A guest post by Tom Fryer and Cristián Navarrete.
This blog is adapted from the introduction of Revisiting Realist Theory of Science (2024) by Tom Fryer and Cristián Navarrete. The full version of the book, which aims to introduce Bhaskar’s A Realist Theory of Science (1975) to a non-specialist audience, can be found here.
A Realist Theory of Science is an incredibly valuable book.
Revisiting Realist Theory of Science: A Practical Guide, dreamt up by yours truly (Tom and Cristián), is also a book.
In RTS, originally published in 1975, Roy Bhaskar manages to simultaneously strike a hammer blow to positivism, begin a rebuttal of social constructionism, and outline a nuanced description of the basic features of the world. That’s pretty good going.
When I (Tom) first read RTS—or at least after I’d read Andrew Collier’s brilliant Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy, before returning to give RTS a second shot—I was blown away. I was in the early stages of my PhD, largely flip-flopping between different research questions and designs, and into that caffeinated confusion came RTS. It was exactly what I’d been looking for.
Sometimes you just read something and it resonates with you. It clarifies some vague and uncomfortable feeling that you’ve got that you’ve not quite been able to put into words. And more than that, it gives you some of the tools to move past the thing that was making you uncomfortable in the first place. That was RTS for me.
Let me be a bit more specific. I’d had a sneaky suspicion that ontology and epistemology were super important for research, but the way these were taught in research methods classes didn’t seem to do them justice. I really do think this is an issue. Or to bring Cristián back into this, we really think this is an issue. And it’s one we hope to help address in this book.
We think there’s better ways to teach ontology and epistemology than: “Here’s the options, pick one and be consistent. Good lass, now off you pop.” Don’t get us wrong, we’re firm believers that consistency is important (as long as this isn’t blind faith to a position), but there’s more to it than that. Just like our research aims to use the best explanations and theories for whatever we’re studying, the same applies to ontology and epistemology. Ideally, we should reflect on the strengths and limitations of our philosophical theories, the ways they have been critiqued by others, and then take an informed decision on which position (or combination of positions) to adopt. That’s much more demanding than just being consistent.
Throughout this book we’ll explain why we think ontology and epistemology are essential for everyone (well, all researchers at least). They have implications for your research questions, literature review, methodology, analysis, findings and conclusions. So, pretty much everything really.
This book is an attempt to introduce some of this thinking about ontology and epistemology, hopefully in a vaguely accessible way.
This accessibility is really important to us. Let’s face it, philosophy can be a pretty daunting discipline for many applied social scientists. It’s just not feasible for everyone to take 6 to 12 months out of their PhD to read and engage with this stuff. Sure, go for it, if that’s what floats your boat—it’ll be a fun conversation with your supervisor (cough, cough)—but for many this really isn’t possible (or what you want to do, in any shape or form).
We think there’s a real space for work that tries to translate the insights from philosophy of science, without necessarily getting bogged down in all the details.
We’ve often struggled to help people take initial steps in learning about critical realism. While there’s some great books out there, like those by Berth Danermark and colleagues (2019) or Doug Porpora (2015), we always found ourselves coming back to the advice: “Well, if you really want to get all this stuff, as in like really get it, then you probably need to read RTS”. There’s just something fundamental about the way Bhaskar reaches his conclusions in RTS (the method is as powerful as the conclusions) that means reading RTS is essential to really get what critical realism is on about.
But, and it’s a big but, we always made this recommendation with a slightly heavy heart. RTS is a tough read. It’s primarily aimed at a philosophy of science audience, and this means that it’s engaged in a range of discipline-specific debates, the same type of niche debates you find in all areas of academia. This means it’s not always the easiest text for practical social science researchers to engage with and learn from. That’s why a core aim of this book is to communicate critical realism’s insights and lessons to a non-specialist audience.
To put this another way, Revisiting RTS was born from the belief that RTS has amazing insights that all social science researchers could benefit from, but there’s space for communicating this in a different way.
So, in this book we’ve organised things into four chapters:
- What is ontology and epistemology and why do we need them?
- What is critical realism and how does it reach its conclusions?
- What are the main critical realist conclusions from RTS?
- What are the implications for our work?
If you’re familiar with RTS, you’ll see that our organisation doesn’t stick to its structure. This is because we’re not aiming to give a commentary that follows chapter by chapter. We don’t think this is the most effective way of introducing and building on the theorising from RTS.
In the second and third chapters we get to the heart of critical realism and its key ideas. The second chapter maps out the method Bhaskar uses in RTS to reach his conclusions, and the third (long) chapter maps out what these conclusions actually are.
We’ve then ended the book with a chapter focussed on methodology and the implications critical realism has for your research. In some ways this reflects our own bias – we’re health (Cristián) and education (Tom) researchers. This means we’re primarily interested in critical realism because it helps us do better research. Sure, sometimes we end up down an interesting philosophical rabbit hole, but ultimately what keeps us going is the practical usefulness of critical realism. This meant we didn’t want to stop with an abstract discussion of ontology and epistemology, but instead we wanted to help you unpack the implications for your practical research. Again, we hope this is useful to some of you.
Revisiting Realist Theory of Science (2024) by Tom Fryer and Cristián Navarrete can be found here. We’re keen for this to be living document, one that is updated, adapted and extended over time to become a more useful teaching resource. This will only happen with engagement from the realist community, so please do reach out to one or both of us – we’d love to hear from you.