Why critical realists ought to be transcendental idealists

ABSTRACT

In A Realist Theory of Science, Roy Bhaskar provides several transcendental arguments for critical realism – a position Bhaskar himself characterized as transcendental realism. Bhaskar provides an argument from perception and from the intelligibility of scientific experimentation, maintaining that transcendental realism is necessary for both. I argue that neither argument succeeds, and that transcendental idealism can better vindicate scientific practice than Bhaskar’s realism. Bhaskar’s arguments against the Kantian view fail, for they misrepresent the transcendental idealist position. I conclude that, if they wish to retain their theoretical commitments, critical realists ought to be transcendental idealists.

KEYWORDS:

• Roy Bhaskar
• transcendental idealism
• critical realism
• Immanuel Kant
• transcendental realism
• transcendental arguments

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Guus Duindam is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the University of Michigan, where he is also a J.D. student. His primary areas of research are Kant, ethics, and philosophy of law. He is currently working on several articles concerning moral and legal responsibility as well as a dissertation in Kantian ethics.

ORCID

Guus Duindam http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7381-4329

Notes

1 Bhaskar (1975, 25): ‘The … position which is advanced here, may be characterized as transcendental realism’ (see also Bhaskar 1998, 2, 5).

2 Note that for Kant, ‘intuition,’ is a technical term, largely unrelated to contemporary usage of the word. In the Transcendental Aesthetic, intuition is defined: ‘[i]n whatever way and through whatever means a cognition may related to objects, that through which it relates immediately to them, and at which all thought as a means is directed as an end, is intuition’ (A19/B33). An intuition is thus the representation of an object, afforded us through the faculty of sensibility. The ‘manifold of intuitions’ is the raw input of sensibility, i.e. it is meaningless prior to concept-application; thus Kant’s claim that ‘neither concepts without intuition corresponding to them in some way nor intuition without concepts can yield a cognition’ (A50/B74) (Kant 1998).

3 ‘We therefore assert the empirical reality of space … though to be sure its transcendental ideality [emphasis in original]’ Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1998), B44/A28.

4 I should note that I do not take myself either in this section or in the following sections ever to provide an independently plausible defence of transcendental idealism. That would require far more theoretical work, for which there is no space in this paper. My aim here is merely to clarify what it is that transcendental idealism claims, in order better to address Bhaskar’s arguments. For a convincing contemporary defence, see Allison (2004).

5 That he means the transcendental reality of objects is made even more explicit in The Possibility of Naturalism (1998, 6). But it is anyway clear throughout A Realist Theory of Science: intransitive objects are entirely mind-independent, they therefore correspond to the Kantian transcendentally real.

6 Compare this to the Humean view, on which we are never even entitled to claim that some x caused y.

7 My example of scientific ‘experimentation’ on the Kantian framework here is deliberately basic. My aim here is merely to show that Bhaskar’s arguments rest on a misunderstanding of transcendental idealism, not to provide an independent account of the nature of experimentation under transcendental idealism. For an example of a Kantian treatment of experimentation and empirical laws, see McNulty (2015). For an account involving unobservable entities, see also Palmquist (2013).

8 Indeed, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant provides several arguments for supposing experience is not only transcendentally, but also empirically ordered. For instance, in the introductions, he claims that we must suppose the systematizability of nature (2000, 3–83).