Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change is a major new book addressing one of the most challenging questions of our time. Its unique standpoint is based on the recognition that effective and coherent interdisciplinarity is necessary to deal with the issue of climate change, and the multitude of linked phenomena which both constitute and connect to it. In the opening chapter, Roy Bhaskar makes use of the extensive resources of critical realism to articulate a comprehensive framework for multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinary (...) understanding, one which duly takes account of ontological as well as epistemological considerations. Many of the subsequent chapters seek to show how this general approach can be used to make intellectual sense of the complex phenomena in and around the issue of climate change, including our response to it. Among the issues discussed, in a number of graphic and compelling studies, by a range of distinguished contributors, both activists and scholars, are: The dangers of reducing all environmental, energy and climate gas issues to questions of carbon dioxide emissions The problems of integrating natural and social scientific work and the perils of monodisciplinary tunnel vision The consequences of the neglect of issues of consumption in climate policy The desirability of a care-based ethics and of the integration of cultural considerations into climate policy The problem of relating theoretical knowledge to practical action in contemporary democratic societies Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change is essential reading for all serious students of the fight against climate change, the interactions between governmental bodies, and critical realism. (shrink)

The grounds for critique offered by Roy Bhaskar have developed over the course of his work, but two claims have remained central: ethical naturalism and moral realism. I argue that neither of these is compatible with a scientific realist understanding of values: a scientific realist approach commits one to treating values as socially produced and historically contingent. This does not, however, prevent us from reasoning about values, nor from developing critiques by combining ethical reasoning with a theoretical understanding of the (...) social world and its possibilities. In particular, we can draw on a variety of Habermas's discourse ethics to offer provisional justifications for value-claims that support a critical stance. Thus we can develop grounds for critique that are both ontologically credible and anti-foundational, but also judgementally rational. (shrink)

The paper assesses the aims and arguments of critical social science and the reconstructions of it provided by critical realist philosophy. It argues that attempts to derive normative conclusions on the basis of explanatory critiques of social phenomena are flawed in several important respects. Accounts of critical social science standardly underestimate the problems of justifying critical standpoints and finding alternative social forms which generate fewer problems than those they replace, and hence lead to net improvement. By arguing that value positions (...) can be derived from explanatory critiques, the philosophical reconstructions make light of the normative issues raised by proposals for social change. They also ignore the question of the feasibility of alternative systems and the prevalence of structures which generate both good and bad effects. While the reconstructions succeed in defending critiques centering on straightforward cases of false beliefs or the frustration of universal human needs, in others, where culturally-specific needs and issues of social responsibilities are involved, they fail to recognise the need to address prior normative questions. It is therefore argued that the aims and claims of critical social science need to be moderated and its dependence on normative discourse properly acknowledged. (shrink)

ABSTRACT While multiple crisis phenomena have sparked experimentation with alternative forms of production and consumption on the micro level, it is not clear if and how these alternative practices may become hegemonic and thus displace capitalism as the hegemonic order on the macro level, rather than merely fostering pockets of a solidarity economy within capitalism. This question is hard to research, because it relates to post-capitalist futures rather than actual events or phenomena in the past or present. In this article, (...) I propose a methodological framework for studying the transformative potential of counter-hegemonic initiatives. Building on debates on causality and prediction within Critical Realism, I introduce the concept of ‘ex-ante’ retroduction. Using this mode of reasoning helps to identify possible generative mechanisms for the viability and achievability of alternative futures which can then be empirically investigated. (shrink)

This essay, written in memory of Erik Olin Wright, considers Wright’s project of constructing and identifying real utopias. It confronts a tension in Wright’s oeuvre, the question of the knowledge by means of which reformers can identify the utopias that ground the really existing real utopias.