes that the world has a structure of its own — that it is comprised of natural kinds, which do what they do in virtue of what they are, or perhaps are what they are in virtue of what they do.³ If this view of causality is correct, then relativism may be ruled out on ontological grounds. Of course, ruling out relativism on ontological grounds is no substitute for a theory of truth, or of justification. However it is a significant move, as I shall try to show.

The discussion to come is framed by these connections between politics and philosophy and between epistemology and metaphysics. In the end, my objective is to advance critical realism as an alternative to the relativism and attendant anti-realism that have come to characterize the post-positivist intellectual milieu. The main purpose of the present chapter is to provide a context for such an undertaking. I shall begin, therefore, by describing in more detail the conceptual development that worries me. I shall then turn to critical realism itself, setting out the basic rudiments of the position. Finally, I shall say a word about the kind of intervention that I want to make, and about what I do and do not hope to accomplish by it.

Post-positivist perspectivism

The phenomenon that concerns me is not reducible to the views of any one philosopher. While there are those whose thinking illustrates and/or has contributed to it, the phenomenon itself — which I shall call “post-positivist perspectivism” — is an overarching problematic, cutting across the social sciences and humanities. Emerging out of the breakdown of positivism, the problematic has to do with the limitations of our knowledge and of our thinking about knowledge. More specifically, it involves the repudiation of the concept of truth as a universal norm, and a deep suspicion of ontological realism. Prominent figures who hold such views range from Rorty and Putnam to Foucault, Lyotard and Flax, from Kuhn and Feyerabend to Derrida. Notably, most of the thinkers I've mentioned do not believe themselves to be either relativists or idealists. Nonetheless, especially as their ideas have filtered through the academy and into segments of the culture at large, they have contributed to a growing consensus that the concept of truth tells us little more than that a given person or group of people for some non-cognitive reason prefers to believe that x. As I have said, I regard this situation to be significant politically.

Jane Flax's piece “The End of Innocence” is an emblematic expression of the stance in question.⁴ Flax's view is that the concepts of truth and reality have no genuine denotative meaning. They are simply words that philosophers (and others) use in order to impose their wills on others. By using such terms, Flax says, people are able to make it seem as though they are pursuing an objective dictate — an “innocent truth” — when in fact what they are trying to do is to advance their interests. So-called “truth,” she says, is an effect of discourse. Each discourse has its own rules about what constitutes a meaningful statement and about how to determine the truth-value of given claims. “There is no way to test whether one story is closer to the truth than another,” she says, “because there is no transcendental standpoint or mind unenmeshed in its own language and story.”⁵ What settles disputes is “prior agreement on rules, not the compelling power of objective truth.”⁶ In sum, “(a)ll knowledge is fictive and non-representational. As a product of the human mind, knowledge has no necessary relation to Truth or the Real.”⁷ Accordingly,

(w)e should take responsibility for our desire … : what we really want is power in the world, not an innocent truth … Part of the purpose of claiming truth seems to be to compel agreement with our claim … We are often seeking a change in behavior or a win for our side. If so, there may be more effective ways to attain agreement or produce change than to argue about truth.⁸

The presumed unity, stability and permanence of “reality,” similarly, is an illusion created by Western philosophers, who have superimposed binary oppositions onto the actual “flux and heterogeneity of the human and physical worlds.”⁹

A more nuanced version is put forward by Richard Rorty.¹⁰ Rorty would have it that he has successfully opted out of debates over the concept of truth and the nature of reality. Citing Dewey, he holds that the very questions of whether or not our accepted beliefs are “really” true and of whether or not the things that we encounter “really” exist are entirely meaningless. They can only arise, he says, if one has already adopted a way of looking at the world in which there is reason to think that we are fundamentally detached from, and unable to connect with, our environment. As answers to questions that make no sense to ask, the epistemological and ontological positions taken by traditional philosophical disputants simply take us further afield. If we are absolutely determined to try to fix the value of our beliefs, Rorty says, we should ask not whether or not they correspond to something non-human, but whether or not they promote social solidarity.

Rorty says that he cannot be charged with being a relativist because relativism, he says, is a theory of truth, and, as a pragmatist, he “does not have a theory of truth, much less a relativistic one.”¹¹ There is a s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Critical Realism
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: relativism, anti-realism and causality
• 2 On the necessity of necessary connections: critical realism and Kant's transcendental idealism
• 3 Natural kinds: critical realism and Putnam's internal realism
• 4 Alethic truth
• 5 Recovering Aristotle: realism about causality and the social sciences
• 6 Conclusion: critical realism and the post-positivist quagmire
• Bibliography
• Index