From Jonathan Joseph (2004)

Foucault’s work does contain an irrealist impulse, which is to stake his all on the transitive domain of knowledge, and to define reality according to the power of discourses or the Nietzschean struggles of power-knowledge. There is a tendency in Foucault to reduce truth-claims to rhetoricalnarrative strategies (Norris 1992: 85).

Yet the power-knowledge relation is tempting for a realist too. Against the naivety of positivist inspired social science, it is important to show that the transitive domain of human knowledge is full of power relations and that knowledge develops, not simply on the basis of trying to understand the world beyond it, but according to the dynamics of its practical, institutional and discursive context. Epistemic caution is necessary for the transitive realm is full of different theories, knowledge claims and views of the world.

But this reaffirms the need to uphold a knowledge independent intransitive realm, over which such battles are fought, and which must be appealed to when different theories make different claims. Firstly, for there to be a dispute between competing descriptive discourses, these discourses must have a common referent outside of themselves, or else the contestation is meaningless.

Secondly, critical realism argues that the ordering of transitive knowledge into different theories, practices and disciplines indicates a wider ordering of the intransitive world that this knowledge is about. Critical realism argues that the possibility of knowledge and the forms that it takes (as practices and disciplines) reflects the fact that the world has an ordered, intelligible and relatively enduring structure that is open to scientific investigation. That knowledge is possible, albeit disputable, presupposes that the world is a certain way and that claims may be made about its nature.

Critical realism makes a transcendental argument along the lines that given that knowledge is possible and is meaningful, this pre-supposes that the world itself is a certain way. In place of Kantian transcendental idealism that moves from the status of knowledge to the necessary structure of the mind, critical realism looks at what knowledge and human practice presupposes about the world itself. Given that certain things, or even certain debates, are intelligible to us, this presupposes that the world is ordered or structured in a particular way that is open to investigation.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Conference of Socialist Economists. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. / Jonathan Joseph

Front Featured Image: Bray, during PhD Retreat, October (2011, Taey)