Postscript
Since we wrote the first edition of this book, critical realism has become much better known, and there has been a flood of new literature. Much of this provides clear and introductory accounts of realist philosophy and its application to the social sciences, while other works engage in substantive research in specific disciplines (or across disciplinary perspectives).
There are now significant differences of approach within the broadly defined ‘school' of critical realism. These have been provoked most especially by the attempts by some of the originators of the approach to extend it to a philosophical defence of religious or spiritual beliefs. This has been resisted by others as undermining the more modest role of the approach as ‘underlabourer' for secular scientific work. Developments in the wider social and political context of social theorizing have also had their consequences for the directions taken by critical realism. There has been a growing concern with the approach as a basis for understanding the relationship between socioeconomic processes and the natural environment, and, along with the decline in explicit commitment to Marxian analysis among the social scientific academy, there has been continuing discussion about the relationship between critical realism and Marxism, as well as other ‘critical' theories.Since the publication of the second edition of this book, there have been important developments within critical realist philosophy, increased diversity within the approach itself and also commentary from other versions of realism. Among the developments within critical realism is a series of publications under the editorship of Margaret Archer (discussed further in Chapter 12), and books by Douglas Porpora (2015), David Elder-Vass (2010), an edited collection celebrating the work of Peter Dickens (Ormrod 2016), a new edition of Garry Potter (2000, 2015) and numerous contributions to the Journal of Critical Realism. A collection of essays edited by Zahle and Finn (2014) on the debate between individualists and holists in social theory also has a clear relevance to critical realism, and includes essays by prominent critical realist theorists.
Daniel Little has developed a popular blog into an extremely clear and valuable critical survey of varieties of realism, including critical realism (2017), and expounding his own version of ‘scientific realism’. This will be discussed in Chapter 12.
Justin Cruickshank has developed a critique of the critical realism of Bhaskar and Archer as employing a priori reasoning to establish ontological claims about the nature of reality, which are then ‘applied' dogmatically to produce interpretations of empirical evidence that fit the required ontology. Cruickshank relates what is acceptable in critical realism (its bare commitment to a reality independent of our knowledge of it) to his version of the philosophy of Karl Popper (Cruickshank 2003b, 2007, 2010). A broadly similar line of argument against critical realism in its 'Bhaskarian form is given by Kaidesoja (2013).
In Chapter 12 of this edition, I provide a more detailed review of some of the issues posed by this newer literature.
140