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critical realism, causation and the charge of positivism. Fiona J. Hibberd. University of Sydney, Australia. Abstract. The system of realist philosophy developed by ...
Situational realism, critical realism, causation and the charge of positivism

History of the Human Sciences 23(4) 37–51 ª The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0952695110373423 hhs.sagepub.com

Fiona J. Hibberd University of Sydney, Australia

Abstract The system of realist philosophy developed by John Anderson – situational realism – has recently been dismissed as ‘positivist’ by a prominent critical realist. The reason for this dismissal appears not to be the usual list of ideas deemed positivist, but the conviction that situational realism mistakenly defends a form of actualism, i.e. that to conceive of causal laws as constant conjunctions reduces the domain of the real to the domain of the actual. This is, in part, a misreading of Anderson’s philosophy because, contrary to Hume’s constant conjunction account, Anderson viewed causation as pluralistic and non-linear. However, the critical realist charge does point to two important ontological differences between these realist philosophies – a levels-of-reality thesis and the notion of causal powers. Situational realism has always maintained that the arguments for both lead to difficulties that are logically insurmountable. Unfortunately, this is not addressed in the critical realists’ dismissal of Anderson’s philosophy. Regardless of who makes the charge of positivism, it frequently involves inattention to the real character of its target. Keywords causal powers, critical realism, levels of reality, positivism, situational realism In a recent article, I provided an historical exposition of situational realism, a philosophy established during the 1920s and 1930s by the Scottish-Australian philosopher John Anderson (Hibberd, 2009). It was argued that, although insufficiently developed,

Corresponding author: Dr Fiona Hibberd, School of Psychology, Brennan MacCallum Building, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. Tel.: þ61 2 9351 2867 Email: [email protected]

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Anderson’s system of philosophy provides the metaphysical foundations for an integrated natural and social science and a curative for the fragmentation that currently exists across the human sciences and within psychology. Examples of Anderson’s relevance to psychology were supplied and differences between his realism and the then contemporary philosophies – 20th-century logical positivism and Dewey’s pragmatism – were noted. The most important features of Andersonian realism can be stated briefly.1 Anderson’s central thesis is that there is only one way of being – that whatever exists or occurs is on the same level of reality as any other occurrence; reality is seamless. What exists are spatio-temporally located situations that have propositional structure. From this propositionality, the conditions of existence, or categories, can be derived. These categories (e.g. relation, particularity, universality, causality) are the invariant features of all occurrences irrespective of whether the situation is historical, biological, psychological, social, etc. Ergo, there is no categorial distinction between ‘man’ and nature; distinctions between them are with respect to qualities. Situations are not constituted, wholly or partly, by the relations they enter into or stand in. They are in continuous process – processes continuing into one another is causation, i.e. there is interaction at all points. Logic is concerned with how things are and, as such, provides the most highly generalized description of reality. Knowledge is a matter of finding out what is the case, but as observers and reasoners, we are fallible. Mental stuff, such as ideas, beliefs, concepts, percepts, images, sense data, schemas, appearances, propositional attitudes, etc., are all misguided reifications; ‘mind’ is not a thing with content. Neither is it reducible to brain states; cognition is relational. Similarly, social institutions and movements are not reducible to their individual members; society is holistic in that social complexes have characteristic ways of working not possessed by their component parts. And social and other forces ‘work through’ individuals in a thoroughly deterministic manner. In contrast to the negligible international influence of Anderson’s realism, Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism has adherents in many countries from a wide range of disciplines. It is a much more complex and worked-out philosophy than Anderson’s. (In fact, it is teeming with distinctions, concepts, neologisms and nonce-words.) Recently, critical realism judged situational realism to be a positivist philosophy. The basis for this charge appears not to be the usual assumptions deemed positivist by various commentators in the psycho-social sciences, but a cluster of ideas concerning the concept of causation. In this article, I compare these two philosophies with respect to this concept. This, I hope, will be instructive because an increasing number of researchers believe that, in critical realism, they have found a comfortable middle ground between social constructionism and its beˆte noire, positivist philosophy.

The Critical Realist’s Charge of Positivism Notwithstanding the fact that Anderson would regard critical realism as distinctly nonrealist on a number of topics, these two philosophies obviously have common features.2 In particular: 1. 38

Both deem ontology to be logically prior to epistemology, and neither thinks scientific objectivity unachievable.

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4.

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Both agree that the central philosophical task is to develop a general theory of being, a realist theory of the conditions of existence. Both reject an ontology of atomistic things, of nothing but particulars, universals, stuff, substance and properties, Plato’s realism about the Forms, much of linguistic philosophy and positivism. Both employ an immanent critique, one which aims to show that their opponent admits implicitly what she or he denies explicitly – that what is admitted implicitly is unavoidable.

Yet Bhaskar (1999) considers critical realism to be unique as a realist philosophy – unique in its use of a transcendental method of argument, its immanent critique, its focus on ontology, its critique of social reality, its connection with socialism, and its attention to science. Perhaps, then, he is not (or was not) conversant with situational realism which, I suggest, matches critical realism on every one of those features. The editor of the Dictionary of Critical Realism, however, is somewhat conversant, though he nevertheless maintains that situational realism is just another version of empiricism or positivism: In Australia, the realist tradition inaugurated by the Scottish-Australian philosopher John Anderson (1893–1962) explicitly saw itself as entailing empiricism and positivism (Anderson, 1962; Baker, 1986); and, while an emergentist strand, best exemplified in the scientific essentialism of Brian Ellis (2001), has in part grown out of that tradition, it is an emergentism that is reductionist in relation to the sociosphere. (Hartwig, 2007: 98)

Hartwig (2007) does not elaborate on these claims and I can find no published material where this view of Anderson’s realism has been proposed and defended. Presumably a defence is deemed unnecessary given Hartwig’s conviction that situational realists happily align themselves with empiricism and positivism. Perhaps because of his keenness to uphold Bhaskar’s view that critical realism is unrivalled, Hartwig quickly dismisses an alternative version of realist philosophy with the ‘positivist’ epitaph. The term ‘positivist’ has been a pejorative for some time in the human sciences.3 The mantra is that the positivist subscribes to a number of ideas that have no place in presentday science and philosophy. Here are six of those (not necessarily independent) ideas deemed to be positivist, or to imply positivism, and therefore passe´: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Objectivity – scientific objectivity is achievable; Value-immunity – research is done from within a value-free framework; Discoverability – scientific knowledge is something discovered (rather than produced or constructed); Scientism – ‘science’ is defined narrowly and any definition must include a commitment to quantitative methods; Logicality – logic is necessary to scientific inquiry; Non-reflexivity – a notion of reflexivity is absent.

Notably in the psycho-social sciences, a conflation of positivism and realism is not uncommon, especially among those of a social constructionist persuasion (e.g. Brand, 39

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1996: 39; Denzin and Lincoln, 2005; Guba and Lincoln, 1994; Lovie, 1992; Ussher, 2002).4 One consequence is that the philosophy or metatheory that upholds just some of the ideas above is dismissed summarily and, thereafter, nothing the ‘positivist’ says is seriously considered. At the very least, this conflation suggests a neglect of the literature that distinguishes between realist and positivist philosophies. The anti-realist aspects of logical positivism were long ago reported (e.g. Passmore, 1943, 1944, 1948; Stebbing, 1933, 1933–4) and recent work has added to this body of research (e.g. G. P. Baker, 1988; Coffa, 1991; Earman, 1993; Friedman, 1999; Richardson, 1998). Within the social sciences, Manicas (1987) refers to logical positivism and logical empiricism as ‘twentieth century logical empiricism’ and, in a luminous and penetrating analysis, distances it from realism; Greenwood (1992) too reminds us of the anti-realist elements in later versions of logical empiricist philosophy. Yet, in spite of this substantial literature, misconceptions persist. To demonstrate situational realism’s relationship to the ideas above would involve a significant digression from the aim of this article. Suffice it to say that objectivity, discoverability and logicality are features of Anderson’s philosophy while value-immunity, scientism and non-reflexivity are not (see Hibberd, 2009). Note, however, that the content of logical positivist philosophy was such that their conception of objectivity was compromised, valueimmunity could not be maintained, and discoverability was precluded (Friedman, 1999; Richardson and Uebel, 2005; Weissman, 1991). In short, the only feature that situational realism has in common with logical positivism is logicality, though Anderson’s view of logic is very different from that of the logical positivists (Hibberd, 2005, 2009). Still, I suspect that Hartwig’s conviction of Andersonian realism as positivist involves none of the ideas above. It is more likely that (1) although two of the terms Anderson used to describe his philosophy were ‘positivist’ and ‘empiricist’, Hartwig has assumed that Anderson meant by those terms something akin to current usage, and (2) Hartwig has misjudged situational realism as a defender of Hume’s theory of causal laws and thereby positivist. Critical realism, on the other hand, is highly critical of an Humean account of causation, deductive-nomological accounts of explanation, and it defends a levels-of-reality thesis. Let me examine these two possibilities. First, we should not be misled by Anderson’s use of the term ‘positivism’ to describe his system of philosophy. By ‘positivist’, he simply means that his system is not just an exercise in criticism – that it proposes positive theses, especially with regard to the subject matter of logic. Anderson’s meaning has nothing to do with current usage. He is referring to ideas that, if true, refer to the way the world is.5 Although the development of Anderson’s realism was concurrent with the halcyon days of logical positivist philosophy, his only reference to the latter was to note its subjectivism. However, Anderson’s use of the term ‘empiricist’ is less straightforward. It is certainly consistent with the general definition of empiricism, that knowledge is based on experience, but there the connection with British empiricism ends (Hibberd, 2009). When Anderson uses the term ‘empiricist’ as a thesis about knowledge, he adopts its classical (Greek) meaning, namely, finding out by trial and error: ‘whatever we know we learn – in other words, that to know something is to come into active relations, to enter into ‘‘transactions’’, with it . . . ’ (Anderson, 1962[1962a]: 162).6 Yet, he also regarded empiricism as an ontological thesis: 40

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The distinguishing-mark [sic] of empiricism as a philosophy is that it denies this [different kinds or degrees of truth or reality], that it maintains that there is only one way of being. (Anderson, 1962[1927a]: 3) Realism is ‘ . . . an empiricist doctrine, or theory of existence as the single way of being . . . ’. (Anderson, 1962[1930]: 48)

This less conventional understanding of empiricism as ontological occurs for the following reason. Anderson argues that the long-standing dispute between extreme rationalism and empiricism always comes down to an ontological matter – whether what we can know can be of two (at least) quite different kinds or types: (a) truths other than matters of fact or objects that ‘transcend’ existence, and (b) contingent situations. His response is that both types take the situational form and so we are always concerned with a single way of being (see Hibberd, 2009). Say anything about the first type and you will find yourself affirming or denying some attribute or condition of a quantified subject, just as you would when saying something about the second type. Although Anderson regards empiricism as an ontological thesis, he does not treat experience as a fundamental category. Experience, on his account, is simply one type of relation and ‘relation’ is one of a number of categories (Hibberd, 2009). Experiencing or knowing is an occurrence or situation and what enables the knowing and what is known are also occurrences or situations. So, these ‘goings on’ are, like everything else, subject to the general categories, the general conditions of existence. Situational realism is, in part, an empiricist philosophy, but it is so only in the two senses (ontological and epistemological) just outlined. Anderson’s descriptions of his philosophy as ‘positivist’ and ‘empiricist’ are not an alignment of it with either positivist philosophy of science or British empiricism. Second, if we take up the critical realist ideas identified above, we can add to the list of ideas deemed positivist and, therefore, implausible: 7. 8.

Constant conjunction – a commitment to an Humean notion of causation; Nomologicality – science and social science are both involved in a search for universal laws; 9. D-N model – a commitment to the Hempel theory of explanation whereby explanation proceeds by deductive subsumption under universal laws (interpreted as empirical regularities); 10. Existence monism – a levels-of-reality thesis is absent, reality is not stratified but seamless. Whether Anderson is ‘guilty as charged’ with respect to these four ideas is best examined through two of critical realism’s central tenets – the levels-of-reality thesis and a notion of causal powers.

Levels of Reality Anderson’s treatment of reality as ‘only one way of being’ returns us to a central tenet of his philosophy: anything that exists or occurs is ‘a spatial and temporal situation or 41

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occurrence that is on the same level of reality as anything else that exists’ (A. J. Baker, 1986: 1). This is at odds with the ontology of critical realism.7 When Bhaskar’s philosophy was first introduced as ‘transcendental realism’ in 1975, its raison d’eˆtre was to show that the then dominant philosophy of science, empirical realism, was mistaken in its assumption that the objects of scientific knowledge ‘appear as conjunctions or sequences of events’ (Bhaskar, 1975: 100).8 Contrary to Hartwig’s (2007) belief, Anderson would have raised no objection to this aim, having shown the defects of Hume’s and Mill’s account some decades earlier (see Anderson, 1962[1938]). But as Bhaskar sees it, the problem with empirical realism as a system of philosophy (and this does mean a philosophy such as Anderson’s) is this: By constituting an ontology based on the category of experience, as expressed in the concept of the empirical world and mediated by the ideas of the actuality of the causal laws and the ubiquity of constant conjunctions, three domains of reality are collapsed into one. This prevents the question of the conditions under which experience is in fact significant in science from being posed; and the ways in which these three levels are brought into harmony or phase with one another from being described. (Bhaskar, 1978: 56–7)

Bhaskar’s metaphysical position is complex and the detail need not be provided here. Suffice it to say that there are two related ways in which he attempts to establish ontological depth with respect to natural and social phenomena. The first concerns the three domains or levels referred to in the excerpt above. These are (1) the real (causal mechanisms, series of events or occurrences and experiences), (2) the actual (series of events or occurrences and experiences only), and (3) the empirical (experienced events only). According to Bhaskar (1998a: 41), these overlapping domains are stratified and each stratum is ‘categorically distinct’. Mechanisms, events and experiences obtain at the different strata or levels of reality, though all have an equal ontological status; one is no less real than any other. Any philosophy that fails to recognize these three domains (such as Anderson’s) is judged by critical realists to be ‘actualist’. Actualism is the view that causal laws are constant conjunctions of events (Hume’s theory of causality); possibility and natural necessity are reduced to an actuality of events and/or states of affairs. This ‘denies the existence of underlying structures which determine how the things come to have their events, and instead locates the succession of cause and effect at the level of events: every time A happens, B happens’ (Collier, 1994: 7). Bhaskar’s second approach to establishing ontological depth involves the claim that the divisions of the sciences are ‘based in part on real stratification of the aspects of nature of which these sciences speak’ (Collier, 1994: 107). Specifically, an ordered series of causal (generative) mechanisms exists across strata. The laws of physics and chemistry, for example, refer to the generative mechanisms at those levels and they may explain something about biological mechanisms, though they will not explain them away. ‘The relations between the more basic and less basic domains are one-way relations of inclusion: all animals are composed of chemical substances but not all chemical substances are parts of animals, and so on’ (ibid.). So Bhaskar’s stratification of reality is also a stratification of mechanisms. Concepts of rootedness, emergence and ‘downward’ causation are also invoked. Higher-level mechanisms, those of a social kind, for 42

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example, are rooted in, and emergent from, mechanisms at a lower level. They can project their causal powers ‘downward’ and affect changes at lower levels, such as when psycho-social mechanisms bring about changes in a human body. It should be immediately obvious that situational realism does not readily accommodate the ‘actualist’ label. To repeat the point made previously, Anderson rejected Hume’s account of causality as constant conjunction. Anderson’s alternative is a philosophy of process which takes causation to be pluralistic and dynamic, one that accommodates ‘interaction at all points’. It involves an efficient cause acting upon a causal field to produce an effect (Hibberd, 2009). Granted that situational realism rejects all notions of causal powers (more about that in the following section) but this does not necessitate commitment to a constant conjunction account. And, as we have seen, Anderson’s ontology is based on categories of existence, not experience. Situational realism is not an example of the empirical realism described by Bhaskar. However, Anderson certainly thought that there are laws to be discovered in all sciences, notwithstanding the great difficulty in doing so.9 Yet he is clearly at odds with positivism over the nature of a law. He did not address criteria of nomologicality, but he would reject the positivists’ conception of laws as simply exceptionless regularities. And, given Anderson’s view of the concept of probability, he would also repudiate Hempel’s inclusion of inductive-statistical explanation into the covering law model. However, Anderson thought that laws play a role in causal explanation. Some commitment to a version of the covering law model, one that takes laws to be causal connections between situation types instantiated in particular sequences of events, is not at odds with his system. In short, situational realism supports nomologicality but rejects the D-N model of explanation. Finally, to existence monism. This is the thesis that there are not kinds or sorts or levels of existence. Anderson frequently argued that to claim otherwise leads to the problems associated with dualism. He agrees with Bhaskar (and with Hume) that cause and effect are spatio-temporally distinct and he recognizes the existence of causal mechanisms interacting with other causal mechanisms, not all of which can be observed directly. However, situational realism explicitly rejects any notion of ‘levels’ of reality (Anderson, 1962[1930]).10 This is the core of the metaphysical dispute between these two versions of realism. Anderson shuns any levels-of-reality thesis. Bhaskar thinks the notion absolutely necessary. Present-day metaphysics is replete with discussion about how a hierarchical account of nature stratified into levels is best conceptualized, and talk of ‘levels’ is particularly prominent in philosophy of mind and psychology (e.g. Martin and Sugarman, 1999). For most discussants, a non-layered world is inconceivable and seldom do they defend their position. The rationale appears to be that the structure of reality is indicated by the structure of science (Schaffer, 2003). This same rationale was offered some 90 years ago by the philosopher Samuel Alexander, a major influence on Anderson. But Anderson’s (2005[1944]) rather brusque response was to say that disciplinary distinctions among sciences have a social, not ontological, basis. Current philosophy is far more terminologically complex than in Anderson’s day. Debates about levels of reality now involve notions such as ‘mereological structures’, ‘ordered supervenience structures’, ‘ordered realization structures’ and ‘ordered nomological structures’. Yet, in spite of, or perhaps 43

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because of, these conceptual ‘tools’, the difficulty in providing a model of levels remains (Heil, 1998, 2003b; Kim, 2002). There is some consensus that the concept ‘supervenience’, which is central to the concept of emergence and a layered model of the world, is typically characterized as a purely modal notion providing no ‘ontological illumination’ or explanatory depth (Heil, 1998: 154). And it is possible that the assumption that reality is layered stems from ‘reading off’ features of the world from features of our language (Heil, 2003b: 218). Perhaps, as Kim (2002) claims, the Cartesian model of a bifurcated world has been transposed into a layered world. Certainly, Anderson’s argument against levels of reality is just that advanced against a Cartesian account of mind and against all forms of dualism (Hibberd, 2009). Adapting it to Bhaskar’s levels-of-reality thesis, the argument runs as follows: there has to be some kind of relation between Bhaskar’s ‘causal mechanisms’ (supposedly located at one level, say l1) and any effects (supposedly located at another level, say l2). Regardless of what that relation is, it has to be described as belonging to l1, the realm of generative mechanisms, but then so has the other term of the relation, effects, because relations just are the connections between the items standing in those relations. Consequently, one cannot help but treat mechanisms and their effects as joint items in a single situation. Ergo, any ontological notion of ‘different levels’ collapses. Obviously, parts of a system can be configured to form a particular relational structure and this system will have certain qualities, but this does not license the inference that its qualities exist at a higher level than its parts, nor that these qualities are ‘emergents’, nor that the psycho-social, for example, is reducible to the biological. The key point is that ‘levels’ are not part of the world’s furniture.11 Arguably, Anderson’s notion of nonlinear, causal fields is less misleading than ‘levels of reality’. In referring to that which is acted upon and which becomes X, there is no suggestion of higher emergents. Neither, then, is there any suggestion of higher emergents being more evolved than lower emergents, or of a lower basis being more substantial than that at a higher level. The notion of ‘emergents’ is a reification. An objection similar to Anderson’s rebuttal of ‘levels’ has recently been made by Kaidesoja (2007). According to critical realism, causal mechanisms are causal powers and Kaidesoja, though not dismissing a concept of causal power, laments the lack of detail pertaining to Bhaskar’s account of powers: From this perspective, it becomes problematic to answer to [sic] the question: how are causal powers of things related to actual entities (e.g. observable events, processes, things and states of affairs)? It is not enough to assert that the exercised causal powers somehow produce the actual objects of observations, because the precise nature of this relation of production remains inevitably obscure since it is hard to see how something that is categorically distinct from actual entities could produce any actual spatio-temporal effects. (Kaidesoja, 2007: 75; emphases added)

This is precisely Anderson’s point – how can interaction across levels be explained without collapsing those levels? Although Anderson and Bhaskar agree that mechanisms, events and experiences are logically independent, this does not imply a distinction between ontological levels. 44

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The Concept of Causal Powers As we have seen, one reason for Bhaskar’s insistence on levels of reality is his adherence to a concept of emergent causal powers. Generative mechanisms just are the causal powers of things (Bhaskar, 1998a: 36–7). The rudimentary features of critical realism’s account of causal powers are: 1.

2. 3.

All structures, including social structures, possess causal powers. These are their powers to effect change. Causal powers are complex, irreducible, fundamental features of this world (Bhaskar, 1998b: 80). Causal powers are potentialities which may or may not be exercised. ‘Can’ does not equal ‘does’ (Collier, 1994: 10). Tendencies are causal powers (potentialities) which are exercised (set in motion). They may not be actualized at the level of events or manifest to people. They can be set in motion and this is independent of any outcome at the level of the actual (Pinkstone and Hartwig, 2007: 458). The category mistake in philosophy is the confusion of powers and tendencies with their realization.

To quote Bhaskar: Things possess powers . . . to do and suffer things that they are not actually doing and suffering and that they may never actually do or suffer. It remains true to say of a Boeing 727 that it can (has the power to) fly 600 m.p.h. even if it is safely locked up in its hangar. (1978: 87) All men (living in certain kinds of societies) possess the power to steal; kleptomaniacs possess the tendency to do so. (1978: 230) We know what it is like to be in a situation where we tend to lose our patience or temper and we know what it is like keeping it. Tendencies exercised unfulfilled; shown, perhaps, but unrealized in virtue of our self-control. (1978: 99)

This is to say we have the power to become angry and when we feel angry some of the intrinsic enabling conditions, of a relatively enduring kind for the power’s exercise, are satisfied; we are in some state or condition to lose our temper. Bhaskar is not concerned with the effects of a tendency – there may not be any, he thinks. On any particular occasion, the kleptomaniac may not steal and we may not lose our temper. Causal powers, then, are said to be located in an ontological realm which lies beyond or behind the realms of events and experience. Hence, the critical realists’ charges of empiricism-positivism and ‘actualism’. Anderson is without a concept of powers and in maintaining that there are no levels of reality, he fails to recognize the categorial distinctions between causal powers, the events they may generate, and the experiences we may have of them.12 Within current mainstream philosophy, this area of metaphysics – powers – is topical and is said to cleanly divide empiricists from realists, unlike the levels-of-reality thesis. Following Hume, the empiricist line is that powers are nothing at all (e.g. Carnap, 1936; D. Lewis, 1997; Mackie, 1973; Ryle, 1949). Following Reid, Locke and Berkeley, the realist line is that dispositions have as their basis real, causal powers. Among presentday realist philosophers of science, a concept of powers is deemed an essential alternative 45

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to Hume’s metaphysics. Bhaskar is joined by Greenwood (1991) on this matter as they develop the ideas of their supervisor Harre´ (1970). Bennett and Hacker (2003), Ellis (2001), Heil (2003a) and Pols (1982, 1998) also retain a notion of causal powers13 as do Anderson’s students, Armstrong (1997) and Molnar (2003).13 Anderson’s (1932) dismissal of the concept of powers draws on an infinite regress argument that, according to Anderson, Hume had directed at Locke. Here is the argument: if something is actually done, it is claimed that it could only be done if a relevant power was exercised. You can only do X if the power to do X is exercised, but exercising the X power is also to do something. Thus in order to exercise the X power, we must exercise the power to exercise the X power. Now we are on the path of an infinite regress, and it is a vicious one - we can never actually do X because we are always chasing the eternally elusive, spontaneously occurring first power (McMullen, 2008, personal communication). In addressing the question of what powers do when they are not manifested, Psillos (2006) employs a similar regress argument. Many will find this argument unsatisfactory (e.g. Molnar, 2003). More telling for Bhaskar’s account is his view that: to say that X has a power to do something is to say that it possesses a structure or is of such a kind that it will do it, if the appropriate conditions obtain (Bhaskar, 1978: 88, 231). But these two statements are not equivalent. Here, as in other places throughout the critical realist literature, there is an illicit movement from a relational conception of powers, as in X having the power, or ability, or capacity to do Y, to a property-type conception, as in powers being items instantiated in structures. X having the power to do Y cannot be some kind of internal state because this takes powers to be both relational and an intrinsic property of whatever stands in that relation, thereby engaging the fallacy of constitutive relations discussed in Hibberd (2009). The relation to Y cannot be built into the structure of X. Similarly, if a power is supposed to be a component of some structure, it cannot be characterized relationally, and its intrinsic properties must be, at least in principle, discoverable. Given this erroneous conceptualization, it is unsurprising that Kaidesoja (2007) notes the absence of detail in critical realism’s conception of powers. In his The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation, Mackie (1974), a student of Anderson’s, argues that the concept of powers needs to be explained in terms of causation rather than causation in terms of powers. Interestingly, critical realism sometimes arrives at just this position, despite claims to the contrary. Take the following example: people strike matches and light cigarettes in their apartments. This is normal. But a gas leak is not normal and should not occur. So, we ascribe the cause of the explosion which wrecked the apartments to a quantity of gas rather than to someone’s lighting a cigarette. To ask what caused the explosion, is to ask ‘What made the difference between those times, or those cases, within a certain range, in which no such explosion occurred, and in this case in which an explosion did occur?’ (Mackie, 1974: 35). Mackie’s example is not a case of similar antecedents repeatedly followed contiguously by similar successors. In fact, it is consistent with Bhaskar’s observation that: When something is cited as a cause it is, I think, most typically being viewed as that factor which, in the circumstances that actually prevailed, ‘so tipped the balance of events as to produce the known outcome’. Clearly such a concept is non-Humean and generative. (1998b: 83) 46

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Both Mackie and Bhaskar refer to the factor that ‘made the difference’, that ‘tipped the balance’. (This is non-Humean.) Yet Mackie does so without the concepts of powers and tendencies. More recently, P. Lewis (2000) has drawn on Mackie’s account because he thinks that the critical realist theory of causal powers is at odds with their position that social structure is causally efficacious. Lastly, the empirical reason given for employing a concept of causal powers is that fundamental particles are said to have no internal structure: ‘What these properties are is exhausted by what they have a potential for doing’ (Molnar, 2003: 136). This, then, is thought to license the inference that such properties are ungrounded or ‘bare’ powers. Psillos (2006), however, notes that the evidence from physics is currently incomplete. One possibility is that the properties of elementary particles are grounded in symmetries (rather than being pure powers) which act as meta-laws and thereby determine ordinary laws of nature. So, like ‘levels of reality’, it is not obvious that ‘powers’ and ‘tendencies’ are part of the world’s furniture. It is possible that their only basis is in the language of ordinary discourse.

Conclusion My primary aim has been to consider the basis of critical realism’s charge of positivism recently directed at Anderson’s philosophy. In certain respects the charge differs from the commonplace misidentification of realism with positivism. The latter tends to misrepresent both philosophies in that various ideas are either incorrectly identified as positivist or mistakenly predicated of realism. Critical realism’s charge, on the other hand, appears to attribute Humean positivism to Anderson’s philosophy. But it errs in not recognizing that Anderson dismissed Hume’s theory of causality as constant conjunction, developing instead the concept of non-linear causal fields. This points to major differences between the two versions of realism regarding the concept of causation. Critical realism argues for a levels-of-reality thesis and develops the notion of causal powers. Situational realism upholds existence monism and rejects the notion of powers. Anderson repeatedly argued that to propose ‘levels’ or ‘types’ of reality inevitably leads to a form of dualism. And, importantly, the basis of situational realism’s rejection of causal powers is not an empiricism which maintains that causal powers are not real because they cannot be observed. It is rather that the critical realists’ concept of powers involves at least two fallacies – it confuses relations and properties and it entails a vicious infinite regress. Superficially, then, there is some substance to the critical realists’ charge of positivism. Yes, Anderson did think that there are laws to be discovered across all the sciences. Yes, he did defend a non-stratified reality without causal powers. But his understanding of the nature of a law is contrary to positivist philosophy, and a non-stratified reality is defended because Anderson did not think that contrary positions have or can overcome the various logical obstacles entailed in their arguments. Couple this with the fact that although Anderson shares one feature from the six ideas commonly deemed positivist – logicality – his understanding of logic is quite different. Scratch away the surface and the charge of ‘positivism’ is not much of a stick to beat the realist with. Why, then, is the positivist epitaph frequently shallow and misplaced? Psychologists and social scientists have sometimes been chided for their complacency, ignorance and 47

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distortion of ‘fundamental problems’ in their field (e.g. Bickhard, 1992; Koch, 1992; Suppe, 1984). Certainly many have not kept abreast of research in the philosophy of science. Given the vast amount of literature involved, this is excusable. What is less fathomable is the critics’ readiness to proclaim on such matters despite their unfamiliarity with that literature. Theirs, it would seem, is a quick and easy approach to conceptual and historical matters: read only secondary source material, ignore the Chinese whispers effect and follow the Zeitgeist. One consequence is that 20th century positivism and realism are not well understood. This is why social constructionism has been hailed as a viable alternative to positivism when it is not (Hibberd, 2005), why positivism and realism are sometimes said to be equivalent when they are not, and perhaps why the critical realists’ dismissal of Anderson’s philosophy is hollow. A breakdown in the process of critical inquiry is understandable in any scientific enterprise. Continuing to ignore that breakdown is not. Notes 1. How they are established and/or supported is set out in Hibberd (2009). 2. Two of those topics are critical realism’s theory of truth and its epistemology. 3. Almost 30 years ago, Wetherick (1979: 99) commented on ‘[t]he ritual denunciations of positivism which preface every account of so-called ‘‘radical’’ psychology’. 4. Precisely which version of positivism, and which of realism, the critic has in mind is never stated. 5. The term ‘positive’ was used in a similar sense by the American New Realists of the early 20th century who were ‘committed to certain positive beliefs’ (Holt et al., 1912: 31). See the entry ‘Positivist’ in Williams (1976) for the various shifts in meaning. 6. This accords with ecological approaches to knowing (e.g. Good, 2007). 7. It is also at odds with ‘levels-of-reality’ theories developed by Herbert Spencer (1922[1860]), Samuel Alexander (1920) and Conwy Lloyd Morgan (1923). They proposed an emergent evolutionism because they wanted to incorporate evolutionary theory into metaphysics. And it is contrary to more recent attempts by Nicolai Hartmann (1953[1949]) and Paul Oppenheim and Hilary Putnam (1958), among others, to develop the ‘levels-of-reality’ thesis, though Oppenheim and Putnam oppose emergentism. 8. Bhaskar’s rationale was the intelligibility of experimental practice. When experimenters work to control certain variables, they are working to prevent certain mechanisms from interacting in complicated ways and giving rise to a flux of events. Their aim is to obtain a regularity under controlled conditions so as to identify the single mechanism responsible for that regularity. Bhaskar concludes from this that mechanisms ‘lie behind’ the regularities produced in experimental settings. Causation is not simply conjunctions of events. 9. For arguments against the supposed impossibility and irrelevance of laws in the social sciences, see McIntyre (1996). McIntyre finds the arguments against a lawful science of human action to be so weak, they are little more than window dressing. 10. Of course, the word ‘levels’ can be used metaphorically in the exploratory stages of inquiry but eventually it must be cashed out. A literal meaning, explicit and detailed, has to be provided if the metaphor is not to lead inquiry in the wrong direction. Anderson would argue that ‘levels’ as a metaphor cannot be cashed out. 11. It follows that there is no ‘fundamental level’ either. 48

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12. Certainly Anderson (1962) takes the categories to be invariant across anything that exists or occurs, because ‘the whole point about categories, as contrasted with qualities, is that they apply to all material’ (Anderson, 1962[1962a]: 182). 13. Hartwig’s belief, quoted on p. 3, that Ellis’s philosophy has links to Andersonian realism is incorrect. 14. There are, of course, differences between these accounts.

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Biographical Note Fiona J. Hibberd is Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney. Her research interest is the philosophy of psychology and she is the author of Unfolding Social Constructionism (2005) and other papers. Her teaching includes the history and philosophy of psychology, psychoanalytic theories of personality and conceptual issues in psychometrics.

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