Tobin Nellhaus

Much of Charles S. Peirce's philosophy hinges on his “universal categories” of Firstness (qualities, potentialities), Secondness (action, otherness) and Thirdness (relationship, rule‐boundedness). Despite their abstractness, the categories have concrete applications and shed light on several critical realist theories, such as its ontological domains, its social ontology and its more nascent semiotics. Using Peirce's categories this way requires building on his effectively non‐deterministic materialist arguments and extricating his ontology from his better‐known phenomenology. Peirce's universal categories, which are stratified and emergent, unearth a systematic pattern unifying critical realist ontologies and address certain problems else- where in critical realist philosophy. Most significantly, Peirce's semiotics provides critical realism with the mechanism con- necting epistemology to ontology and grounds a case for reconceptualizing critical realism's empirical domain as the semiosic domain.

Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the virtual is rooted in a tradition that conceptualizes it in terms of potentiality rather than illusion or falsity. His theory of the relationship between the virtual, the actual, the real, and the possible presents similarities with critical realism’s ontological domains of the real and the actual, and thus offers alternative and/or additional realist ways of thinking about those domains, especially regarding causal powers residing in relationships rather than entities. Virtuality applies to the empirical domain as well due to experience’s grounding in signs, which are relational. Deleuze also employs virtuality to formulate a concept of simulacra, which illuminates the nature of scientific models and provides a starting point for a critical realist approach to artworks.

The concept of the three domains of reality is widely used in empirical critical realist research. However, there has been little scrutiny of how the domains are conceptualized and what they contribute to critical realism and how they should be applied in empirical research. This paper involves four arguments. First, Tom Fryer and Cristián Navarrete argue that the three domains of reality are redundant, confusing, and unsupported by Bhaskar’s theorizing. Second, Dave Elder-Vass argues that the three domains schema embodies a distinction between the actual and the non-actual real. Regardless of whether we call them domains we need to retain this distinction. Third, Tobin Nellhaus argues that there are several reasons to uphold the three domains, but ‘the empirical’ is flawed and must be enfolded within a more encompassing theory. Fourth, Ruth Groff argues that the metaphor of ontological stratification is a problem when readers take it literally, often misconstruing the actual metaphysical content that it is meant to capture.

Even though sign-systems are a crucial part of society, critical realism, as developed by Roy Bhaskar, does not yet have an adequate theory of signs and semiosis. The few suggestions that Bhaskar offers can be advanced through the semiotics of C.S. Peirce. In doing so, however, it becomes necessary to reconsider Bhaskar's ontological domains of the real, the actual, and the subjective, and expand the last domain into one of semiosis. This new understanding of ontological domains, incorporating Peirceian semiotics, provides the basis for rethinking the ontology of society: the customary dyad structures/agents becomes the triad structures/agents/discourses, each of which possesses material, sociological, and meaningful aspects.

From oral culture, through the advent of literacy, to the introduction of printing, to the development of electronic media, communication structures have radically altered culture in profound ways. As the first book to take a critical realist approach to culture, Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism examines theatre and its history through the interaction of society’s structures, agents, and discourses. Tobin Nellhaus shows that communication structure—a culture’s use and development of speech, handwriting, printing, and electronics—explains much about why, when, and how theatre has transformed.

Most work on reflexivity has focused on individuals exercising their reflexivity through discourse. However, agents have three major aspects (intentionality, causal efficacy and embodiment) and they are fundamentally social. This article examines the possibility of collective reflexivity conducted not just by saying, but also by doing—that is, through their embodiment. By expanding the concept of ‘performatives’ to encompass not just speech acts but also acts that speak (i.e. embodied activities as socially meaningful) and applying the work of Charles S. Peirce in order to develop an ontology of embodied reflexivity, it becomes possible to determine several criteria defining embodied collective reflexivity. Assessing possibilities such as legislative debate, political demonstrations, religious ritual and dramatic performance reveals that a certain set of practices does in fact meet those criteria and discloses additional aspects of what constitutes embodied collective reflexivity.