Editing Roy Bhaskar (section)

== Transcendental realism ==
'Transcendental realism' was the term used by Bhaskar to describe the argument that he developed in his first book, ''A Realist Theory of Science'' (1975).<ref>{{Cite book|last=Bhaskar, Roy, 1944-2014.|title=A realist theory of science|date=2008|publisher=Verso|isbn=978-1-84467-204-2|location=London|page=25|oclc=154707552}}</ref> (Not to be confused with [[Transcendental realism (Schelling)|F. W. J. Schelling's transcendental realism]], or [[Transcendental realism (Schopenhauer)|Arthur Schopenhauer's transcendental realism]].) The position is based on Bhaskar's [[transcendental arguments]] for certain [[Ontology (philosophy)|ontological]] and [[Epistemology|epistemological]] positions based on what reality must be like for scientific knowledge to be possible.

=== Transitive and intransitive domains ===
''A'' ''Realist Theory of Science'' starts with a proposed paradox: how do people create knowledge as a product of social activities since knowledge is of things that are not at all produced by people?<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|last=Bhaskar, Roy, 1944-2014.|title=A realist theory of science|date=2008|publisher=Verso|isbn=978-1-84467-204-2|edition=3rd|location=London|page=21|oclc=154707552}}</ref>

The former is inspired by [[Thomas Kuhn|Kuhnian]] arguments of how scientific communities develop knowledge and asserts all observation is theory-laden based on previously acquired concepts. As such, it is not a [[Philosophical realism#Na.C3.AFve realism|naïve realist]] perspective of knowledge being a direct acquisition of facts through observation of the real world, but it rather considers knowledge to be fallible. That aspect of knowledge is described as the ''transitive domain of knowledge'' in that knowledge can change over time.

The second part of the paradox is asserted to be based on a real world, which exists and behaves in the same manner regardless of whether or not people exist or whether they know about the real world. That is described as the ''intransitive objects of knowledge''.<ref name=":0" />

Bhaskar refers to the elimination of the intransitive objects of knowledge and thus the reduction of ontology to epistemology as the ''epistemic fallacy'', which Bhaskar asserts has been made repeatedly over the last 300 years of philosophy of science. The epistemic fallacy "consists in the view that statements about being can be reduced to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge".<ref>{{Cite book|last=Bhaskar, Roy, 1944-2014.|title=A realist theory of science|date=2008|publisher=Verso|isbn=978-1-84467-204-2|edition=3rd|location=London|page=36|oclc=154707552}}</ref>

=== Transcendental argument from experimental science ===
The core argument of ''A Realist Theory of Science'' begins as a critique of positivist/empiricist understandings of how science works. Bhaskar focuses on the empiricist argument that science produces true knowledge of invariant causal laws by observing causal regularities: "a constant conjunction of events perceived".<ref name="Bhaskar, Roy, 1944-2014. 2008 33">{{Cite book|last=Bhaskar, Roy, 1944-2014.|title=A realist theory of science|date=2008|publisher=Verso|isbn=978-1-84467-204-2|location=London|page=33|oclc=154707552}}</ref> Bhaskar develops what he calls an immanent critique of empiricism in which he takes some of its core assumptions as correct for the purpose of the argument and then shows that to lead to an incoherence in the empiricist argument. In particular, he accepts the premise that experimental science produces useful knowledge (although he does not commit himself to the claim that the knowledge that it produces is true) and then asks what the world must be like if that is the case.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Bhaskar, Roy, 1944-2014.|title=A realist theory of science|date=2008|publisher=Verso|isbn=978-1-84467-204-2|location=London|page=36|oclc=154707552}}</ref> In that sense, his arguments take a similar form to Kant's transcendental arguments, a term that he employs to describe them.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Bhaskar, Roy, 1944-2014.|title=A realist theory of science|date=2008|publisher=Verso|isbn=978-1-84467-204-2|location=London|page=30|oclc=154707552}}</ref>

He argues that experimental science is necessary only when and because "the pattern of events forthcoming under experimental conditions would not be forthcoming without it".<ref name="Bhaskar, Roy, 1944-2014. 2008 33"/> In experiments, scientists manipulate the conditions to exclude some causal factors so that they can focus on others. Any causal regularity observed is then in part the product of their activity, which is necessary only because the causal regularities do not occur consistently in the outside world, which Bhaskar calls ''open systems''. The regularities are therefore not constant conjunctions in the sense required by empiricism. They are however believed to produce useful knowledge of how the world works, and in particular, scientists form beliefs about how the world outside the laboratory works on the basis of their experiment; however, scientists know that outside the laboratory, the constant conjunctions do not occur. Indeed, doing experimental science makes sense only if it tells us something useful about what occurs beyond the laboratory.<ref name="Bhaskar, Roy, 1944-2014. 2008 33"/>

What experimental scientists are learning about, therefore, cannot be causal laws, which are understood as invariant patterns of events. Instead, Bhaskar argues that they are learning about causal mechanisms, which operate as tendencies in the sense that they tend to but do not always bring about certain outcomes.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Bhaskar, Roy, 1944-2014.|title=A realist theory of science|date=2008|publisher=Verso|isbn=978-1-84467-204-2|location=London|page=49|oclc=154707552}}</ref> They may operate only under certain conditions, or they may be obstructed by other causal mechanisms since multiple mechanisms interact to produce any given event.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Bhaskar, Roy, 1944-2014.|title=A realist theory of science|date=2008|publisher=Verso|isbn=978-1-84467-204-2|location=London|pages=46–7|oclc=154707552}}</ref> The role of experimental scientists is to prevent such obstructions to allow the isolation of a particular mechanism.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Bhaskar, Roy, 1944-2014.|title=A realist theory of science|date=2008|publisher=Verso|isbn=978-1-84467-204-2|location=London|pages=46, 53|oclc=154707552}}</ref> Mechanisms, or ''generative mechanisms'', as he often calls them, are in turn properties of things (objects), and he usually identifies them as well with the ''causal powers'' of those things.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Bhaskar, Roy, 1944-2014.|title=A realist theory of science|date=2008|publisher=Verso|isbn=978-1-84467-204-2|location=London|page=50|oclc=154707552}}</ref>

=== Real, actual and empirical domains ===
On that basis, Bhaskar argues that the world can be divided into nested domains of the ''real'', the ''actual'' and the ''empirical''. 
{| class="wikitable"
|+The domains of depth ontology<ref name=":1">{{Cite book|last=Bhaskar|first=Roy|title=A realist theory of science|date=2008|publisher=Verso|isbn=978-1-84467-204-2|location=London|page=56|oclc=154707552|quote=Table 1.1}}</ref>
!
!Domain of Real
!Domain of Actual
!Domain of Empirical
|-
|Mechanisms
|x
|
|
|-
|Events
|x
|x
|
|-
|Experiences
|x
|x
|x
|}
The ''empirical'' contains the events that people actually experience. It is a subset of the ''actual'', the full set of events that actually occur, regardless of whether or not people are aware of them. That, in turn, is a subset of the ''real'' which includes objects, their structures and their causal powers as well.<ref name=":1" /> It is important to note that the objects and structures may be able to exert certain causal powers, but the powers may not affect a given situation if the triggering conditions are not present, and even if they are triggered, their characteristic effects may not be actualized if other causal powers obstruct them. The error of empiricism, then, is to build its ontology purely on the category of experience and thus to collapse all three domains into one.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Bhaskar|first=Roy|title=A realist theory of science|date=2008|publisher=Verso|isbn=978-1-84467-204-2|location=London|pages=56–7|oclc=154707552}}</ref>

=== Stratification and emergence ===
For Bhaskar, the causal powers of things depend on their structure as complex objects.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Bhaskar|first=Roy|title=A realist theory of science|date=2008|publisher=Verso|isbn=978-1-84467-204-2|location=London|page=51|oclc=154707552}}</ref> They are [[Emergence|emergent]] in the sense that they are properties of the whole that appear only as a result of the parts being structured as they are in this type of whole. As Collier explains in his book on Bhaskar's critical realism, that leads to a view of wholes as composed of parts, which are themselves wholes with their own emergent powers.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Collier|first=Andrew|title=Critical realism: an introduction to Roy Bhaskar's philosophy|date=1994|publisher=Verso|isbn=0-86091-437-2|location=London|page=117|oclc=29477588}}</ref> Reality is thus stratified in two senses: in the sense implicit in the division between the empirical, the actual and the real and also in the sense that it consists of things composed of parts that are themselves things at a lower level of stratification.

The relationships between objects and the combinations of their causal powers may create entirely new structures with new causal powers. A typical example is water, which has a causal power of extinguishing fire, but it is made up of hydrogen and oxygen that have causal powers of combustion.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Sayer|first=R. Andrew|title=Method in social science: a realist approach|date=1992|publisher=Routledge|isbn=0-203-31076-4|edition=2nd|location=London|page=119|oclc=52112061}}</ref> That stratification spans in all sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, sociology etc. That implies that objects in sociology (labour markets, capitalism etc.) are just as real as those in physics. The position is not [[Reductionism|reductionist]]: each stratum depends on the objects and their relationships in the strata below it, but the difference in causal powers means that they are necessarily different objects.