Bhaskar views facts as social constructions that are conceptualizations of the world and exist in what he terms the transitive dimension of science (RTS 57, 196; RR 9, 60; SRHE 94-5, 283). Bhaskar conceives the world as containing mechanisms at the ontological level of the real that generate phenomena (events and situations) at the ontological level of the actual, and we conceptualize these events and situations into transitive facts, which are social products and subject to conceptual change. Thus facts, unlike events and situations, cannot exist in a world without intelligent beings.
As our conceptual toolkit changes, so does the way we
conceptualize events and situations. Critical realism
conceptualizes events and situations in relation to the real
mechanisms which generate them, rather than conceiving them
as atoms that determine our knowledge of them without any
kind of mediation. (See
Now if we want to claim that all facts are relative to a perspective, then it may seem that we have to ignore the relativity of the perspective from which the claim is advanced, which is termed "Nietschean forgetting." Bhaskar resolves this antinomy by holding that perspectives are real (PE 77) and are parts of totalities in which agents are embedded. The perspective from which the claim about perspectives is made is part of a totality essentially relating the real perspectives the claim is about. This totality is the stratified self, and its structure eliminates the need for "forgetting" the perspective from which one makes the claim that all perspectives are relative (PE 80, 198-9).
Copyright © 1997 Louis Irwin
| Abbreviations |
|
All Works by Roy Bhaskar:
|
