In his book Miracles, first published in 1947, C. S. Lewis presented an argument designed to show that philosophical naturalism is self- refuting. He claimed that ...
SOCIAL REALISM, CRITICAL REALISM AND EDUCATIONAL THEORY ROBIN SMALL THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND ______________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT The recent use of expressions such as ‘social realism’ and ‘critical realism’ in educational theorising reopens epistemological issues that philosophers of education should be addressing. This discussion examines the current uses of these terms and reviews the philosophical issues they raise. I argue that ‘social realism’ is a misguided attempt to combine sociological and epistemological claims about knowledge, while ‘critical realism’ signals a Kantian line of argument in some uses but not others, and in either case needs to be separated from New Age ‘spirituality’. KEY WORDS social realism, critical realism, reductionism, reincarnation, stamp collecting. ______________________________________________________________________ Recent theoretical discussions of education have included a couple of terms that should interest philosophers of education: ‘social realism’ and ‘critical realism’. They are evidently philosophical expressions, even if one comes from a neighbouring discipline, the sociology of education. So here is an occasion to make our own contributions to these discussions, not just to provide a much-needed conceptual context but also to make some judgements on the soundness of the claims being made. This presentation is intended to make a start. I will begin by saying what I take people to mean when they talk of social realism. Normally I am not much in favour of definitions, outside dictionaries. As used in
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debate, they are commonly attempts to take over a familiar word in order to slip in implications designed to be brought out later as supposedly new discoveries. But with a novel expression used for some theoretical standpoint, a definition can reasonably be expected. At least then we can tell whether it makes sense, or whether it is just a new name for old ideas, as William James candidly admitted in the case of ‘pragmatism’.1 So: I take it that social realism means that even though knowledge claims are a social product, they can still be objectively true, that is, about an independent reality. In that case, I suppose there must also be a ‘psychical’ or ‘mental’ realism which says the same thing about knowledge claims in relation to processes in the individual mind. I don’t expect that suggestion to catch on (although if it does, I will claim the credit). This is because psychologists have not been given to presenting their findings as philosophical insights. The model of positive science is more appealing to them, as any researcher in education can witness. Having separated their discipline from philosophy in the late nineteenth century, the psychologists are in no hurry to get together again. But the situation of sociology is evidently different. There is a precedent within modern philosophy for the debate that social realism defines as its starting point. In his book Miracles, first published in 1947, C. S. Lewis presented an argument designed to show that philosophical naturalism is selfrefuting. He claimed that “no thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes.”2 In other words, if knowledge arises from purely natural processes, then it cannot be taken as based on good reasons – and in that case, it is not genuine knowledge at all. If we substitute ‘social’ for ‘natural’, this becomes the position that social realism sees itself as opposing. Lewis’s position is generally rejected by philosophers, most of whom would see Elizabeth Anscombe’s response (made in a public debate with Lewis in 1948) as a decisive refutation.3 Even so, it has a certain persistence, and now and then claims a high-profile supporter, a notable example being Antony Flew in Atheistic Humanism,
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a book produced toward the end of his life and of his commitment to atheism as well.4 Many of the points Anscombe made in 1948 are relevant to social realism. I pick out one as an example. Lewis notes that we disbelieve reports of rats and snakes coming from someone who is evidently impaired by excessive drinking. Similarly, one could argue, we discount theoretical views on finding out they have been arrived at in a certain way – for example, if they reflect the knower’s social background closely and coincide with familiar ideological prejudices. But doing this assumes that we already know that these processes correspond to bad theories. In that case, we must have an independent way of judging the validity of a theory, since making a correlation depends on identifying each side by itself and then noting the relation between them.5 I will be coming back to this point later. Maybe I should explain why I would not want to call myself a social realist. It is not just that this is a sociologist’s idea of a philosophical expression. Anyone can come up with views worth considering, and titles are especially open to suggestion. But I think that ‘social realism’ is an awkward expression, simply because the two halves do not interact, as they do in the case of ‘critical realism’, where it is precisely the realism that is supported and qualified by the critical approach. For example, the qualification may be so-called ‘fallibilism’, which concedes that we may always have to take back our claims to knowledge if something turns up that makes them untenable. The whole point of ‘social realism’, as far as I can tell, is that knowledge can be about reality even though it is a social phenomenon. It is the ‘even though’ that I disagree with. By itself, this phrase is not a proposition that can be true or false. Still, it denotes an opposition, or the appearance of an opposition, between the two halves of the overall statement. In other words, the term ‘social realism’ is intended as an oxymoron, using this word in its real meaning, to refer to an expression that seems to be a contradiction but actually makes good sense.6 There is not much point in using the expression unless you have a feeling that something looks wrong here, or want to
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be especially nice to other people who feel that way – although why bother? If you think they are confused, better to help them correct their mistake. But even this explanation doesn’t work well. The problem is that it involves two different uses of the word ‘knowledge’. What is true in knowledge is the content, or the proposition that is being expressed in a knowledge statement. I don’t think anyone wants to claim that this is a social product, except perhaps the later Karl Popper, with his whimsical notion of a separate ‘World 3’ created by our thinking.7 Thoughts are abstractions, not located in time or space, and so don’t have causes or effects.8 In contrast to these are the actual experiences of thinking and judging, and the behaviours that go with them – the things that psychology and sociology address and try to explain. Once again, I conclude that the ‘social’ and the ‘realism’ don’t go together very well. Yet there is a different reason altogether for putting them together. Presentations of social realism usually start from a background history of anti-realism. In fact, they tend to look like the testimonies of reformed anti-realists. Michael Young’s Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism To Social Realism in the Sociology of Education is an example: the title is a summary of the book’s narrative content.9 As we know from the Scriptures, there is more rejoicing in heaven over one repentant sinner than over ninety-nine people who do not need to repent.10 Which is fine, as long as the ninety-nine aren’t expected to join in the rejoicing. That may be why I am not more enthusiastic about social realism. On the other hand, it is hard to deny that there is something called critical realism. The expression has a history going back a hundred years, but I doubt that many users have that literature in mind.11 Nowadays it is likely to be identified with Roy Bhaskar’s 1976 book A Realist Theory of Science, widely read because of its affinities with the Marxist revival of that time, which Bhaskar signalled by using the word ‘dialectic’ from time to time. The label that he gives to his own theory is ‘transcendental realism’, signalling its reliance on the Kantian strategy of reasoning that proceeds from empirical experience to the conditions that make it possible.12 One striking
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feature of the book is the rather elaborate ontology that Bhaskar proposes. In order to account for scientific knowledge, he believes that we must recognise not only objects and their behaviour as independent of experience, but also the general structures that underlie the particular events that we observe. These ‘tendencies’ or ‘powers’, as he calls them, are represented as causal laws in scientific theories. In Bhaskar’s terminology, they are ‘real’ whereas observed events are only ‘actual’. In support of this model, much of the book is given over to a critique of the Humean approach to causality, taken as a position typical of positivist philosophy in general. While it is unusual, this theory does at least belong to the philosophy of science. In contrast, Bhaskar’s later book From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul goes into a more spiritual area, as its opening words indicate: “The essential theme of this book is that man is essentially God.”13 Most of what follows is a fictionalised account of the author’s past lives, with commentary showing how they have contributed to the attainment of enlightenment in his current incarnation. Bhaskar describes the book as “an attempted reconciliation of some of the best insights of the New Age and New Left movements” and argues that it represents a development rather than a rejection of critical realism. The development, however, has apparently led to a schism amongst his admirers, with some refusing to take the new direction while others welcome the appearance of spiritual doctrines within educational philosophy.14 Even so, critical realism in this sense seems to be thriving. It has an international organisation, a web site and a journal of its own, as well as various book series with names like “Routledge Studies in Critical Realism,” “New Studies in Critical Realism and Education” and ”New Studies in Critical Realism and Spirituality.” The fact that all of these revolve around one person, Roy Bhaskar, gives the movement a certain cultish appearance, especially when talk of God and reincarnation start to appear quite prominently. I don’t imagine this is the direction that social realism sees itself as taking, but it does make one wonder. In any case, given the long history of critical realism, it’s hard to see why the name should be handed over to people with such a specific agenda. One of the best known
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realists of the twentieth century is Karl Popper, who could just as well lay claim to the label. Even if he preferred to call his philosophy ‘critical rationalism’, Popper was a strong supporter of scientific realism.15 So I am going to use the term in a broader sense to include him and more recent writers as well, who don’t necessarily classify their philosophical standpoint as ‘critical realism’. When I first studied philosophy, we heard a lot about ‘sense-data’ or ‘sensibilia’, and one much discussed problem was how knowledge of the world could be constructed with these as the starting point. You can read about this question in books such as H. H. Price’s Perception, a work that opens with the dramatic (and really somewhat questionable) statement: “When I see a tomato, there is much that I can doubt.”16 The underlying issue was the old one of scepticism, and a lot of ground was conceded to attacks on everyday claims to knowledge about the world. This state of affairs has occurred before in the history of philosophy, and what usually follows is a move back toward realism, as new ways of answering the sceptic’s arguments are discovered. The classic example is Kant’s ‘critical philosophy’, advanced from 1781 onward largely in order to overcome the challenge of David Hume’s scepticism. And that is just what happened with ‘post-positivist’ epistemology. The post-positivist epistemologists gave up what Dewey called the quest for certainty as well as the positivist demand for foundations of knowledge (in effect, the same thing). Instead, they looked for the standards that enable us to decide that one theory is better than another, even when they account for the same facts. A typical list of criteria would be something like this: a theory is preferable if it is simpler, explains more, is more readily testable, leaves fewer unanswered questions, agrees with what we already have reason to believe, and leads on in new directions.17 These features of theories – economy, coherence, comprehensiveness, and so on – are sometimes called ‘epistemic virtues’. They don’t look like social conventions to me, although one would expect that within a scientific community they may be made explicit to help in resolving disputes between rival theories, or just to point the way for theorising. What is important to note is that they aren’t located in the process
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through which a theory has come about, but in its outcome. It follows that neither psychology nor sociology has much to contribute in assessing theoretical validity. That is not a criticism, just an acknowledgement that they ask different questions. Realism comes in when we take the crucial step of arguing that theories with these advantages are more likely to be true. The assumption (and it is an assumption) is that we cannot just say ‘This theory works best’ and leave it at that. The reason why it works must be that that is what reality is like. Here, as sometimes happens, we get to a point where one can only say: this seems to be the only answer to a question that has to be asked. Admittedly, that won’t convince someone who does not feel that the consistent success of the best theories we have, including a lot of common sense beliefs, needs to be accounted for somehow or other. It must be this move, restated in terms of conditions of possibility, that justifies the use of the word ‘critical’ to claim continuity with the Kantian transcendental tradition in philosophy. Whether readers spot the reference is another matter. Many probably simply take ‘critical’ to mark a contrast with the ‘naïve’ realism that has never been encountered outside first-year philosophy textbooks like John Hospers’ Introduction to Philosophical Analysis.18 At any rate, we are all realists these days, or so it seems.19 Not only is scientific realism a prevailing view, but moral realism is thriving as well.20 This is a step beyond the critical realist Karl Popper, who once said: “We cannot make ethical judgements, but we can make ethical decisions.”21 According to the moral realists we can certainly make ethical judgements that have as much claim to truth as factual statements, and back them up with similar kinds of theoretical reasoning. Not everyone wants to go this far, but the trend stands in dramatic contrast with the old positivist dismissal of moral statements as mere expressions of feelings, and of interest only by calling for psychological or sociological explanation. So I come back to the issue that seems to cause the trouble: the relation between the social nature of knowledge and its claim to objective truth. This is discussed by Karl
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Maton and Rob Moore in the introduction to their book Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education. It is reassuring to see a clear statement that the ‘social’ and the ‘realism’ are distinct and can even be taken separately, even if the authors insist that the two need to be brought together somehow.22 What comes after that is more disturbing. They explain that “knowledge is emergent but irreducible to the practices and contexts of its production.” (The italics are theirs, as is the missing ‘from’.) This formulation strikes me as very confused. Its vocabulary is one that turns up mostly these days in attacks on Darwinism which claim that socalled ‘irreducible complexity’ is incapable of being explained as an outcome of natural processes.23 With Maton and Moore, the problem is again the distinction between knowledge as abstract content (such as a valid theory) and as a psychological or sociological phenomenon. One theory can be reduced to another theory, but a theory cannot be reduced to something that is not a theory, such as the process through which some person or group has come to advance the theory.24 But if ‘reduction’ makes no sense here, neither does ‘irreducible’. The issue here strikes me as essentially the same as the one I began with, C. S. Lewis’s claim that naturalism is an internally inconsistent philosophical doctrine. The social realists’ appeal to ‘emergence’ looks like an attempt to escape from Lewis’s conclusion by inventing a new kind of naturalism, one that does not claim to give causal explanations for knowledge. Better, surely, to challenge the argument itself. A few further remarks about the notion of ‘reduction’ and the nature of scientific theories may be helpful, given that this is the problem area. According to a famous modern scientist (the one who appears on the New Zealand hundred dollar note), “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”25 Most people take that remark as a claim for the unique status of physics, although what strikes me (assuming the quotation to be accurate) is that it seems to count stamp collecting as a science. So, what is the contrast being drawn here? Probably that stamp collecting doesn’t involve theorising in the way that physics does. It is what
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used to be called a ‘classificatory science’. To take this further: philately (a more dignified name) doesn’t involve the theoretical strategy that is called reductionism – and which is very characteristic of physics, more so than any other science (which was probably Rutherford’s point). On the other hand, if you want ‘emergence’ or ‘irreducible complexity’ then a stamp collection would be a good place to look. It is true that many find the notion of reductionism alarming. Part of the problem is that what is meant varies. Sometimes ‘reductionism’ is identified with explaining wholes in terms of parts, a notion that supports the naive assumption that the word ‘reduction’ means ‘decrease in size’. In fact, to ‘reduce’ in this context means, literally, to lead back. That may not have anything to do with wholes and parts. If one account can be referred back to another that is a broader theory, that is reduction. Thus, for example, Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion are reducible to Newton’s single law of gravitation, which explains why planets move in ellipses, as well as a lot of other things. Most people who have done science at high school will be able to think of other examples. There is no reason why this should worry anyone. But while reductionism may be about theories rather than about things, if theories are about things – as a realist will claim – then maybe reductionism is about things after all. In that case, maybe what it says is that some things are ‘nothing but’ other things, or that instead of simply being explained, some things can be ‘explained away’. There is plenty of scope for disputes over these issues. However, I don’t see that social realism has to take a position one way or the other simply in virtue of its recognition of the social dimension of knowledge, for the reasons I gave earlier. One thing it should not do is join in the popular tendency to use ‘reductionist’ as a criticism rather than description. These are people who are not sure what reductionism is, but know they don’t approve of it. It is points like these that I have in mind in suggesting that philosophers of education can make useful contributions to theoretical debates in education by bringing their disciplinary expertise to bear on the ideas driving the discussion. They can work to
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distinguish what is right and useful in social realism and critical realism from what is ill-informed or just plain misguided. At any rate, to sum up, while I don’t think I am a social realist (but only because I don’t see a need for the expression) I think that I may be a critical realist – only without the spirituality and, especially, without the reincarnation.
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NOTES
1
William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New
York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1902). 2
C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (London: Collins, 1947), 27.
3
G. E. M. Anscombe, “A Reply to Mr C. S. Lewis’s Argument that ‘Naturalism’ is Self-
Refuting,” in The Collected Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe II: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 224–31. 4
Antony Flew, Atheistic Humanism (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993), 109–40.
For a revival of this controversy, see Victor Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument From Reason (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2003). 5
Anscombe, The Collected Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe II, 224.
6
John Milton’s ‘darkness visible’ is commonly given as an illustration.
7
Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 155. He later
changed the expression ‘third world’ to ‘World 3’. The logician Gottlob Frege earlier posited a ‘third realm’, but insisted that “In thinking we do not produce thoughts, we grasp them.” Logical Investigations, trans. P. T. Geach and R. H. Stoothoff (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), 17 and 25. By ‘thoughts’ Frege means what are elsewhere called propositions. 8
This point should remind us that the analogy between knowledge and material
production has its limits. It may be helpful to think of theorising as involving ‘raw materials’ and techniques or instruments used to change their form. See Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1969), 167 for an elaboration of this model. But the ‘material’ nature of knowledge remains a metaphor, as any search for lawlike generalisations will soon show. 9
See Michael F. D. Young, Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism To
Social Realism in the Sociology of Education (London: Routledge, 2008). 10
Luke 15:7.
11
The expression ‘critical realism’ was used by the American philosopher Roy Wood
Sellars in his book Critical Realism (Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1916), which was followed by Essays in Critical Realism (London: Macmillan, 1920) written by a group including Sellars, Arthur Lovejoy and George Santayana. See also G. Dawes Hicks,
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“The Basis of Critical Realism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 17 (1916–17), 300–59. The term is also applied to the early work of the Viennese philosopher Moritz Schlick, dating from the same period but with neo-Kantianism (that is, ‘critical philosophy’) in the background. Later Schlick became a positivist and rejected realism as an unverifiable metaphysical position. This led to a falling out with Karl Popper, who remained a committed realist. See Schlick, “Positivism and Realism,” trans. D. Rynin, Synthese 7.1 (1948), 478–505. 12
Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd ed. (Hassocks, Sussex: The Harvester
Press, 1978), 15. 13
Roy Bhaskar, From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul (London: Routledge, 2000), ix.
14
See respectively Sean Creaven, Against the Spiritual Turn: Marxism, Realism, and
Critical Theory (London-New York: Routledge, 2009), 32–42 and Brad Shipway, A Critical Realist Perspective of Education (London-New York: Routledge, 2011), 218– 20. 15
One would assume that this fact about Popper is generally known, and yet Kenneth
R. Miller gets it spectacularly wrong in his book Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle For America’s Soul (New York: Viking, 2008), 181. 16
In the interests of fairness I give a longer extract: "When I see a tomato there is
much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a tomato that I am seeing, and not a cleverly painted piece of wax. I can doubt whether there is any material thing there at all. Perhaps what I took for a tomato was really a reflection; perhaps I am even the victim of some hallucination. One thing however I cannot doubt: that there exists a red patch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape, standing out from a background of other colour-patches, and having a certain visual depth, and that this whole field of colour is directly present to my consciousness." H. H. Price, Perception (London: Methuen, 1932), 4. A similar epistemology appears in A. J. Ayer, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1940). The closest American counterpart is perhaps C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge (1929; New York: Dover Books, 1956). 17
Most of this list is taken from William Lycan, Judgement and Justification
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 130.
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18
John Hospers, Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1956), 380–83. 19
I don’t mean ‘realism’ in the sense used in nineteenth century German debates
over whether the school curriculum should be based on Latin and Greek or on natural science and modern languages (although we are probably all realists in that sense as well). 20
See e.g. Peter Railton, “Moral Realism,” Philosophical Review 95 (1986), 163–207.
21
I was told this by my uncle, one of Popper’s philosophy students at the University
of Canterbury during the Second World War. 22
Karl Maton and Rob Moore (eds), Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of
Education (London: Continuum, 2009), 5. 23
See e.g. Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
(New York: The Free Press, 1996). 24
See Paul M. Churchland and Patricia S. Churchland, “Intertheoretic Reduction: A
Neuroscientist's Field Guide,” in On the Contrary: Critical Essays, 1987–1997 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 65–79. 25
P. M. S. Blackett, “Memories of Rutherford,” in J. B. Birks (ed.), Rutherford at
Manchester (London: Heywood & Company, 1962), 108.
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