Blackwell Reference Online

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Critical realism in its contemporary usage emerged out of debates in the philosophy of science in the 1970s (e.g., Harré & Madden 1975 ; Bhaskar 1997 ). It focused on what could be argued from the relative success of laboratory experiment to create artificial closed systems where causal relationships could be isolated and explored. It was argued that such closed systems of regular causal relations were rare outside the laboratory and that non-social reality consisted of complex and stratified structures in open or variable and changing systems. The purpose of natural science method was to explain the powers of these structures as tendencies to act in particular ways. Because, in the ordinary course of things, regular outcomes were rare outside the laboratory it was then inferred that reality could be analytically distinguished into structures, the outcome of their complex interplay, and human experience, perception, or interpretation of those outcomes. It was then argued that this distinction could make sense of the difference between theory and the rest of reality in quite a different way than the philosophies of idealism or materialist empiricism ( Morgan 2006 ). Idealism argues that reality is mind-dependent, while materialist empiricism argues that reality consists of a series of external objects of sense perception that are the basis of causal laws. Critical realism argued ... log in or subscribe to read full text