Editing Roy Bhaskar (section)

== Original critical realism ==
The first 'phase' of Critical Realism accrued a large number of adherents and proponents in Britain, many of whom were involved with the ''[[Radical Philosophy]]'' Group and related movements. The ''Radical Philosophy'' journal was where much of the early CR scholarship first appeared. It argued for an objectivist realist approach to science based on a [[Immanuel Kant|Kantian]] transcendental analysis of scientific experimental activity. Stressing the need to retain both the subjective epistemological, or 'transitive', side of knowledge and the objective ontological, or 'intransitive', side, Bhaskar developed a theory of science and social science that he thought would sustain the reality of the objects of science and their knowability but would also incorporate the insights of the '[[sociology of knowledge]]' movement, which emphasised the theory-laden, historically contingent and socially-situated nature of knowledge.

What emerged was a marriage of ontological realism with epistemological relativism that formed an objectivist yet fallibilist theory of knowledge. Bhaskar's main strategy was to argue that reality has depth and that knowledge can penetrate more or less deeply into reality without ever reaching the bottom. Bhaskar said that he reintroduced [[ontology]] into the [[philosophy of science]] when that was almost heresy. He argued for an ontology of stratified [[emergence]] and differentiated structure, which supported the ontological reality of causal powers independent of their empirical effects. Such a move opened up the possibility for a non-reductivist and non-positivistic account of causal explanation in the human and social domain.

That explanatory project was linked with a critical project, the main idea of which is the doctrine of Explanatory Critique. Bhaskar developed it fully in ''Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation'' (1987), which developed the critical tradition of [[ideology critique]] within a CR framework by arguing that certain kinds of explanatory accounts could lead directly to evaluations and so science could function normatively, not just descriptively, as positivism has assumed since [[Hume's law]]. Such a move, it was hoped, would provide the Holy Grail of critical theory, an objective normative foundation.