Confessions:On Critical Realism and other things

It may seem strange for someone like me to acknowledge the influence of an epistemological current like Critical Realism. Broadly speaking, I have over the last 10-15 years embraced in my research a position that in philosophy is known as Idealism. I have been idealist in the Kantian sense of having explained much of contemporary institutions by recourse to the complex array of symbol systems, representing techniques and formal code languages (software systems) by means of which organizational and social life is instrumented, structured and controlled. In social research, idealism has often taken the form of what is referred to as Constructivism. My recent study on information and its institutional implications has come as the offspring of such an orienation that I wouldn't be unhappy to describe as Neo-Kantian. Ernst Casirrer and Nelson Goodman have had a deep influence on me and so had too Claude Levi Strauss, Gregory Bateson and much later Nicklas Luhmann.

Despite widespread misconceptions, Critical Realism stands, at least in some respects, closer to Idealism than to Positivism. Both Critical Realism and Idealism recognize the social character of knowledge (a key issue) and reject the positivist understanding of the world as an atomistic series of actions or events. A Roy Bhaskar persuasively claims knowledge and the social institutions to which knowldge is associated are not just arrays of entities or processes standing to an adjacent relationship to one another. Rather, they are complex constructions that exhibit ontological depth. They are concatenated into structures that work as the generative matrices of the social practices of knowing. Only a smal portion of this "real reality" may be manifested in particular settings and is thus given to experience and perception (observation). The rest has to be inferred and reconstructed in the "laboratory" of theory.

This is in fact a point that I have been at pains to make in my later writings, most notably my "Farewell to Constructivism" and "Reopening the Black Box of Technology" and my new book (to appear in December 2006) "The Consequences of Information" (see my website http://personal/lse.ac.uk/kallinik/ for details). In studying the forms though which technology is implicated in the making of social practices and human agency I have become increasingly disillusioned from the way these issues have been dealt with across a variety of disciplines and research circles. Too much voluntarism, I thought, too many agreeable explanations that flatter our humanity, but little real concern with all those constraints that large and complex technological systems with a long life span impose on to us. Most crucially without ever carring of studying how human agency is not a transcedental (socially exogenous) force but rather something that is forged, inter alia, by the variety of technological artefacts that inhabit and in a sense make our life. Humans are as much causes as they are outcomes of social processes. Critical Realism, as I understand it, seems to hold a promise in this respect.