3.2 Foundation of Pragmatism
3.2.5 Critical Realism
Critical realism is similar to pragmatism in many ways. Critical realism has a striated view of the world which influences how the world is experienced - the real, the actual and the empirical (Bhaskar, 2008). The striations resemble Peirce’s classifications of firstness, secondness, and thirdness (Plowright, 2016). For both pragmatism and critical realism, reality is unknowable (Heeks et al., 2019; Johnson & Duberley, 2000). Both pragmatism and critical realism promote mixed-methods approaches for research (Mingers, 2001). Each philosophy starts with a problem and relies on abduction to understand the situation (Heeks & Wall, 2018; Miettinen, 2000) and both rely on the potential for action. Pragmatism considers the potential for action (Plowright, 2016; Wehrwein, 2019), while Bhaskar deems one theory preferable to another if it has the potential to achieve “a new order of epistemic (explanatory and/ or taxonomic) integration, or at least show grounded promise of being able to do so”
(Bhaskar, 2009, p. 55).
Critical realism differs from pragmatism in identifying ontological structures in the real domain, which cause the mechanisms in the actual domain (Heeks et al., 2019), while pragmatism ignores ontology (Johnson & Duberley, 2000). The pragmatist reasoning is that no habitual action can be formed if something is not knowable, and there is no pragmatic
98 value in pursuing the notion. Whereas critical realism lacks a formally structured methodology, pragmatism encourages methods that lead to habits that determine action.
Peirce’s pragmatism is woven around semiotics, whereas a similar concept of affordances has been a recent addition to critical realism (Bygstad et al., 2016; Volkoff & Strong, 2013).
Critical realism is a research paradigm located on a continuum between positivism and interpretivism (Heeks et al., 2019). Critical realism can overcome Cartesian dualism by accepting that there is an objective view of reality that is positivist, but, like interpretivism, the knowledge of that reality is socially constructed (Heeks et al., 2019). Critical realism creates knowledge of reality and not reality itself (Willig, 1999) and is critical because all viewpoints are mediated by perceptions and theoretical lenses (epistemic relativity). It does not accept judgmental relativity regarding all views as equally valid (Mingers et al., 2013).
Consequently, critical realism accepts an ontology beyond human comprehension and epistemology that exists through social practices. Like social constructionism, which views knowledge as localised and potentially applicable in other circumstances, critical realism considers socially constructed knowledge potentially applicable to different situations. On the other hand, critical realism seeks potential objective mechanisms that could cause the observed phenomena. The potential mechanisms have the capability of producing similar results in alternate situations but are themselves guided by deeper structures that may result in dissimilar outcomes. In these situations, the mechanisms and structures, if they exist, do not change. Only our understanding of the mechanisms change (Heeks & Wall, 2018; Willig, 1999).
The striated ontology of critical realism used to explain a socially constructed epistemology over a realist ontology is depicted in Figure 3.1. At the lowest level, observable transient phenomena and events occur in an empirical domain that human senses can observe and test. The empirical domain exists within the greater actual domain in which transient events exist that may either be experienced or that cannot be experienced (non-events) by humans.
Mechanisms and structures bring about the events in the actual domain with enduring structures in the real domain (Heeks et al., 2019; Heeks & Wall, 2018; Mingers, 2004; Willig, 1999). The lower levels (empirical domain to actual domain) are considered transitive, and the higher levels (actual domain to real domain) are intransitive.
99 Figure 3.1 The stratified ontology of critical reality (Mingers, 2004).
Social practices are infinitely variable and do not endure in the same way as structures.
Nevertheless, the concepts, relationships and structures used in social practices must pre- exist their use (Mingers et al., 2013). If a practice had to create the relevant structures each time it was used, actors outside the practice would have to relearn the practice each time.
Hence social practices must have a degree of persistence or morphostatic properties (Archer, 2010). Most social practices' performance is based on a structural domain of mechanisms - materials, resources, concepts, practices and relationships - that exist and endure. These mechanisms may not be observable in the real and actual domains (intransitive) but are detectable in the empirical domain (transitive) (Mingers et al., 2013). Critical realism revolves around identifying structures in the real domain and the possible generative mechanisms that cause the events to occur in the actual and empirical domains. Identifying structures and mechanisms that may not be observable is accomplished through a process of retroduction (Mingers et al., 2013).
Retroduction is fundamentally the same as Peirce's abduction used in pragmatism (Heeks &
Wall, 2018). Retroduction starts with an observed event and proposes hypothetical structures and mechanisms that could generate the observed event if the structures and mechanisms existed. The third phase seeks to test the potential explanations, eliminate those that do not fit the observed outcome, and substantiate the belief in the most likely explanations (Mingers et al., 2013). The common critical realist method is known as “DREI” and seeks to describe the event, retroduce explanatory mechanisms, eliminate incorrect hypotheses and identify
100 adequate mechanisms. Bhaskar added to the DREI acronym to become DREIC, where C stands for correction. Correction relates to updating the understanding of the potential mechanisms in the light of new knowledge (Edwards et al., 2014). A similar abductive process is retrodiction which is comparable to retroduction. Elder-Vass (2007) argues that retroduction identifies the mechanisms from outcomes (hence inductive), and retrodiction analyses how the mechanisms interact in the causation of actual events (or outcomes and thus deductive).
Critical realism resists reductionism, with Bhaskar warning of the epistemic fallacy of reducing our knowledge of the world to our experiences (Mingers et al., 2013). While this is contrary to the pragmatist view of practices shaping our world, it provides the opportunity for conceptualising controlling influences that may affect practices. Critical realist mechanisms offer a starting point for abduction in pragmatism. Simultaneously, pragmatist observations of practice in the critical realist empirical domain can help confirm or refute the abductively derived mechanisms and allow retrodictive (deductive-abduction) testing.