Leigh Price

The article is a lightly edited transcript of a digital roundtable discussion. The participants were invited based on their prior work on critical realism and epistemology. The roundtable discussion includes introductory statements on judgemental rationality by Jamie Morgan, Ruth Groff, Dorothea Schoppek, Leigh Price, and Frédéric Vandenberghe, followed by a discussion between the participants on a variety of topics related to judgemental rationality. The discussion demonstrates a variety of opinions and perspectives, as well as the clashing of opinions in a respectful manner. The roundtable provides interesting discussion points about Bhaskar's approach to judgemental rationality, how we adjudicate between different meta-theories (such as between that of Bhaskar and Harré), and what role should normative values have in theoretical adjudication.

Bhaskar's philosophy supports society via a process of homeostasis to resist socioecological system disintegration by developing its values and ethics in response to endogenous and exogenous change. To the contrary, positivist (first generation) and hermeneuticist (second generation) approaches to systems theory have distorted humanity's mechanism of homeostasis because, amongst other things, they disallow the use of facts to guide values/actions. Since acting on knowledge is, ceteris paribus, a given in Bhaskar's approach, resolving socioecological system problems involves correcting the method of homeostasis (our method of finding knowledge and acting on it) rather than correcting the consequences of the failure of homeostasis (the poorly informed action or inaction). This is reminiscent of Gandhi's approach to social transformation in which we trust the means to arrive at appropriate ends and it releases activists from having to be keepers of the moral high-ground or having to try to change people's behaviour.

Empirical realist ecologists, such as C. S. Holling, face significant methodological contradictions; for instance, they must cope with the problem that ecological models and theories of climate change, resilience and succession cannot make predictions in open systems. Generally, they respond to this problem by supplementing their empirical realism with transcendental idealism: they therefore say that their models are simply metaphorical or heuristic, that is, 'not true' in that they are not empirical. Thus, they explicitly deny an ontology for what their models are about. Nevertheless, in their practice, ecologists act as if their theories do have an ontology and thus tell us something truthful about the real world. This discrepancy leaves ecology vulnerable to unnecessary critique, such as that climate science is not real science. Transcendental realism offers a solution because it releases ecologists from the requirement to make predictions; but it does so without denying ontology. This provides several advantages to ecologists.

Hume maintained that, philosophically speaking, there is no difference between exiting a room out of the first-floor window and using the door. Nevertheless, Hume’s reason and common sense prevailed over his scepticism and he advocated that we should always use the door. However, we are currently living in a world that is more seriously committed to the Humean philosophy of empiricism than he was himself and thus the potential to act inappropriately is an ever-present potential. In this paper, I explore how Hume’s two versions of causality have detrimentally affected our ability both to arrive at and to use research to improve human well-being. I illustrate my argument with an example of what I think is an incorrect yet supposedly scientifically sound assumption: that absenteeism causes poor school attainment. Instead I make the interdisciplinary argument that absenteeism is better understood as an aggravating symptom of a number of other causes of poor attainment, such as poverty and individual psychological factors. I suggest that an instrumental, punitive policy against parents whose children tend to be absent from school may be ineffectual or even counterproductive if the objective is to improve the well-being of those children. To support my argument, I introduce the critical realist idea of transfactuality. Using the example of research into moon rocks, I show how mainstream science uses transfactuality despite its empiricist aversion to it. I also suggest that it is our honesty, integrity, and stoicism that lead us to the extreme overthrow of reason and common sense that we see today in many of the UK’s social policies; an overthrow that Hume himself did not achieve. Metaphorically speaking, British professionals, stoically and honestly believing in the ability of their trusted research correlations to guide their action, are exiting out of the first-floor window rather than using the door. This is a significant barrier to our ability to devise and implement social policy.

This is an account of the emancipatory struggle that faces agents who seek to change the oppressive social structures associated with neo-liberalism. We begin by ‘digging amongst the bones’ of the calls for resistance that have been declared dead or assimilated/co-opted by neoliberal theorists. This leads us to unearth, then utilize, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness and Shiv Visvanathan's ideas; which are examples of Roy Bhaskar’s transformative dialectic. We argue, using examples, that cognitive justice – a concept common to each of our chosen theorists – is vital in enabling emancipatory social learning. By embracing cognitive justice, the agents gained confidence, which led to their increased ability to champion community and non-academic knowledge. It also uncovered structural tensions – attendant in neoliberalism – around privilege. By articulating these tensions, the participants were able to ‘come closer together’. Such processes, initiated by ensuring cognitive justice, are possible steps in achieving universal solidarity; which is likely to be a necessary step along the path of achieving emancipation.

There are grave issues with how the U.K. government approaches the issue of wellbeing. Specifically, policy interventions that might improve the material conditions of citizens are being down-played, and at times out-rightly dismissed. Instead, an individualist, instrumental message is being promoted, namely, that the best way to improve wellbeing is by improving individual happiness and mental health. I argue that this instrumental message – which in practice blames the victims for their lack of happiness and removes state responsibility – can be made to sound feasible because of a reliance on positivist-based research, whether obtained objectively or subjectively. In this paper, I therefore detail the failings of mainstream wellbeing research and its policy conclusions, and argue that critical realism offers solutions.

Southern Africa, where most of these book chapters originate, has been identified as one of regions of the world most at risk of the consequences of environmental degradation and climate change. At the same time, it is still seeking ways to overcome the century long ravages of colonial and apartheid impositions of structural and epistemic violence. Research deliberations and applied research case studies in environmental education and activism from this region provide an emerging contextualized engagement that is related to a wider internationally articulated quest to achieve social-ecological justice, resilience and sustainability through educational interventions. This book introduces a decade of mainly southern African critical realist environmental education research and thinking that asks the question: "How can we facilitate learning processes that will lead to the flourishing of the Earth’s people and ecosystems in more socially just ways?" The environmental education research topics represented in this book are wide-ranging. However, they all exhibit the common theme of social justice and wanting to create change towards a better future. All the authors have used critical realist or critical realist-influenced research methodologies. Offering contributions from a small but growing community of researchers working with critical realism in the global South, this book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners in the areas of environmental education, sustainability, development and the philosophy of critical realism in general.

In this paper I argue for the superiority of a critical realist understanding of interdisciplinarity over a mainstream understanding of it. I begin by exploring the reasons for the failure of mainstream researchers to achieve interdisciplinarity. My main argument is that mainstream interdisciplinary researchers tend to hypostatize facts, fetishize constant conjunctions of events and apply to open systems an epistemology designed for closed systems. I also explain how mainstream interdisciplinarity supports oppression and gross inequality. I argue that mainstream interdisciplinarity is not true interdisciplinarity and refer to it accordingly as ‘condisciplinarity’. By way of example, I examine the condisciplinarity of the World Health Organization’s ecological model applied to the issue of men’s violence against women. Specifically, I argue that critical realist interdisciplinarity is preferable because it acknowledges inter alia the empirical, actual and real layers of reality, which allows it to develop depth-explanations of phenomena. In practice, this means that critical realist interdisciplinarity can potentially provide explanations that, compared to condisciplinarity, are broader (include more of the human and non-human context) and deeper (include for example individuals’ conscious and unconscious psychological motivations). In the World Health Organization’s example of the causes of men’s violence against women, condisciplinarity resulted in the absence of historical, global and unconscious aspects of the problem. It is also restricted the analysis to reductive, constant-conjunction based theories of the causes of the problem, specifically ‘risk factors’, thereby providing a relatively shallow explanation for the problem.

This study originates out of my experience as an environmental educator working within business and industry in Zimbabwe and South Africa. It is motivated by my observation that, despite much environmental rhetoric and training, environmental education in industry rarely leads to significant advances towards environmental protection. I assume that the problem of the mismatch between rhetoric and action involves both semiotic and non-semiotic components and therefore, after a thorough exploration of my methodological options, I adopt a qualitative transdisciplinary textual analysis of relevant documents using Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis and Bhaskar’s Dialectical Critical Realism, with some insights taken from Bhaskar’s more recent concept of Meta-Reality. My main conclusions from the study indicate that causally efficacious philosophical mistakes, relating to theories of structure/agency and theories of epistemology, are an important aspect of the problem being considered. Specifically, I demonstrate that these mistakes function to buttress ideology and its attendant contradictions which in turn function to provide the preconditions that maintain inequalities and poor environmental practice in business and industry. Prior and current events, such as climate change and the trend towards globalisation, the ‘free market economy’ and psychological characteristics of the author, relevant to the problem, are also important. In line with Bhaskar’s emancipatory aim for explanatory critique, I end with tentative recommendations for a re-imagined environmental education for business and industry which require action. Consistent with my methodological choices, my recommendations have a universal application, despite my focus on texts from South Africa and Zimbabwe. My recommendations are summarised below: • there should be consistency between theory and practice such that performance contradictions are avoided; • we should not act from a fear of survival based on past, no longer relevant experiences as this is unlikely to be an adequate base for present actions; • we should avoid voluntarism by acting with the resources at our disposal, based on a true understanding of our strengths and weaknesses and our own specificities; • we should avoid assuming the stance of the ‘victim’ by refusing to blame other agents or circumstances, without distorting or underestimating the causal efficacy of those agents or circumstances ; • we should direct our action towards the abolition of inequalities and master-slave relationships ; • we should act from the position of epistemological humility, rather than from the position of epistemological privilege; • we should consider action as ‘shedding’ based on an understanding of the Transformational Model of Social Activity ; and • we should consider learning to be ‘shedding’ based on the necessity of knowledge, or ignorance, as a requirement of arriving at relatively new knowledge. This study is also a contribution to contemporary methodological discussions relevant to Critical Discourse Analysis in that it extends these discussions to include psychoanalytical depth explanations of lived illusion. Furthermore, this study is an experimental attempt to apply the concept of ‘meta-reflexivity’ in Critical Discourse Analysis