Philosophy, metaphilosophy and ideology-critique: an interview with Ruth Porter Groff

ABSTRACT

In this interview, Ruth Groff discusses how she came to be a realist, her role as a community organizer, her relationship to critical realism, and various issues arising from her published work over the years. Discussion ranges across the nature of positivism and its legacy, the concept of falsehood, realism about causal powers, mind-independent reality, the history of philosophy, and the underlying interest in ideology-critique that runs through her thinking.

KEYWORDS:

• Ruth Porter Groff
• causal powers
• free will
• Marx
• Humeanism
• social ontology

Ruth Porter Groff is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Political Science Department and Affiliated Faculty in the Philosophy Department at Saint Louis University.¹ While those who are newer to critical realism (CR) may be less familiar with her work, the quality of her output over the years has established her as one of CR’s most respected proponents, and she deserves to be widely read. It was immediately obvious from her first book, Critical Realism, Post-Positivism and the Possibility of Knowledge (Groff 2004a) that Groff has an enviable command of classic texts in the history of philosophy, including those that have shaped arguments in ontology and epistemology with which critical realists are familiar – works of Hume, Locke, Kant and so on – as well as of the now established canon of realist classics that range across philosophy of science and social science. Her subsequent work has only served to confirm this impression. She is perhaps best known for her discussions of causal powers; the metaphysics of social and political theory; free will; Marx and Aristotelian-inflected Marxism, but she also has an interest in first-generation critical theory, having edited Subject and Object: Frankfurt School Writings on Epistemology, Ontology and Method (Groff 2014a).

Groff is the author of two single-authored monographs (a third, A Critical Introduction to Causal Powers and Dispositions, is close to completion), editor or co-editor of three edited volumes, and has authored a steady stream of articles, chapters, reviews, encyclopedia entries, etc. (e.g. Groff 2008, 2014b; Groff and Greco 2013).² Her work has been published in journals such as Synthese, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Philosophy & Social Criticism and Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, as well as Journal of Critical Realism and Alethia (Groff 2000, 2014c, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2021a, 2021b). She was a guest editor for a special issue of the Journal of Critical Realism on causal powers (Groff 2009), and her Critical Realism, Post-Positivism and the Possibility of Knowledge was the subject of a symposium in the journal (New, Roberts, and Groff 2004).³ Her second single-authored monograph, Ontology Revisited: Metaphysics in Social and Political Philosophy (Groff 2012a) was awarded the Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize in 2012.⁴

Groff earned a B.A. (Hons) in philosophy at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania (one of the top liberal arts colleges in the USA), before moving on to the University of Toronto for an MA in Adult Education. In 2003, she was awarded a PhD in political theory from York University (Canada) for a thesis titled Knowledge After ‘the Fact’: Critical Realism and the Post-Positivist Quagmire (published by Routledge in 2004 as the previously mentioned Critical Realism, Post-Positivism and the Possibility of Knowledge). She began her academic career as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Marquette University, Williams College and SUNY Albany, respectively, before joining the Political Science Department at Saint Louis University as an Assistant Professor in 2008. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014 and has recently been appointed to the Philosophy Department as Affiliated Professor. Amongst other activities, she was an editor of the Journal of Critical Realism, under Mervyn Hartwig (2007–2010) and remains an editorial board member, a member of the Steering Committee of the International Association for MacIntyrean Inquiry (2011–2015) and a consultant to the Yale University-hosted and Templeton-funded project to introduce critical realism to American sociologists (2015–2017). In 2017, she founded the Critical Social Ontology Workshop (CSOW), which (with a Covid break) convenes annually.⁵ She is a member of the editorial board of Axiomathes, where her role will be to develop a section of the journal devoted to social ontology and has also recently become a member of the editorial board of the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.⁶ She is a member of the Critical Realism Network and the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR).

The following interview with Professor Ruth Porter Groff was conducted by Professor Jamie Morgan for the Journal of Critical Realism.⁷

Jamie Morgan (JM): Let’s start with the basics – what drew you to realism? The acknowledgements page of your Critical Realism, Post-Positivism and the Possibility of Knowledge credits Hugh Lacey with introducing you to Roy Bhaskar’s A Realist Theory of Science (1975) at Swarthmore College, so perhaps we might start there? You also mention the ‘Bhaskar listserv’ and in the age of Snapchat and Tik Tok the reference might now seem somewhat obscure … 

Ruth Porter Groff (RPG): There are really two questions here: when/how I came to be a realist (or to know that I was one), and when/how I came to be a critical realist. I became interested in realism in the context of an undergraduate training in philosophy, at the centre of which was a multi-faceted critique of logical positivism, including its relationship to liberalism and to certain types of moral theory.

JM: ‘Positivsm’ is one of those words used sometimes with precision and sometimes loosely (at the extreme, a ‘swear-word by which no one is swearing’, Raymond Williams in Bhaskar 1986, 226). It might be worth clarifying here what you mean by logical positivism.

RPG: Sure. Logical positivism was meant by its proponents to be a kind of technically rigorous, modernized empiricism, designed to distinguish between meaningful claims, which its proponents took to be scientific, and meaningless, non-scientific claims. Names of prominent logical positivists that people might recognize include Carl Hempel, Rudolph Carnap and A. J. Ayer.

JM: Ayer, of course, is famous for Language, Truth and Logic, published in 1936, which begins with a rejection of metaphysics and takes a sceptical approach to knowledge of a ‘transcendent reality’. The book was written after a year spent at the University of Vienna – and Hempel and Carnap too were members of the ‘Vienna Circle’, which flourished in the 1920s and early 1930s – influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tracatatus, A. N Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica, and the work of Ernst Mach and Gottlob Frege. But while some of this may sound vaguely Kantian – the notion of a rejection of metaphysics – the positivists’ rejection of metaphysics, etc. is rooted in empiricism, isn’t it?⁸

RPG: Yes, that’s right. As empiricists, they held that all ideas with substantive content are reducible to sense-data. That’s not Kant’s view. The only other meaningful ideas, as they had it, are analytic, which is to say that they are definitions, such as (famously) ‘All bachelors are unmarried men.’ The view is inherited from Hume, but the logical positivists added in what they took to be modernizing improvements, as I put it above, most notably conceiving of the position as adherence to what they called the ‘verification principle,’ which was a fancy name for Hume’s claim that the content of a non-analytic concept is given by what Hume had called sensory ‘impressions.’ Science was thought to consist of claims about sense data (confirmed via the verification principle), connected by analytic claims.

JM: To be clear then, logical positivists were committed to a unity of the sciences along empiricist lines but building from the claim that one can distinguish meaningful claims about the world from meaningless ones and thus meaningless subjects – and not only the supernatural but also metaphysics were considered to be of this kind … an updating of Auguste Comte’s view that progress goes through three stages of knowledge: religious, metaphysical, and then positive (identification of patterns, laws, etc.)? And this resulted in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science and various publications in the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science series … 

RPG: Yes. Thanks for those details. Logical positivism held sway well into the twentieth century, wreaking havoc on all manner of inquiry, despite facing serious challenges early on, only one of which is that the verification principle itself does not show up as meaningful on logical positivist criteria.

JM: And that influence and its legacy has been enduring … 

RPG: Yes. Certainly in a pointed way in the social sciences, especially in the conception of inquiry and explanation that’s associated with the use of quantitative methodologies.⁹

This said, in the social sciences and in philosophy alike it may be more perspicacious at this point to talk more broadly about the impact of Hume, and to a certain extent Locke (and in some corners Kant’s reaction to Hume), than to restrict the conversation to positivism specifically. Positivism is sort of the methodological tip of the iceberg.

It’s a curious thing, really, about the social sciences, that more or less positivist methods are once again in the position of orthodoxy, after the crises of the late 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s – which took down behaviourism, for instance, if nothing else – followed by the widespread collapse of the program in the 1990s in the wake of poststructuralism and postmodernism.

JM: I’m sure we’ll have more to say about Hume and Humeanism. In any case, you became interested in this from early on; was this ‘critique of logical positivism’ just a case of following the general syllabus or something you elected to do and actively pursued at Swarthmore?

RPG: Challenges to positivism, and to its effects at different levels of abstraction, were being advanced by professors of mine both inside and outside of philosophy; that’s for sure. But it may be that even more than some of my teachers, and certainly more than other students, I was interested in seeing how the critique necessarily had both intra- and cross-disciplinary implications, because of how positivism itself had come to constitute a comprehensive world view, to use an old-fashioned term. Some of my professors were also thinking this way, but even those who were, were to some extent intellectually siloed in a way that I never was.

In any case, the critique of logical positivism led me to questions about realism. One avenue for this was via the so-called Quine-Duhem thesis, often referred to as ‘the underdetermination of theory by data.’

JM: The idea that in order to test a scientific hypothesis you need auxiliary assumptions that invoke other background hypotheses … 

RPG: The upshot of the Quine-Duhem thesis is that we don’t get directly from sense data to theories. Roy later called this same idea the ‘ontological fallacy’ – viz., the notion that it is a mistake to believe that the intransitive objects of scientific inquiry speak for themselves. Once one accepts that data must already be theorized in order to be … well … theorized, it’s hard to avoid grappling in one way or another with the issue of realism generally.

JM: Because it invites questions along the lines of … 

RPG: Along the lines of ‘If data are always-already theorized, then is there anything that exists independently of how we think about it?’ I read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a first-year student, which raised the issue quite acutely. But I was also reading philosophers such as Charles Taylor, whose brilliant, sustained critique of empiricism included classic articles such as ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’ (Taylor 1971). Taylor argued there that because of the kind of meaning-making creatures that we are, social science must be interpretive. He rejected what he called a ‘brute data’ approach to social reality.

JM: And Hugh Lacey’s role in your intellectual development and turn to realism?

RPG: I took Hugh Lacey’s History and Philosophy of Science seminar in the spring of my junior year at Swarthmore. I did first encounter A Realist Theory of Science (RTS) in that class – and it’s also true that another part of the critique of logical positivism to which I was exposed at every turn was the positivist conceit of value-neutrality in science, which I believe that Hugh was already writing about then – but while it’s thanks to Hugh that I eventually found my way to RTS, RTS didn’t really make a significant impression on me as an undergraduate. I appreciated that Roy was taking issue with Hume’s account of causation (and the idea that logical positivists couldn’t deal at all well with causation was also a key element of the critique that I was absorbing), so that registered as important. But if nothing else I think that it may have been too hard of a book to read as quickly as we read it then. Still, I brought it along to Canada with me, when I went to graduate school, and after a time I began talking with Hugh about it. That’s when we became closer. I remember sending him my piece on Roy’s concept of ‘alethic truth.’ He wrote back and said that I had indeed become a philosopher. I was very happy about that. Thrilled, really.

JM: And for context, Lacey published a series of essays on the subject of value-neutrality and eventually the book, Is Science Value Free? (Lacey 1999).

RPG: Yes. But no doubt because I didn’t have a background in the natural sciences, his work wasn’t formative for me. People such as Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre – and later Max Horkheimer – had more of an impact on my thinking about the relationship between facts and values than Hugh did. I should note that while he was always well-respected, since his retirement Hugh has become quite renowned, especially in Brazil.

JM: So at this stage you were interested in realism, but insufficiently familiar to consider yourself a critical realist?

RPG: That’s right. I really didn’t know anything about critical realism as an undergraduate. I came to critical realism in graduate school. When I went back to school I basically picked up where I had left off, first by taking a year-long seminar on the Frankfurt School and writing an MA thesis called ‘Reason Reconsidered,’ about the conception of rationality that is implicit in radical political education. I had worked for most of my 20s as a labor-community organizer for a remarkable group in Philadelphia, called the Philadelphia Unemployment Project (PUP), and had gone to graduate school with the initial aim of studying the kind of pedagogy associated with Paolo Friere (whose book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, people may have read) and, though his name is less familiar, with Myles Horton, here in the US. PUP is still going strong, after 45+ years.¹⁰

JM: Friere’s teaching through ‘generative themes’ and ‘dialogical learning’ rooted in ‘everydayness’ has been a continual source of inspiration to critics of both autocracy and neoliberalism, and several retrospectives in 2021 have recently commemorated a century since his birth, but I have not come across Horton.

RPG: Horton founded the Highlander Center, which was an integral part of the efforts to organize the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] in the American South (the drive to unionize industrial workers was a major part of the US labour movement in the 1930s), and then the civil rights movement. A few bits of famous detail about Highlander include that it’s the ‘communist training school’ that Martin Luther King, Jr. was attacked for attending. Rosa Parks spent time there, in her capacity as an officer of her local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) branch, prior to her now-famous act of refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. As I understand it, striking tobacco workers brought an early version of the song ‘We Shall Overcome’ to Highlander, where it was transformed into a kind of anthem of the civil rights movement. Horton’s autobiography, The Long Haul, is wonderful – and there is an excellent video of him being interviewed by a young Bill Moyers, which people can find on YouTube; it’s called ‘The Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly.’ Highlander is still doing exemplary work.

But back to the Frankfurt School: I was most interested then in Max Horkheimer and in Theodor Adorno – though later, when I edited Subject and Object, I came to more fully appreciate Herbert Marcuse’s work. As an MA student, my main concern was with what the Frankfurt School thinkers had to say about empiricism; later I came to see how central to their thinking Kant was, and became interested in that. Kant presents a more serious challenge to realists, I think, than that posed by Hume, even if it’s Humeanism that continues to prevail in analytic metaphysics. (Kant is a contender in analytic ethics, but move the dial over a notch to ancillary matters, and the default tends to revert to Hume.)

JM: I guess it is no great revelation to suggest many realists have an abiding interest in Frankfurt School Critical Theory. For me it followed an interest in Michel Foucault, which led to reading Jürgen Habermas and especially his lectures collected in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. For you?

RPG: For me, the first thing was what Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse added to the critique of positivism in the philosophy of social science. They were actually less committed to realism than one might like, or than would have done justice to their analyses. I wrote about this in Ontology Revisited. But there’s much to be learned from them about empiricism, reason and ideology-critique; there’s no question about that. From Horkheimer, especially, I learned, from a different angle than that from which I’d come to things as an undergraduate, that a focus on surface appearances is wholely inadequate to radical inquiry, let alone – as Norman Geras argued so beautifully in ‘Marx and the Critique of Political Economy’ – radical inquiry into the nature of something like capitalism, the surface appearances of which are entirely and systematically misleading (1972). Horkheimer’s ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’ is a must-read, despite the reservations and equivocations about the ontology that really is needed in order to be able to talk meaningfully about the nature of things. That ambivalence is there in Marcuse too, even in his great essay on ‘The Concept of Essence.’ Still, these are seminal works. Adorno’s Lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is one of my favourite books.

I’m proud of the annotated collection that I edited, Subject and Object: Frankfurt School Writings on Epistemology Ontology and Method (Groff 2014a), and also genuinely humbled that I got to do it. These thinkers were such giants to me. But unlike Plato (another huge figure, for me), their work is close enough in time to the present that I felt that I was able, in some tiny way at least, to touch the intellectual history that they created. I remember feeling that way very strongly when I was in contact with Marcuse’s family regarding copyright permissions.

JM: But in terms of what all of this meant to you, it was really the status of reason rather than the problem of ontology which preoccupied you at first?

RPG: That was the point of entry, yes – all the more so since, at the practical level, I was interested in popular education, in ideology-critique. I had not gone to graduate school thinking that I would wind up being a professor. The questions of what reason is, and of what we mean – or ought to mean – by the concept of truth, were central to the kind of pedagogical work that I wanted to do. The ontological questions were lurking, though, even just in relation to the Frankfurt School thinkers. (For example, Adorno was preoccupied with the damage done to objects by what he called ‘the myth of constitutive subjectivity’, but he was also enough of a Kantian that he simply could not allow for non-concept-dependent objects. It’s a kind of tragic flaw in his thinking, in my view.)

And those ontological issues immediately became more pressing, both philosophically and politically. In the years in which I’d been away from academia, postmodernism and poststructuralism had taken hold in humanities and social science departments, and watered-down versions were beginning to make their way into the broader intellectual and political milieu. Not as much in philosophy departments, at that point, at least not in Anglo-analytic ones, but they were outliers. The idea that ‘reality’ belonged in quotation marks was in the air on the academic Left, and I regarded it as a pernicious development.

JM: You begin Critical Realism, Post-positivism and the Possibility of Knowledge, with an opening statement regarding an ill-considered resurgence of relativism, writing that in ‘the wake of the well-deserved breakdown of positivism, it no longer seems possible to rationally assess competing knowledge claims’ (Groff 2004a, 1).

RPG: Yes, that was the general situation at the time – anti-realism combined with an ultimately emotivist epistemology, wherein ‘true’ means ‘I (or we or they) approve’ – the full pernicious brunt of this supposedly progressive stance didn’t hit until recently, with the notion of ‘alternative facts’ and the like.

JM: Doug Porpora said something similar in his interview. It seems remarkable really that few were prepared to see how counterproductive it might be to build radicalism around various denials of reality, since that would prove conducive to post-truth politics. As you say, the malign potentials of that are now manifesting all around us.

RPG: Anyone with any political sense at all could see that it was at best a double-edged sword, already in the early 1990s. I don’t think that the academy is playing quite the same role now as it was then, though. If nothing else, the idea that all knowledge-claims, or at least all knowledge-claims voiced by members of a given demographic, are true (given only that they are believed by their proponent(s) to be true) – I think that that idea has less widespread traction within academia currently than it did for a stretch there in the 1990s. There are still a few pockets – or in some cases new pockets – of it; for instance, it hit analytic political philosophy maybe five years ago, but I wouldn’t say that it’s all-pervasive, even there.

JM: Pervasive or not, the consequences have been profound haven’t they?

RPG: They have. The idea that all claims about the world are on the same epistemic footing is really very, very dangerous. I should add that by pointing to what I see as a change in the role of the academy, I don’t mean to contradict what I said initially: here in the US, the larger political fall-out is far more extreme now than it was in the 1990s. Half of the country, it seems, are now emotivists about the concept of truth, and hard core anti-realists about the external world. It’s just that within the academy, I think, there is less of a generalized romance with the idea that everyone gets to have their own facts. It’s worth noting that people were always faster to go with an account of ‘true’ wherein all claims get to be true, than they were with the idea that no claims get to be false (in the normal, realist sense of the term). Everybody likes ‘Well, it’s true according to me/us/them, so you can’t say that it isn’t.’ Nobody wants ‘false’ to mean ‘I (or we or they) don’t like it’ – certainly not when they themselves believe a claim to be false. I don’t mean ‘everybody’ and ‘nobody’ literally, of course; obviously there are exceptions.

JM: Still, this seems to have perverse consequences, equivalent, say, to the well-known phenomenon of market analysts in an upswing rating more than half of stocks as a ‘buy’ based on past performance, implying they are all above average (an impossibility many have been prepared to ‘go along with’ because it is convenient).

RPG: I can see the analogy in the sense that if all theories count as true, then none of them count as false. I will say that non-realist accounts of falsehood bring to mind that line about how there aren’t any atheists in trenches. When you yourself think that a claim is false, you don’t take yourself to be saying simply that you don’t like it. You might not like it. But you dislike it because it’s false, not the other way around.

JM: Or you dislike it and it’s false … 

RPG: Yes, of course; thank you. But it needs the ‘and.’ In any case, Critical Realism, Post-Positivism and the Possibility of Knowledge was definitely a product of the period in which it was written, in the sense that I felt myself to be responding to a particular moment in intellectual history in the English-speaking world, especially on the self-proclaimed Left, which was centred, then, in the academy.

JM: So, your interest at this stage (early graduate school) was more epistemology – questions of what we can know, the status of knowledge, the concept of truth, the construction of truth claims, etc.? The (typically unintended) adverse consequences of undermining truth and justification, the possibility of judgmental rationality (that there is a defensible basis to distinguish between theory claims) and so on … .

RPG: Yes. Above all, I was certain that there were such things as disinformation campaigns, and I wanted an epistemology that would allow me to say so. That required a robust conception of falsehood. But it was in the nature of the case that that conception had to be well-founded; it couldn’t just be required politically. In short order, this got me to the question of what the world would have to be like in order for empirical claims about it to be not just objectionable, but genuinely false. I first had to sort out different theories of what it is for a claim to be false, but having done so I was left, it seemed to me, with an ontological problem, not an epistemic one. Or, perhaps, with an epistemic problem – viz., that we need to be able to say that disinformation campaigns are meant to further false beliefs – the ultimate solution to which was ontological, not epistemic.

JM: Because … 

RPG: Because – assuming a minimal correspondence-style conception of truth (think Aristotle: ‘To say of x that it is x, is “true”; to say of x that it is not x, is “false”’) – assuming this much, the question at hand was: ‘What would the world have to be like for claims about it to be false?’¹¹ That’s an ontological question, even if it’s bound up with epistemological ones.

JM: So, you immediately had to reckon with the thorny problem that positivism is false, and yet it is still meaningful to suggest reality does not reduce to our concepts of it – there is some kind of break on claims about the world and of ourselves in that world (something we will likely return to later since one must, of course, allow for social reality, speech acts, construction, performativity, emergence, etc.). Knowledge is not just belief, it is in some sense ‘true justified belief,’ which is a necessary step in having some reasoned basis for making the case that not everything is or can be true?

RPG: Yes to the first sentence. That was it exactly. Positivism is fatally flawed, but it is still the case that some claims about the world are false. No to the second sentence – though not to the spirit of it. I am with Karl Popper (and sometimes Roy) on knowledge claims being always-provisional. The concept of ‘knowledge’ is not where the epistemic normativity is properly located, in my view. It’s the concepts of ‘true’ and of ‘false’ that ultimately do the work, rather than the concept of ‘knowledge.’ But that’s a technical point.

JM: Just so we don’t confuse readers here, I think that ‘technical point’ needs some clarification. Are you suggesting that the standard definition of knowledge as ‘true justified belief’ is not adequate, or are you saying that the focus of interest is the concept of ‘true’ in relation to what we mean by knowledge. And where does justification stand in relation to these two?

RPG: I’m a fallibilist about knowledge, meaning that generally speaking I think that even our best theories could turn out to not be true. As I say, this is a view that Popper defended adamantly, and that Roy did sometimes. I also think that even when our theories are true, there is probably not a way to know for certain that they are. Thus I suppose that I do have reservations about the definition of knowledge as justified, true belief. Some knowledge-claims are more well-founded than others, so it’s not that they all have the same epistemic weight. And, as I argued in the first book, there is good reason to think that in principle they can’t all be true. It’s just that it doesn’t properly fall to the concept of ‘knowledge’ to provide the epistemic normativity involved in critical thought. That job is done by the concepts of ‘true’ and ‘false.’ I do think that this is a distraction for the average reader, though.

JM: But, to put it another way, typically there are grounds to insist on having good reasons to maintain that something is true for something to rise to the level of knowledge? Is something knowledge if it is merely convenient to believe it is the case?

RPG: I’d want to re-phrase your question to be: ‘Is something true if it is merely convenient to believe that it is?’ And the answer is ‘No.’ Justification – even if it doesn’t tell us for sure if a claim is true – requires having better reasons to think that a claim meets the norm of ‘true’ than that it’s convenient to think that it does. (Also, ‘“True” is when it’s convenient to think that x is as it’s said to be’ is not a good definition of the concept of ‘true.’) But I do try to stick with Popper on this, loosely, anyway. The normative work is not done by the concept or category of ‘knowledge.’ Knowledge-claims are claims. Some may be true, others will be false, and we don’t get to know for sure which are which. (Popper himself thought that we could be sure that a claim was false – at least one in the form of a universal generalization, which he thought could be falsified by counter instances. I’m less sure of that.) Of course, simple factual claims, especially, will be easier to assess than more complex theories.

I set this all out in chapter four of the dissertation book, but it isn’t the main epistemic concern of the work. I guess that it’s not so much that it’s a technical point as that it may be a bit of a distraction.

What I was trying to do when I was first starting out (I’ll put it here in the parlance of CR) was to (a) defend what Roy had called the ‘ontological fallacy,’ while at the same time (b) providing a metaphysical rather than epistemological defense of the possibility of what he had called ‘judgmental rationality.’ With respect to such an undertaking, the necessary epistemic distinction is not between the categories of knowledge and truth. Rather, it is between (a) the idea that all knowledge claims conform equally to the norm of ‘true’; and (b) what I have been calling an emotivist conception of truth (or any other non-realist conception, for that matter). To say that no knowledge-claims are false (or that all of them are true) is one kind of error; to say that what it is for a knowledge-claim to be true is for it to be affirmed, either affectively or cognitively, by some individual or group, is a mistake of a different kind. The former is a (mistaken) belief about how many knowledge claims can be true; the latter is a (mistaken) belief about what it is for a claim to be true. I do have views about the concept of truth, and they did make their way into the book (Groff 2004a, ch. 4), but overall the thesis was an attempt to counter (a), not (b), viz., the erroneous idea – all the rage at the time, as I’ve said – that no knowledge-claims are false (in the normal sense of the term).

JM: Apologies if I seem to be labouring the point Ruth but a final clarification might help a general reader here. You might usefully clarify the phrase ‘the norm of true,’ since this seems pivotal in distinguishing in principle between knowledge and mere belief if there are problems with simply accepting knowledge as that which is both true and justified (especially since there is little on this within critical realism with the kind of detail one finds say in Roderick Chisholm’s epistemic principles and statements on logical relations of epistemic appraisal).

RPG: Yes, I seem not to have been able to communicate the point clearly enough. Let me try it this way: if one is a fallibilist, one must find an epistemically responsible, yet non-equivocating way to do without a definite dividing line between the categories of ‘knowledge’ and of ‘belief.’ This simply falls out from the position. If you think that all knowledge-claims are provisional, and might turn out to be false, you cannot think that knowledge-claims as opposed to ‘mere beliefs’ are the claims that have somehow been established to be true. This means that ‘knowledge’ is doing far less epistemic work than it does from a non-fallibilist perspective. As I put it before, whatever weight the category of ‘knowledge-claim’ (as opposed to just ‘claim-claim’ or ‘belief’) has, it can’t be coming from the concept of ‘knowledge’ (since we’ve already stipulated that knowledge-claims are provisional.) The normative epistemic weight has to be coming from the concept of ‘true’ or of ‘truth,’ which – following again from the fallibilism – has to be seen as external to the concept of ‘knowledge.’ I call that concept a norm, or a regulative ideal. And the definition of that norm to which I subscribe is, again, Aristotle’s, teched-up a little by William Alston, though not in the essentials: viz., ‘To say of x that it is x, is “true”; to say of x that it is not x, is “false”.’

I’m willing to say that justification involves doing one’s best to assess whether or not a knowledge-claim fails to conform to that norm. I’m not as sure as Popper was that in all cases falsification is possible, even though conclusive confirmation is not. But sometimes falsification is possible, and in general there are ways to assess plausibility, I think. But always what is doing the normative epistemic work is the regulative ideal of ‘true,’ not the concept of ‘knowledge.’ This is a way of parsing things that is probably more original to me than some of my other views, but as I see it it’s just what is entailed by fallibilism combined with what an Aristotelian definition of ‘true’ means. One thing that’s potentially confusing about it, I suspect, is that usually people who blur the line between knowledge and belief – think Rorty, for instance – are not simultaneously Aristotelians about the concept of truth or realists about reality. With them, the line is blurred because ‘true’ just means ‘I or we believe it’ and plus as a matter of ontology there is nothing to be mistaken about.

Does this help?

JM: Yes, I think that nails it.

RPG: Oh good. When people start to think about which parts of reality might be ontologically such that in principle statements about them could be false (even if, as per fallibilism, we can’t know for sure that they are) – they often begin with bodies. Next come trees; then rocks; dinosaurs having existed when we didn’t, etc. I went through this progression, Taylor’s objections to ‘brute facts’ notwithstanding. I remember spending a long time trying to figure out what I could possibly be claiming about the world by saying, even just to myself, that it was raining outside, other than that it was, in fact raining outside, whether I thought it was or not. It was at this point that I turned in earnest back to Roy’s work. If, contra Hume and Kant alike, causation itself is not concept-dependent, I thought (and still do), then it cannot be the case that all claims about the world are true. Later I saw that we also need the proviso that not everything can cause everything.

JM: Though just to be clear you are referring here to causation as agency rather than causation as human agency?

RPG: Well, I thought that Roy – among others – was right to think of causation as something like the display of a power or powers. If that’s what causation is, then every instance of it will be that. But I wouldn’t say that causation just is agency, human or otherwise. Rather, I would say that agency, including human agency, involves the expression of causal powers.

Realism about causation, e.g. in the form of a belief in the existence of causal powers, places an ontological limit on the conditions of possibility for relativism about knowledge, as that phrase is understood outside of critical realism. That was the thesis of the dissertation, which was published in 2004 as part of the Routledge Studies in Critical Realism series.

JM: And you conclude the book with a version of the idea that a seemingly radical critique or denial of a position may ultimately, if inadvertently, endorse the position. You observe that for post-positivist thinkers no theory can meet positivist criteria and therefore there can be no knowledge but only belief (‘episteme’ becomes ‘doxa’) and, as such, post-positivists have implicitly endorsed the claim that they supposedly reject, i.e., that knowledge is as positivists claim it is and thus scientific knowledge is value-free and certain (Groff 2004a, 143–2).

RPG: To reiterate, the central claim was the one that I stated above: namely, that realism about causal powers places an ontological limit on the conditions of possibility for relativism about knowledge. Not relativism about knowledge in the idiosynchratic sense that Roy used the phrase, but the kind that was associated with Richard Rorty, for instance, whom I addressed in the book – along with a then-famous piece by Jane Flax, called ‘The End of Innocence.’ But yes, I did, and do still, think that those who were rejecting what they thought of as ‘Science’ or ‘Knowledge’ (capitalization intentional) were tacitly committed to a bad theory of knowledge, in addition to being mistaken both about how many claims about the world can be true and about what it is for a claim to be true.

JM: Still, your concluding remark is pointed.

RPG: Thank you. I had probably thought it already, but I’m sure that the clarity with which I saw it was greatly enhanced by Larry Laudan’s book Beyond Positivism and Relativism (1996) and by Calvin Shrag’s The Resources of Rationality (1992).

JM: I’m not familiar with these.

RPG: As an aside, Shrag had been the external examiner for the honours exam in philosophy of social science at Swarthmore in my senior year. In response to each of the points that I made in the oral component of the exam he would tap on the desk, then point his finger and say ‘Ooo-kaay!’ in what I now recognize was a heavy mid-western American accent. He was a character. It was a good experience, though, and I remember being excited, later, to be reading a book by that same person who had been such an attentive interlocutor. Speaking of personal connections, this might be a moment to add that Brian Ellis, who figured in the dissertation book, turns out to have been Hugh Lacey’s philosophy professor back in Australia!

JM: Six degrees of separation … 

RPG: Exactly. I gave a talk at a Templeton-related critical realist event in 2013 for which the organizer, Phil Gorski, had flown Ellis in, and Hugh also came. I remember Phil saying ‘So – you’re giving a talk to your father and to your grandfather!’ Roy was there too, in fact. It was very nice. In terms of content, meanwhile, what I remember most from that workshop is having been so aggravated by a smooth-talking young sociologist who was bandying around the term ‘causal mechanism’ that I wrote a paper about the concept, which subsequently appeared in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (Groff 2017) – the lesson, I suppose, being that one should always endeavour to do one’s best fussing in print.

Anyway, I do still think that positivism was the implicit starting point for many thinkers, and that once it became clear that positivist norms regarding knowledge were a bust, the epistemic response that followed was to conclude that therefore everything must be a matter of opinion, or of power, as Flax had had it. It was kind of a Nietzsche move. I’ve been referring to it as epistemic emotivism. Emotivism was a moral theory that was consistent with positivism, according to which a claim such as ‘Torturing puppies is morally wrong’ literally means ‘I dislike torturing puppies; do so as well.’ Or, in a less cognitive register, ‘Torturing puppies: yuck.’ As positivism fell apart, people began to treat empirical claims in the same way that positivists had treated normative claims.

JM: And in your first book would you say you are essentially, if modestly, recovering metaphysics in the wake of both positivism and post-positivism?

RPG: I suppose that that might be a way to put it, in that I didn’t take on relativism at the level of epistemology. I took it on at the level of metaphysics – or, better, via metaphysics. It was a simple argument: if realism about causal powers is true (and if not everything has all possible causal powers), then it can’t be that the world is consistent with all possible claims about it. Some potential claims about what causes what will have to be false, if causation itself is mind-independent (and if not everything can cause everything). Of course, if all you mean by ‘false’ is ‘I don’t like that belief,’ then even if you were to know which beliefs are false (which, to be clear, was not my point: I argued only that they can’t all be true), you wouldn’t know anything about the world other than which beliefs you or others dislike. But that’s not an account of ‘false’ (or of ‘true’) that most people really want to endorse, as I suggested earlier, if only because then their own claims wouldn’t have the kind of purchase that they actually want them to have.

JM: You may have flummoxed a few people here – is a/the problem a conception of true that has no relation to a conception of real?

RPG: Yes. What William Alston called an epistemic theory, and what others sometimes call a non-realist theory of ‘truth’ or of ‘true’ (Alston 1996). For instance, Flax had declared that ‘true’ just means ‘It’s a win for my side for people to believe this.’

But to return to the main thread of the discussion: it probably doesn’t make sense for me to rehearse the whole argument of that first book. It’s available in paperback these days, and people can just read it for themselves if they want to. The governing idea, as I’ve said, is that realism about causation as per RTS, if true (i.e., true as Aristotle defines the term), puts an ontological limit on the possibility of relativism. To show that there are good reasons to think that realism about causation is true, or at least well-founded, I did my best to show that it beats out both Kant’s transcendental idealism and Hilary Putnam’s conceptual realism (I took Putnam to be the contemporary neo-Kantian with whom one had to contend). I also argued against Ellis that real causal powers do too exist at the level of social phenomena. (He thinks so also, nowadays.) Along the way I took issue with Roy’s concept of alethic truth, contending that it was more trouble than it was worth, and I pointed to a Popper-friendly realist alternative.

JM: And do you stand by what you said in the book about scientific essentialism?

RPG: In terms of critical realism and scientific essentialism, what I’d say now is that Bhaskar and Ellis – along with a handful of others, by then – articulated similar but not identical versions of a neo-Aristotelian metaphysics, according to which different kinds of things have different kinds of real causal powers. Scientific essentialism was Ellis’s name for his version of the approach, though he also sometimes called it dispositional realism or dispositional essentialism. These days I wouldn’t say that critical realism is a species of scientific essentialism or that scientific essentialism is a species of critical realism; I would just say that these are two different anti-passivist theories of causation, amongst a family of such theories. I would add, though, that – as did Aristotle – both Roy and Brian take the ‘kinds’ in question to be something other than mere classificatory constructs; that’s the essentialism part.

JM: I recall reading the book around the time it came out and being tremendously impressed that this was a doctoral thesis. But let’s go back to the reference to the ‘Bhaskar listserv’ from the acknowledgements page; younger readers might not know what a listserv is. I might add here, when I took my old copy of the book off the shelf, I found a printout of a response you sent me in April 2005 in which you kindly shared some ideas on fallibilism in response to a question I had sent (and which included a very diplomatically phrased correction to a somewhat loose use of terminology – correspondence theory of knowledge instead of truth).

RPG: Thank you so much for these kind words, Jamie.

A listserv was basically a way to hit ‘Reply all’ on an email without all of the names having to be there. Everyone on the list received all of the e-mails that anyone else posted to the list. I joined the Bhaskar listserv in 1996 or so, at the recommendation of a fellow graduate student, Derek Hrynyshyn. People were reading RTS together, and it put me in touch, or in some cases back in touch, with other now-long-time critical realists. Doug Porpora, whom I’d known from peace-related work in Philadelphia in my early 20s, was on that list, for example. My first critical realism related publication – which later became a chapter in the dissertation and then in the book – came out of an intense conversation there about Roy’s concept of ‘alethic truth,’ as it had appeared in Dialectic (Bhaskar 1993) and in Plato Etc. (Bhaskar 1994). As I recall, I was the one person to be resolutely opposed to it, regarding it as a flat-out category mistake (Groff 2000, 2004a).

JM: How did that go?

RPG: Do you mean what was my reasoning? If so, the published argument is fairly detailed, but the take-away is that by ‘alethic truth’ Roy did not mean ‘a claim about the world that is indubitably true,’ or at least he didn’t mean just that. He meant: ‘a way that the world is.’ How the world is is an issue of being, not of knowing, as I believe that I put it at the time, and we already have a vocabulary for that. The word ‘true’ isn’t a good replacement for the word ‘reality.’ I managed to bring Doug around to my way of seeing things, and perhaps others eventually. As an already-senior person, Doug was always wonderful (and meticulous) about saying ‘As Ruth Groff has argued … .’ He did that for at least 20 years. This was all very early in the life of the listserv and in the revival of interest in Roy’s work. For instance, Mervyn Hartwig was not yet active on the list when I first joined. Tobin Nellhaus was there, as was Howard Engelskirchen. Colin Wight, as I recall. I don’t think that I could have written my dissertation without that intellectual community.

It was also thanks to the list that I was able to move beyond critical realism, in my interest in causal powers. Specifically, a participant named Ronny Myhre mentioned Ellis’s name – ‘This guy should be all over the critical realism literature,’ he said. I went to the library and got Brian’s Scientific Essentialism, which was my first inkling that there were people within Anglo-analytic philosophy who were beginning to talk in a realist way about causal powers, after two or three centuries of decrying them. I remember photocopying the whole book, so that I could mark it up, and then clutching it like some treasure on the subway ride home. It was very gratifying to me to later become intellectual friends with Brian. He was generous enough to read each chapter of Ontology Revisited after the first two or three, right as I finished them. I felt as though I were writing a Victorian serialized novel, if only for a readership of one. It meant a great deal to me to have that kind of support.

JM: And Brian provides an essay for your collection edited with John Greco.¹² This leads me to a different kind of question. I am curious as to whether you think your early grounding in philosophy gave you a different take on critical realism? A lot of those who find realism attractive come to it insofar as it solves a problem for them in developing a methodology (or some similar) chapter for a dissertation or thesis. You by contrast seem to have come to it armed with both more context and the traditional philosopher’s toolkit and focus: decomposition, parsing, disambiguation, etc. Would you say your ‘style’ and set of concerns differs from that of more social science based realists?

RPG: Yes, I think so. What I’ve already said about the concerns that got me to realism about causation gives you at least some of the sense in which this is so. And no doubt the difference has become more marked over time. RTS was about the metaphysics of causation – as was The Possibility of Naturalism (PON, Bhaskar 1979), in part, insofar as it was an effort to show how the position defended in RTS applies to sociological phenomena. Both of those early books also had to do with the relationship between knowledge-claims and the objects thereof, among other things. I approached this material, and still do, not as someone with primarily methodological concerns, but as someone who was and continues to be independently interested in these same philosophical topics – as well as in the confrontation with Hume generally. When I started out, I sort of thought – as is not uncommon amongst critical realists, in my experience – that Roy was the only person to have ever defended a powers-based ontology, or to have repudiated Hume (or Kant) on the basis of such an ontology. After I read Ellis, I found my way to the then-handful of contemporary Anglo-analytic metaphysicians who were engaged in a recovery of real causal powers, other than Rom Harré and E. H. Madden. For example, Nancy Cartwright, Stephen Mumford, Anjan Chakravartty, and others. I also came to appreciate the place of Humeanism in the history of metaphysics more – or, even more – than I already had, as well as its distorting effects across more than one discipline.

JM: And it is worth noting there is still a vibrant communtiy of philosophers interpreting and reinterpreting Hume’s work. For example Helen Beebee, who sets out to refute that Hume held the positions with which he is commonly associated (Beebee 2006; see also Read and Richman 2007).

RPG: Yes. There are a lot of new readings of Hume around these days. I’m not much for domesticating Hume, though. Hume freaked himself out by what he said, to put it bluntly, and he flipped Kant out, too. And neither one of them were slouches. I understand Hume to have put forward precisely those radical and profoundly disarming claims that Kant said awoke him (Kant) from his dogmatic slumbers. This pretty much leaves me with the so-called ‘old’ Hume, the one who disavowed talk of causal powers as technically meaningless, to be rescued only by redefining the concept of causation to mean a subjective feeling of anticipation that regularly accompanies the constant conjunction of given impressions.

JM: It is probably worth briefly explaining exactly what you mean by Humeanism here.

RPG: People mean different things by the term. Some uses are narrower than others. I guess that when I use it, in relation to metaphysics rather than ethics, say, I’m most often referring to one or more of the following ideas that Hume introduced in their paradigmatic form: that causation is a matter of regularity; that there are no essences or kinds; that substances are bundles of impressions; that there are no necessary connections; that there is no bona fide activity; that anything that is logically possible is metaphysically possible; that there is no such thing as real potentiality. In contemporary analytic metaphysics, there are various concepts that are related to these commitments: e.g., talk of ‘possible worlds’ as a way to deal with the problem of believing that the actual world has no modal traction. If I were to use the term in an epistemological context, I’d be referring to empiricism broadly, and perhaps more specifically to the problem of induction that is a function of Hume’s metaphysics.

JM: And Humeanism remains widespread in philosophy?

RPG: Yes. Humeanism remains the default stance in Anglo-analytic metaphysics, though the form of the hegemony has arguably become more subtle in recent years.

The developing anti-Humean discussion, which is what has been of interest to me, is less far-reaching than is the framework provided by critical realism, but it has other strengths. I have spent a lot of time trying to get analytic philosophers to know about RTS, especially.

JM: And Dustin McWherter (a member of Journal of Critical Realism’s editorial board) seems to have attempted something similar in Kantian circles following his The Problem of Critical Ontology (2013).¹³

RPG: Yes, well, Kant is ultimately, the one to beat, if one is going to be a neo-Aristotelian about causation – or about objects, for that matter.¹⁴ As far as I know, chapter two of Critical Realism, Postpositivism and the Possibility of Knowledge was the first direct engagement with Kant on causation in the secondary critical realism literature – though of course it’s Dustin who has produced the book-length encounter. Roy’s primary target in RTS was Humean regularity theory, and Harré and Madden had the same focus in Causal Powers (Harré and Madden 1975). Sure, the very name that Roy gave his position, viz., ‘transcendental realism,’ was a swipe at Kant, as is the whole notion of the ‘epistemic fallacy.’ And formally, Roy took RTS to be a re-rendering of the Critique of Pure Reason. But Roy himself didn’t attend to Kant as effectively as he attended to Hume, in my view. So there was and is work to be done. I would encourage those who are interested in critical realism and Kant to read that chapter of my first book for themselves (Groff 2004a), in addition to reading The Problem of Critical Ontology. (There will also be a discussion of Kant in the forthcoming book; I argue there that while Kant does talk sometimes like a realist about causal powers, in the end he can’t be counted as an anti-passivist about causation.)

For better or for worse, though, the orthodox position in analytic metaphysics is Humean, not Kantian. (Unlike in analytic ethics, as I suggested earlier, where Kant looms large.) Amongst those historians of philosophy whose speciality is Kant, be they analytic or continental, there is certainly interest in causation. I haven’t focused on that work in a sustained way because, as I say, Kantians aren’t driving the discussion of causation in analytic metaphysics. Kant has had a huge influence on critical and continental theory, though, and not all of it good, so I am very glad that Dustin is doing the work that he is.

To come back to your original question about the effects of approaching critical realism as a philosopher, I’d add that within critical realist circles, I’ve tried to emphasize that there is a rapidly expanding literature on real causal powers in analytic metaphysics now, and that Roy’s work is not as much of an anomaly as it might seem to non-philosophers to be. I think too that my training in philosophy has allowed me to not be distracted by the rhetorical trappings of Roy’s work.

JM: Moving on, do you teach a course on critical realism?

RPG: Unfortunately, I don’t. Perhaps when the new book is out, which is about the history of anti-Humean thinking about causal powers and dispositions, I’ll be able to offer a course on powers-based metaphysics. We’ll see.

JM: Your PhD was taken in a politics department, but your background is in philosophy and your research interests are also philosophical. I am not sure how it has been in the US over recent decades but it is definitely the case that the neoliberalisation of universities has shrunk opportunities for philosophers in the UK (many departments have closed over the years or been absorbed by sociology and by politics).

RPG: It was a challenge for me when I was first on the job market, both because my dissertation was officially in political theory but was about the issues that we’ve been discussing, and because the degree was from Canada. In Canada, at that time, a non-Canadian could only get an academic appointment if the employer was prepared to argue that there was no qualified Canadian who could do the job – a very difficult case to make for a junior hire. So I was looking in the US. The conception of political theory was narrower here, and my letter writers were not as well known here as they were in Canada and the UK.

I doubt that I could have written the dissertation that I did in a philosophy department – nor, quite possibly, in any political theory program other than the one that I was in, at York University (Toronto). I now have a secondary appointment in the philosophy department here at SLU, and many of my courses are cross-listed. I’m very grateful to the political science department for not minding that I do philosophy, as well as to the philosophy department for welcoming me despite my having the wrong degree. I have never really fit into any disciplinary or even sub-disciplinary boxes.¹⁵

JM: I hear that a lot from realists. Being a realist seems to encourage, in principle, a continual questioning of basic categories and settled positions. Moreover, it tends to invoke a degree of dissatisfaction with disciplinary constraints and settled or ‘received ontology’ of one kind or another – or confusions between them – of much of social science. Bob Jessop observed in his interview that being interested in Marx adds further impetus to this. Still, your work has been tremendously useful. One might read a book or chapter by you in which you test out the boundaries of a concept and come away with a couple of sentences or a reference, but the underlying effect is to enrich understanding and ingrain a sense of caution (matters are more complex than I thought, critical realism is not entirely original and far from complete, etc.).

RPG: Thank you again, Jamie; I really appreciate your saying that. Apart from my engagement with critical realism, I do feel that I’ve made something of a contribution to the powers and powers-related work in analytic philosophy, and that I’ve added something to discussions of Marx and Aristotle. I’m proud of Subject and Object, as I said. Especially, I’m pleased to have been able to provide clear introductions to each of the pieces that I chose to include – translations, if you will, for readers new to the Frankfurt School. But in all of these areas my work tends to cut across more familiar boundaries and/or to call more widely-held assumptions into question. I almost always feel like an outsider, thinking in ways and/or drawing upon sources that fall outside of the terms of any given debate to which I am party. It’s not lost on me just how lucky I am to have been able to pursue my interests on my own terms.

JM: Cecilia de Bernardi put it quite nicely a while back – ‘alone in a room full of people’ (de Bernardi 2018).

OK, with the idea of testing a concept out in mind, let’s turn to something more substantive. In chapter four of your forthcoming book, A Critical Introduction to Powers and Dispositions you provide a quite brilliant (in its clarity and simplicity) exposition of the concept of a causal power. This concisely sets out and compares Harré and Madden’s and Bhaskar’s accounts. Let’s start with this and the purpose you put this to, and then perhaps we might move on to discuss the concept of causal power and human agency and your discussion of ‘thin Aristotelian Marxism.’

RPG: I’m so glad that you liked chapter four. I’m not 100% clear what you’re asking, but maybe I can tell you a little bit about the book, and then if need be you can help me to better understand the question. The book will be part of a series published by Bloomsbury called ‘Critical Introductions to Contempory Metaphysics.’ Mine is the powers and dispositions volume. I decided that my underlying goal would be to ensure that readers not confuse what I have come to call anti-passivist accounts of powers with passivist accounts, and that the book would be an introduction to the former specifically. It’s organized both historically and (to a certain extent) thematically.

JM: You’ve used the term a few times now, by ‘passivism’ you mean?

RPG: The term comes from Brian Ellis, and it’s meant to capture the idea – popular in British and subsequently Anglo-analytic philosophy since the early modern period – that the world itself is inert. I have for years now been using the metaphor of a child’s flip book to convey the view: passivism is the idea that real-world animation is metaphysically akin to the apparent animation that we observe when we flip quickly through the series of stills in a flipbook – or on a roll of film. Just as in the case of a flip book, or a bit of film, says the passivist, in all cases what seems to us to be activity is in fact a succession of static states. I can say more about the passivism of particular thinkers if you’d like, but for present purposes it’s their common claim that causation does not involve activity, specifically in the form of the display of real powers, that is pertinent. The book is meant (1) to make it clear that disagreement over what I call realism about activity is the base-line dispute when it comes to the powers literature in metaphysics, so that people won’t be misled by the simple use of the word ‘power’ in someone’s theory; and (2) to trace the history of anti-passivist thinking about powers and dispositions.

JM: So critical realists and fellow travellers are anti-passivists?

RPG: Yes. The chapter that you read, chapter four, begins with short discussions of notable post-Humean anti-passivist precursers to Harré and Madden and to Bhaskar: especially Thomas Reid, Sterling Power Lamprecht (whom Harré and Madden cite repeatedly; also, yes: that’s his real name, and he’s wonderful), Roy Wood Sellars (who called his own view critical realism) and G. E. M. Anscombe. After that I reconstruct Harré and Madden’s position in Causal Powers (CP) and Roy’s position in RTS, respectively. Roy’s argument was both more comprehensive and less technical than Harré and Madden’s, and while they all agreed that Humean accounts of laws are inadequate, and that powers provide a way forward, they didn’t have quite the same motivations, philosophically. The task that Harré and Madden set for themselves was to account for the necessity of laws, whereas Roy wanted to show how it could be that laws hold even if and when the regularities that they describe don’t obtain. This said, there is also a great deal of overlap between CP and RTS.

JM: And you state from Harré and Madden that it is powerful particulars that have causal powers, X has power to A in virtue of its intrinsic nature (powers are part and parcel of what a thing is), they behave in some ways and not others, they make things happen – a claim of ‘natural necessity’ but not entailment (quite different than a Humean perspective where atomicity implies lack of internal connection to anything else and thus a problem of why one thing follows from another and why things have consistent properties – a Humean cannot readily account for enduring entities, properties and effects). Bhaskar’s focus, meanwhile, is that it typically requires isolation or laboratory conditions to induce constant conjunctions or regularity of outcome and yet the findings of laboratory science are deemed to continue to apply outside these conditions – leading to the question, ‘what must the world be like for this to be so?’ Events are brought about by genuinely powerful things.

Though, of course, there is always scope for some variation in what people mean by shared terms and it is one of philosophy’s contributions to clarify similarity and difference in order to avoid cross-purposes, etc. as well as to seek to improve on what has come before – subsumption, immanent critique and so forth. You, for example, describe Bhaskar as a ‘non-eliminativist’ about laws: he retains the term but alters its received meaning.

RPG: Yes, CP and RTS do differ in those ways. Roy was also less convinced than were Harré and Madden that it is the powerful particular that ‘does the doing,’ as I put it in a recent paper (Groff 2020). Roy sometimes seemed to think that it’s the powers themselves that are powerful, rather than the propertied thing.

It’s interesting, about laws. I think that Roy was ambivalent about what they are. Sometimes he made it sound as though laws are simply epistemic phenomena, descriptions of how powers or powerful particulars behave. Other times he sounds as though he thought that laws are part of the furniture of the universe, something akin to ‘how things tend to behave,’ where ‘how they tend to behave’ is taken to be an ontological phenomenon of its own, i.e., apart from, or in addition to, the things.

JM: It is perhaps worth clarifying here how seemingly universal constituents of reality fit into a powerful particulars viewpoint. If I said gravity is not the property or power of any one thing it is a consequence of space–time for everything – the ‘warping’ created by mass … and this is expressed in a set of equations that specify its mode of operation … a set of laws perhaps, then one might say … 

RPG: I don’t think that anything much hangs on the universal versus particulars part. You can say that all powerful particulars warp space-time, if only a tiny little bit. If the nature of the warping is expressible in mathematical equations, that’s fine too. That tells us something about how the world is. The issue is what if anything the mathematical equations are doing, metaphysically.

The metaphysical status of laws is an issue that anyone who holds a powers-based account of causation has to come to terms with. If it’s the powerful particulars that do the causal work, as it were (or the powers of the powerful particulars), then the laws aren’t causing anything, as they are in a nomological model. My own view is that laws are indeed simply descriptions, statements about the world. But – as I say – I think that Roy wavered on the question. Stephen Mumford wrote an excellent book on this topic, called Laws in Nature (2004). He too thinks that powers render laws metaphysically superfluous, though he is more dramatic about the whole thing than I am. But he is meticulous in his argumentation there. It’s a great book.

In any case, yes: it’s important to be clear about what people are saying. This past year I published an article in Synthese (Groff 2021a) called ‘Conceptualizing Causal Powers,’ in which I offer a typology of the different ways that people use the term ‘causal power’ that is finer-grained than the one that structures A Critical Introduction …  . Specifically, in addition to the fundamental divide between passivists and anti-passivists, in relation to which powers are associated with (a) activity, powers can also be equated with (b) potentiality, (c) essences and/or (d) necessitation. The conflation of these categories dates to Hume (no surprise), but these senses of the concept must be disambiguated for people to not be talking past each other. I can see now that I ran together the concepts of ‘powers’ and of ‘necessary connections’ when I started out, something that I wish that I could go back and correct.

JM: We’ve all written things where we’ve done something similar – conflation and such … 

RPG: I appreciate that, but it’s not just an idiosyncratic error in this case. It’s systemic. And it continues to have terrible consequences for thinking well about just about anything.

JM: Perhaps we might turn to human agency here since as we noted early on in the discussion an idea of a concept-independent reality is problematic for post-positivism and there are a whole set of other issues too that you have an interest in regarding human agency as causation.

RPG: Sure. With respect to the general issue of realism and the social, my view is that while social phenomena often if not always have an irreducibly conceptual component, or aspect, they aren’t reducible to mere ideational content, let alone to ideational content that is not held intersubjectively.

JM: This is an issue over which there is a great deal of misunderstanding regarding realism and its relationship to varieties of social construction. For example, when one says reality is mind-independent, in what sense does this relate to a speech act? Something is both real and true because I say it is (the utterance ‘I do’ in a marriage contract leads to the status of being ‘married’ and stands behind the subsequent statement ‘it is true that I am married’), but it is not only true because I think it, because I say it and because I believe it to be so?

RPG: Let’s think first about the marriage example specifically. Even in the case of marriage, where at least in some traditions both parties have to say ‘I do’ in order for there to be a marriage, the speech-act is necessary (when it is), but not sufficient. Words alone don’t do it – let alone subjective states of mind. You need an institution to legally sanction it, be that institution a secular one or a recognized religious one. I mean, you can consider yourself to be married. But that’s not the same as actually being married. Even common-law marriage, which might be closer to being a matter of declaration only, you need the state to recognize it, for it to count. You can tell the difference between declaring yourself to be married and actually being married at tax time, when you have to select the correct form for your legal status. Or when someone dies. Or is in the hospital. Of course, the fact that marriage is not simply a matter of two people declaring themselves to be married is itself a social fact: that it takes more than a belief that you are married in order to be married is a sociological phenomenon. Society could change, obviously. It used to be a social fact that same-sex couples could not be married; now, in some places anyway, that’s no longer the case. But regardless, at present it’s not simply declaring it so that makes it so.

But even if we consider a more private or individual speech-act than saying ‘I do’ in the context of a marriage ceremony, the mere fact that something is brought into being by words doesn’t change the meaning of ‘true.’ Statements about such things will be true or false in the same way that statements about things that are brought into being in other ways are true or false.

JM: And yet ‘mind-independence’ requires some careful elaboration insofar as the social fact of marriage is not merely a product of a state of mind, but marriage is a concept and there are no concepts without minds to have them nor are there consequences from the change of state unless there are people to think about themselves differently … Also, can we say that it is true that x is married because the status of being married was performed into existence appropriately (the social fact became the case) and if so does this add different inflections to a correspondence theory of truth than is the case for aspects of reality that do not depend on us for their existence?

RPG: You’ve just said a lot of different things! The key point, though, I think, is no; the fact that marriage is the outcome of the acts of conscious beings, involving meanings, beliefs, etc., does not change what it is for statements about marriage to be true. Nor does it make it be that all statements about it will be true. To respond to some of the component points: yes, of course; marriage presupposes that humans are sentient. But sentience itself is embodied. One might regard minds as being emergent, vis-à-vis human physiology, but they are not free-floating. In this sense, even minds are not completely mind-dependent. Second, there are plenty of effects of marriage that kick in no matter what married people think, or declare: e.g., that in many parts of the world you can’t marry anyone else if you’re married.

Again, the fact, if it is one, that some phenomena (even if marriage isn’t one of them) really might be conjured into being entirely by declaration – this fact doesn’t change what it is for a claim about such a phenomenon to be true or false. I went for a powers-based realism about causation as the check on whether or not all knowledge-claims can be true (as per a correspondence account of ‘true’), but one of the things Alston taught me was that all you really need is for reality to be such that it is possible to be mistaken about it. The existence of speech-acts doesn’t imply that reality is such that it’s impossible to be mistaken about it.

JM: Though human causal powers do seemingly lead to an order of reality dependent on the existence of humans in some sense, an order of reality that accommodates within it its own basis for contingency, contestation, variation and fallibility?

RPG: Yes. Let me say one last word about what this does or doesn’t entail epistemologically, then say something about the ontology. The human power(s) of consciousness allow us to initiate change, as well as to make and derive meaning, etc. But this means only that the world that we create (albeit mostly not self-consciously, and mostly not, as Marx, put it, in conditions of our own choosing) – this world changes, over time. It does not mean that, at any given moment, no knowledge-claims can be false (i.e., because simply by saying that the world is x-like we have made it be x-like). At least, it doesn’t entail this in any kind of general way; I’m sure that there are a few examples – e.g., things said in anger that can’t be taken back, etc., which, immediately upon being said render past statements about the world false and new ones true. But as a rule, the social character of the social doesn’t mean that anything that one says about it will be true of it.

About the ontology. There are really two issues here, it seems to me, when it comes to the objectivity of social phenomena. One is that most if not all social phenomena are not just ideational; there is – as we both have been saying – a material component too. The other, which is also important, is that even the ideational part is sociological, involving intersubjectively held norms and expectations, not ones that just happen to be widely held by many individuals, let alone held only by a person on their own. The norms and expectations are widely held because they are social; not the other way around. On this second point you really cannot do better than chapter one of Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method. Most sociologists – at least outside of the US – know the difference between what Durkheim called a social fact and what he called a psychological fact, but it bears repeating, along with the materiality of such facts.

In any case, social phenomena are perfectly real; they give us no reason to think that subjective idealism is correct as a matter of fundamental metaphysics, or that the correct account of the norm ‘true’ is: ‘I (or we) believe it.’

What I’ve just said in response to your question about the nature of social phenomena shows me to be committed to a non-reductive materialism and to the reality of emergence – i.e., to the existence of relational sociological entities that do not reduce ontologically to their parts. In this regard, I’m broadly sympathetic to what Roy referred to way back when as Synchronic Emergent Powers Materialism (SEPM) and to his early Transformational Model of Social Activity (TMSA), in which there is thought to be an ‘ontological gap,’ as he put it at the time, between individuals and emergent social entitites.

JM: And one of your interests is causation and free will … How might you contextualize this in a way that makes sense to a general reader?

RPG: With respect to the causal powers of individuals, I’ve set out my thinking most extensively in a piece published in Synthese called ‘Sublating the Free Will Problematic: Powers, Agency and Causal Determination,’ (Groff 2019). Some of the position is already present in chapter five of Ontology Revisited, though that discussion is more of a complement to the later analysis than it is an earlier version of it. For context, I’d say that in the modern period the issue of free will arises in relation to the belief that so-called laws of nature determine what happens in the world. And if that is so, the apparent quandary goes – how can it be that humans are, at least much of the time, able (or at least potentially able) to determine for ourselves what happens? If I stop typing and lift my arm right now, mustn’t it be that a law of nature caused me to do it? The article is fairly exhaustive, so I won’t reproduce it here, but the main point is that the so-called problem of free will is an artefact of a bad underlying metaphysics of causation, and that once you dispense with the latter there is no conflict between causation and agency. There are just different kinds of powerful particulars, to use Harré and Madden’s term, with different kinds of causal powers. The complex power(s) of consciousness is included in that mix, and is had by some but not all kinds of powerful particular. My view is very much in keeping with Ellis’ later thinking on the matter, e.g., in his piece in the volume that John Greco and I co-edited (Groff and Greco 2013).

As an aside – albeit related – the conception and design of that co-edited volume is an expression of my own longstanding view that a commitment to the existence of real causal powers changes not just our account of causation, laws, etc. at the level of basic ontology, but what we will say about consciousness and agency – about ‘middle-sized dry goods,’ as E. J. Lowe, to whom the free will article is dedicated, used to put it. (I am not speaking for Greco, here; that’s why the Introduction to the book is single-authored.) The edited volume was intended to illustrate that view by having people write about powers at different levels of abstraction, from metaphysics to social theory. The collection as a whole was dedicated to Roy.

JM: Parenthetically, would you say your book Ontology Revisited and your latest (forthcoming) book A Critical Introduction to Causal Powers and Dispositions exhibit continuity?

RPG: Yes, definitely. I have always undertood the various aspects of my thinking to be related, so it’s nice to have published enough now that those connections are more visible. A Critical Introduction can be seen as a logical extenstion of the paper of mine that we included in Powers and Capacities (‘Whose Powers? Which Agency?’ Groff 2013), which had to do with contemporary philosophers not distinguishing between anti-passivist repudiations of Hume (by theorists of real causal powers), on the one hand, and the use of the term ‘causal power’ by philosophers who do not break with Hume on the issue of passivism, on the other. Ontology Revisited, meanwhile was related to the thesis of the edited volume as a whole, namely, that where one stands on the question of real causal powers will affect what one can say, or say well and coherently, at the level of social, political and moral theory. To make that case in Ontology Revisited, I looked at several figures and one debate in the history of Western social and political thought (broadly construed to include the issue of free will), with the aim of showing both that and how commitments to one or more features of Humeanism have shaped and distorted discussion in areas outside of metaphysics.

JM: You introduce the concept of the ‘myth of metaphysical neutrality’ in the book and perhaps you might explain what you mean by the term?

RPG: It was meant to be a catchy way to problematize the notion that theories about agents and/or macro-level social phenomena are consistent with any and all underlying metaphysics – sort of a metaphysics analogue of the myth of value neutrality. A simple counter-example to the myth of metaphysical neutrality is the fact that one will not be in a position to distinguish between prejudice and structural racism, say, if one holds to a metaphysics according to which structures reduce to the behaviours and/or beliefs of individuals. Rousseau doesn’t get to have the distinction between particular wills and the General Will if there is no such thing as emergence. Etcetera.

Just to be clear, though, the fact that social and political theories presuppose metaphysical theories is a different matter than the fact, if it is one, that social phenomena have an ideational component, in one way or another, depending upon the phenomenon in question (i.e., buildings are concept-dependent in one sense; the institutions of the state in another; social norms in another). The concept-dependence of the social is not the same phenomenon as the meta-theoretical assumption that social and political theories do not have ontological commitments built into them.

JM: So Ontology Revisited was about the latter (metaphysical commitments and consistency), then, not the former?

RPG: That’s right. In Ontology Revisited I looked at Hume; Mill; Horkheimer, Marcuse and Adorno; the free will debate in analytic philosophy; Martha Nussbaum; and, briefly, the American political theorist Jane Bennett, in conjunction with Spinoza. In each instance we can see that the stated views regarding agency and the social are, in one way or another, both at odds with and nevertheless constrained by the underlying metaphysics to which the person (or parties) claim(s) to be committed. I recently took a much shorter, second pass at the general thesis of Ontology Revisited (minus the explicit focus on Humeanism) in a paper published this past year in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour called ‘The Devil is in the Categories’ (Groff 2021b). The ‘cases’ there were Aristotle, Rousseau and Marx. It’s not just a school marm preoccupation with consistency, though. Which thoughts get harder to have, or at very least harder to defend; which lines of inquiry get harder to carry out, given what may even come to be tacitly held basic assumptions and categories – which types of analysis are impeded is an ideological matter. If you take atomism for granted, for instance, you will not really understand what a trade union is; your whole conception of collective action will be stunted in a way that will matter concretely.

JM: This is a fascinating subject. Perhaps you might briefly say something about responsibility and also consider the question, does the idea that decisions are pivotal causes of actions turn on whether we are in a position to ‘do otherwise’ (since this is highly variable and not always the case) or rather on the power as an attribute of humans as entities? And perhaps you might say something briefly about challenges to free will – is it a psychological or metaphysical matter – Daniel Dennett, for example.

RPG: There is a lot packed in here. As I said a moment ago, the place where I address the issue of free will in the greatest detail is in that Synthese piece, ‘Sublating the Free Will Problematic’ (Groff 2019). On the first point, I don’t now think that reasons are best construed as causes of action, at least not exactly. I think that agents, who are sentient, cause their actions – often for reasons. (For the philosophers of mind in the crowd I will say that I think that this sentence is true both where ‘reasons’ are construed along internalist lines and along externalist lines.) And just quickly, with respect to responsibility: as I see it, the concept of responsibility (along with notions such as acting in accordance with one’s highest values, etc.) gets mixed up with the concept of free will when the obvious sense of free will, viz. not being deterministically caused by prior events to act as one does, has been taken off of the table in virtue of a background nomological (or law-based) metaphysics of causation. The architecture of this displacement is very clear in Kant, for instance: we are deterministically subject to causal laws (albeit causal laws construed as per transcendental idealism), so are manifestly not metaphysically free as empirical selves. But we are metaphysically free qua moral agents, i.e., as noumenal selves, in which capacity we are not bound by causation, period.

The free will problematic is a mess. I’m really hesitant to say anything more than that, other than to reiterate that if people are interested in seeing how it can be sorted out, from a powers-based perspective, they should go ahead and read the article. I argue that agents, who are not just sentient but irreducibly sentient, have causal powers – just as other things do. We are not omnipotent. But we do have the power to initiate courses of action; we are in this sense metaphysically free. My position is different from what is known in the free will literature as an agent causal view inasmuch as I reject altogether the nomological metaphysics of causation that structures the debate even for agent causalists. I address the free will debate in Ontology Revisited, too, as I’ve said, but the full positive account comes in that Synthese piece. Someone who was really interested might want to read both.

JM: OK, let’s turn to your work on Marx and ‘thin Aristotelianism’ since the concept of species being seems to have obvious resonance with the issues we have started to discuss. Perhaps you might trace out your reasoning from the 2015 paper.

RPG: It’s got a ridiculous name, that paper: ‘On the Ethical Contours of Thin Aristotelian Marxism’ – though it’s been nicely received. The paper, I mean. It was for a volume on Marx and morality. My claim was that the infrastructure of Marx’s approach is recognizably Aristotelian, in that the basic explanatory categories of Capital presuppose a view of human beings as endowed with distinctively human capacities, and what is taken to be good for its own sake is the actualization of those capacities. Like Aristotle, Marx thought both that humans don’t flourish (in the sense just described) in the context of deformed social relations, and also that non-deformed social relations are themselves an expression of those very capacities, properly actualized. As Aristotle has it, a non-deformed polis just is the fullest display of phronesis (practical wisdom); it’s a multi-party virtue friendship, to use the Aristotelian terminology. Marx doesn’t pick out the same capacities as Aristotle did, and there is disagreement about the relevant social conditions, but it’s an Aristotelian framework. Even if you regard it as Aristotle via Hegel, it’s Aristotle deep down.

JM: There is, of course, always a problem when writing about Marx concerning where one looks for an ‘authentic’ Marx about which one can make legitimate or justifiable claims: works published during his later life or just after his death that one can reasonably assume he intended to be representative of his mature position, earlier manuscripts recovered and published after Marx’s death, which presumably shed light on the development of his position, subsequently published correspondence that might shed light on Marx’s reflexivity, etc.; there are many Marxisms (and post-Marxisms – Laclau and Mouffe, Hardt and Negri, Badiou, etc.) and one cannot avoid provoking the ire of one group of Marxists or another when making claims on Marx (see Morgan 2018). You link the young and mature Marx, broadly along the lines that human species being includes a capacity for creativity or freedom and the good for human beings is to realize our species being, but moral judgement is slightly different … 

RPG: I do disagree completely with Althusserians and others who hold that an ‘early’ ‘humanistic Marx’ held views that were completely different from those held by a supposedly ‘late’ ‘scientific Marx.’ I’m not really interested in what the motivations are for insisting upon the existence of a so-called ‘epistemic break.’ Capital, in my view, is clearly the worked-out version of the 1844 Manuscripts. Not to see that seems to me to be just a wilful misreading of the texts. One author whose work on Marx I really admire is Patrick Murray, though I don’t agree with him about every single thing. But almost every single thing! A person whose work on Marx is serious and who is probably known by critical realists is Howard Engleskirchen, whom I mentioned earlier when discussing the Bhaskar listserv. He wrote a CR-related book called Capital as a Social Kind (Engleskirchen 2011).

JM: Let me put this another way. You may ‘disagree’ with the various strands and interpretations but their existence remains a fact and any discussion of Marx always invites the response ‘which Marx?’ and ‘according to who?’ I interviewed Michael Hardt years ago and this came up – as it did later in various exchanges with Peter Nielsen and Ben Fine (e.g. Morgan 2003, 2006). In any case, there are a host of figures who have engaged with Marx and critical realism, not all of whom would claim to be critical realists: Andrew Collier, Bob Jessop, Steve Fleetwood, Kathryn Dean, Jonathan Joseph, Alex Callinicos, Andrew Brown, John Michael Roberts and so on (e.g. Brown, Fleetwood, and Roberts 2002; Collier 1995; Morgan 2011). Where would you say you sit?

RPG: I’m laughing as you’re asking this because just the other night a friend said to me: ‘Do you just not believe in secondary sources?’ I had to admit that it wasn’t until I was just about through with graduate school that I realized that one was allowed to consult them – or even really that they’re a thing. At least, one certainly couldn’t consult them in place of reading the original work for oneself, I thought. I attribute this to my undergraduate training. We read primary sources almost exclusively, for better or for worse. And it’s not a coincidence in this regard that Swarthmore is a Quaker school. Quakers believe in what they call ‘continuing revelation,’ according to which one says: ‘Yes, the Bible is an important book. But what has God said to thee?’

Mind you, it’s not that one cares nothing about what others hear, from God or anyone else. It’s just that one takes it for granted that there is a there, there, in terms of the original, and that one must engage with it directly. In keeping with this mindset, I would say that I rarely think of ‘Marx according to whom.’ I mean, I think some people get Marx jaw-droppingly wrong, but – or maybe it’s an ‘and’ – in such cases I find myself thinking, perhaps naively, ‘Didn’t they read the text?!’ Works of philosophy (and critiques of political economy) are not Rorschach tests, after all. This said, there are people who, in my view, read Marx better than others. I mentioned Patrick Murray, earlier; I love his work. I am also generally sympathetic to the late Ellen Meiksins Wood’s thinking about Marx, especially in her collection of essays, Democracy Against Captalism. These are just two examples that come immediately to mind, as people whose Marx I recognize. But for me, it’s my own best reading of Marx – if I have to put it that way – that is bedrock. This sounds arrogant, but it’s not meant to be.

JM: It at least seems important to be committed to reading sources on which so many ideas and arguments have depended if subsequent writing takes the form of ‘X said’ or ‘X meant,’ though that of course is different than denial of scope to take inspiration and develop argument as part of an evolving discourse – differences about what one claims and how one locates oneself … and as you say previously you are a secondary source on Bhaskar but also I would add an original source on causal power, depending on what the threshold for original is … In any case, your reading of Marx … 

RPG: Well, sure. You really don’t want to be an imperious jerk, or imagine that you are the first to have read a given text. But you should read things for yourself, and you should work hard at it, such that your best reading is a serious one. My reading of Marx lands me in the company of some rather than others. I don’t think that Althusser got Marx right, as I said, though I do think that Nicos Poulantzas, for instance, has useful things to say about the capitalist state. I also disagree, for what it’s worth, with the Marx-as-Spinozist view. If you want a non-deterministic, anti-passivist, non-reductive materialism – which is the kind of position that I understand Marx himself to have held – then Spinoza just can’t be your guy, no matter how nice he was. I wrote about this briefly – albeit not in connection with Marx – in the final chapter of Ontology Revisited. (I recognize that these may be fighting words in some corners, but I am more or less constitutionally allergic to cherry-picking parts of comprehensive theories without regard to the underlying categories and what they imply.)

In terms of critical realism, one way that I see the relationship between Roy’s early work and Marx I can express via a riff on something that my PhD supervisor Asher Horowitz once said jokingly about Adorno, viz., that for Adorno Marx was a minor post-Hegelian. I sometimes say that Marx is my favourite minor post-Aristotelian (though, to be clear, I don’t actually regard Marx as a minor thinker, and neither is Aristotle my own go-to guy.) I see Roy’s early work as a Marx-inflected neo-Aristotelian recovery of real causal powers, so there is a connection for me between critical realism and Marx, both directly and via Aristotle.

But back to the article, which had to do with the topic of Marx and morality. I argued that while the explanatory infrastructure of Capital is inherently normative, and recognizably Aristotelian, that infrastructure doesn’t add up to a complete moral theory. (Bertell Ollman and Allen Wood are two well-known authors who think that Marx’s commitment to the actualization of human capacities doesn’t count as normative at all, so as part of the argument I did my best to show them to be mistaken about that.) To fill out the picture, I suggested, Marxists could do worse than to adopt Aristotle’s account of moral judgement, turning as it does on the intellectual power of phronesis, or practical wisdom – and I say why. But I went on to say that Marxists needn’t appropriate the concept of phronesis if they don’t want to; other moral theories besides Aristotle’s are consistent with the Aristotelian core. (I’m probably more of a Platonist than an Aristotelian in the end, myself.) Some aren’t so consistent, though. I ran through various alternatives. As suggested by the title, I called the overall position ‘thin Aristotelian Marxism.’ I should note that I don’t mean anything very dogmatic by ‘Marxism.’ I mean by it just what I would mean by referring to the architecture of any major thinker’s work.

JM: And you very neatly, I thought, explain what capitalism is ‘for Marx’ and why it is problematic – in relation to the concept of normative infrastructure of theory – via ‘estranged labour’ … 

RPG: Thank you. I do think that, with Marx, the very deepest ill of capitalism is that it is a system in which, by definition, our core human capacity for conscious, creative, collective self-determination cannot be actualized. It is literally an affront to our humanity. But I don’t want anyone to jump to conclusions upon hearing me say that. Marx thought that a whole host of things were bad about capitalism, and also that some number of things about it were at least instrumentally good.

JM: Since we have been mainly discussing Marx, it’s probably worth mentioning here that your interests are diverse. You have been, as I noted in the introductory comments, for example, involved in the International Association for MacIntyrean Inquiry (ISME). There is an obvious crossover in terms of some of the things you have said in terms of his After Virtue isn’t there? His exploration of emotivism, moral disagreement, his claim that the Aristotelian tradition can be ‘restated in a way that restores intelligibility and rationality to our moral and social attitudes and commitments,’ his comments on Marx and morality (MacIntrye 1985, 259 and 261)?

RPG: Everyone who was anyone was reading After Virtue when I was at Swarthmore. (Though I have always remembered Braulio Munoz, the social theorist with whom I first read more than small bits of Marx, saying, at the time, that he wished that some of those readers could see that much of what MacIntyre was doing – and Charles Taylor too – had already been done by members of the Frankfurt school.) But it’s a magisterial work. When Fredric Jameson reviewed After Virtue, also at the time, he described it as one of the best books on ideology written in the twentieth century. And I got just as much, if not more, out of certain brilliant essays of his (i.e., MacIntyre’s) in Against the Self-Images of the Age, which came out earlier (MacIntrye 1978). Because I was trained in the way that I was, I had already read key emotivists before I got to MacIntyre writing about them so trenchantly. So it wasn’t MacIntyre who introduced me to emotivism, or taught me to view it critically. It was MacIntyre, though, who made the crucial and incisive point that twentieth century emotivists were accurately describing how language that was ostensibly moral was being used, in their own intellectual circles and increasingly in the culture at large, even if emotivism fails as a normative theory. I got involved with ISME through an early paper that I wrote on MacIntyre and Marx that came out in Philosophy & Social Criticism (Groff 2012b). ISME has the aim of bringing together Marxists, Aristotelians and Thomists. I was on the Steering Committee for a time, and co-organized the 2015 annual conference with my colleague Greg Beabout, here at SLU, on the theme of ideology-critique.

JM: But to return to Marx, are you planning to write more on his work?

RPG: Yes, I hope so. I am endlessly intrigued by the metaphysics of Capital. As many readers will know, there are those who see the work as fundamentally Hegelian, not just in its logic but in its ontology – albeit Hegelian in a materialist register. And there are some who see it as Aristotelian; Scott Meikle is a name that people might know (e.g. Meikle 1985). And of late the Spinozists. I have a theory that there are multiple layers to it.

JM: Capital?

RPG: Yes. I have a theory about the metaphysics. I don’t want to be more specific than this because … well … mystery. But I’m really keen to work on it. I think that it’s what I’ll turn to as a next big project, once I finish A Critical Introduction to Powers and Dispositions. As a tiny first step, I gave a paper at this year’s Critical Social Ontology Workshop (CSOW), in which I weighed in on a debate between Patrick Murray and Andrew Kliman about what value is – whether it’s ‘constituted,’ to use the locution of the debate, via production or via exchange. I think that I have a way to capture what is right about what both of them are saying that is not the same as what either of them are saying on their own. I’d like to write that up. It was so gratifying to me that Patrick, Howard Engelskirchen and Tony Lawson were all there at that session. I’m really eager to pursue these issues – even if really the only thing that anyone should be thinking about right now, other than climate change, is the mass psychology of fascism, as Wilhelm Reich put it.

JM: Something that Daniel Little has of late become interested in (a rightward shift in thinking) in his blog; you I recall wrote him a guest piece on causal powers a while back (Groff 2014d).

RPG: I confess that I don’t really follow his blog, so I’m not sure what the right-ward shift is.

JM: Just to be clear I meant shift in events in the world not in his thinking … 

RPG: Well, he was very generous to me when I wrote a paper that involved criticism of his concept of a causal mechanism not being more than an event-causal sequence. We were introduced by George Steinmetz, who asked me to come give a talk to his seminar on that paper and who invited Dan to comment. That’s around when Dan invited me to do that guest post. He was also becoming more interested in critical realism at the time. We were both involved in the Templeton CR project that I mentioned earlier, run out of Yale by Phil Gorski (George was also involved with that effort). In the end, Dan seemed to not actually be all that friendly to critical realism, though this may have changed.

JM: Re the subject of your recent CSOW paper, value is a subject that divides opinion – Dave Elder-Vass’s latest book attempts to provide a realist take on it (2022). Given you have brought it up, this seems an appropriate juncture to ask you how CSOW came about and how you see it developing.

RPG: CSOW is an organization that I formed about five years ago now, for the purpose of bringing together philosophers and social theorists who are doing social ontology that does not presuppose Humeanism. It seemed like the right time for such a grouping, as analytic philosophers had, all of a sudden it seemed, discovered the existence of social phenomena, but in the mainstream were approaching the topic with the same deeply-entrenched orthodoxies that have held their thinking back (in my view) in many other areas – sometimes importing them into socal ontology via those other areas. There needed to be a space, or an additional one, since there are longstanding associations such as the Cambridge Social Ontology Group there in the UK, where people would not have to contend with all of that.

JM: So a forum bringing together philosophers and social theorists for … 

RPG: For productive talk about the nature of social things. I firmly believe that philosophers and social theorists need each other intellectually. Philosophers can be very good at abstractions, and social theorists can often benefit from that; social theorists, meanwhile, have first-order expertise about concrete social phenomena, and philosophers can often benefit from that. I wanted to create a setting in which philosophers and social theorists could learn from and with each other, in a friendly annual workshop.

Doug Porpora, who people will know as current President of IACR as well as from his work, is on the Core Committee, along with Vanessa Wills, Charlotte Witt, Tony Lawson and Sally Haslanger. Just one thing that has been very nice about CSOW is that we’ve consistently had participation from people in multiple countries, on multiple continents. We were interrupted by Covid in 2020 and 2021, but we met again this year. As you mentioned in your introduction, I’ve recently joined the editorial board of the journal Axiomethes, and will be responsible for developing a section of the journal that will be devoted to socal ontology. This will be a potential platform for some CSOW papers.

JM: OK, let’s start to bring the interview to a close. Are there any other future writing projects on your mind?

RPG: I’ve started writing a paper with a friend, John Symons, in which we will use the case of AI to show that different moral theories presuppose different ontologies, just as different social and political theories do. I confess that I don’t actually have any special interest in AI – I can barely operate my cell phone. For me, the paper is a case study for issues related to powers metaphysics and ethics; it’s John who actually knows about AI.

JM: Still, it’s a fascinating subject – one that has occupied the Center for Social Ontology group, organized by Margaret Archer and Ismael Al-Amoudi, for multiple edited volumes. I expect once you begin you will find it difficult not to get drawn into the many issues that it evokes. (I’m currently reading David Chalmers’ book Reality+, which asks whether virtual reality is real. It’s excellent.) But what is it you intend to explore?

RPG: For reasons of metaphysics, we’re going to ask if an AI could be moral as per Aristotle. In order to count as having what Aristotle terms ‘full moral virtue,’ an agent has to have an intellectual power called phronesis, the existence of which is flat-out precluded by any deterministic, law-based account of the world. John and I think that an AI probably can’t have phronesis, even if one is thinking of AIs themselves in Aristotelian terms. The paper is for a book on powers, ethics and AI, which is being edited by Anna Marmodoro and William Bauer. John and I have wanted to write something together for a while, so this was a welcome opportunity. Thank goodness John knows more about AI than I do.

JM: So you think that it’s unlikely an AI can acquire practical wisdom? Whether an AI could experience, appreciate and learn along the lines Aristotle had in mind does seem on first consideration a highly relevant case, if we take seriously speculative accounts of future possibilities discussed for AI (Nick Boström, Ray Kurzweil, etc.). Still, given, as I noted in the introduction, you have acquired a reputation for your enviable command of classic texts, this seems quite a departure, albeit a joint venture … 

RPG: To be precise, we think that an AI might be able to have what Aristotle called a good ‘hexis,’ or character, but not full moral virtue. The main reason for thinking that a good hexis, at least, might be possible is that Aristotle says that character is acquired by habituation; the main reason to think not is that a good hexis is in large part an affective phenomenon, so you’d need AIs that have emotions. But perhaps the dispositions of a good hexis could be programmed. What we suspect that an AI really cannot have, though, not even programmed in, is phronesis – not unless you assume an analogical base that is sufficient to support an emergent non-analogical consciousness. And phronesis is required for full moral virtue. I’ve never co-written for publication before. I’m very pleased that John wanted to do it.

Once this paper and the book are done, I hope to be able to attend to various other longstanding interests. In addition to the larger Marx project, at some point I’d like to work out my thinking about connections between Locke, Kant and Adorno, with respect to the constitution of objects. And I want to think more about a point that I made in one of the explanatory notes in Subject and Object, to the effect that Adorno may have held what contemporary analytic metaphysicians call a ‘trope theory’ of properties. I have an as-yet-not-worked out sense that making this explicit would go a long way toward resolving some of the apparent dead-ends in his thinking, which Adorno readers tend to regard as simply aporetic, reflecting at the level of thought the brokenness of the world.

JM: This seems a good place to conclude. Perhaps we might finish with comment on what realism has meant to you over the years … you’ve combined refinement of thought with, it seems to me, an interest in practical matters – the work of Paolo Friere and Myles Horton, your own work as a labour community organizer and so on … 

RPG: What an intriguing question. I’ve never really thought too much about what realism means to me. It must be something like intellectual fearlessness. People who are attracted to anti-realism almost always take themselves to be enacting a type of respectful deference to others. Who is to say what is real? Or good (though we haven’t been talking about moral realism)? This sort of thing. But to my mind what is best is a mix of kindness and unblinking clarity, not any kind of equivocation about things. I don’t mean by this that one ought to be dogmatic; not at all. As I said before, I think that our claims about the world are provisional – or at least the interesting ones are. Plus, no good ever comes from rigidity, let alone self-righteous rigidity.

It’s important not to turn away from reality, though.

Politically, I suppose that I associate realism with Marx’s observation that we make history, but not under conditions of our own choosing. Both the objective and the subjective conditions of a given time confront us as something external. Not something immutable, but something that doesn’t reduce to our own wishful thinking. Moreover, as I was saying at the outset, struggles to change existing relations of power regularly require us to identify and confront false beliefs. A commitment to realism grounds the concept of ‘false’ by implying that things are such that it is possible to be wrong about them. This last sentence may sound like a kind of anti-climactic note to end on, but I don’t feel that way about it. Thinking that it’s possible to hold false beliefs makes possible a commitment to truth-seeking – to intellectual fearlessness, as I put it above. I think that these attitudes are virtues, though of course you need some other virtues too, to go along with them: patience, a tolerance for situations that really are both-and, good humour, enthusiasm, compassion. But intellectual fearlessness is essential. Just ask Plato.

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Notes on contributors

Ruth Porter Groff

Ruth Porter Groff is Associate Professor of Political Theory and Affiliated Associate Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University. She is the author of numerous books and articles. Additional detail is given in the interview.

Jamie Morgan

Jamie Morgan is Professor of Economic Sociology at Leeds Beckett University. He co-edits the Real-World Economics Review with Edward Fullbrook. He has published widely in the fields of economics, political economy, philosophy, sociology and international politics.

Notes

1 For information on, and access to, Groff’s work and related activity, visit: https://www.slu.edu/arts-and-sciences/political-science/faculty/groff-ruth.php her personal site https://sites.google.com/a/slu.edu/rpg/ and the blog: https://powerscapacitiesanddispositions.wordpress.com.

2 See also, Groff (1997, 2001, 2004b, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012b, 2012c, 2013, 2014b, 2015a) and Kurki (2009).

3 See also, Groff (2015b).

4 It has become customary for the recipient of the Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize to give a keynote at a subsequent IACR annual conference based on the text for which it was awarded. Groff gave her plenary address in 2015 and this was published in Journal of Critical Realism in 2016. She was also an IACR keynote speaker in 2007.

5 Core members of CSOW are Ruth Groff (Coordinator), Sally Haslanger, Tony Lawson, Doug Porpora, Vanessa Wills and Charlotte Witt. Visit: https://www.facebook.com/Critical-Social-Ontology-Workshop-354674334903555/.

6 Visit: https://www.springer.com/journal/10516/editors.

7 See also in this series Archer and Morgan (2020); Rescher and Morgan (2020); Porpora and Morgan (2020); Norrie and Morgan (2021); Lawson and Morgan (2021a, 2021b); Jessop and Morgan (2022); Elder-Vass and Morgan (2022); Sayer and Morgan (2022); Alderson and Morgan (2022).

8 Note from Jamie: Kant rejects ‘metaphysica generalis’ in his Critique of Pure Reason. For an introduction visit: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-metaphysics/#PreRemRejOntGenMetTraAna.

9 Note from Jamie: quantitiative focused economics, sociology, psychology and so on continue to be influenced by a background set of developments that stem from logical positivism: the deductive-nomological and inductive probabilistic models of scientific explanation, covering laws and hypothesis testing. Since no statement containing the claim ‘all’ can ever be conclusively verified then, as Ruth intimates, it became apparent that a verification principle contradicted positivists’ own understanding of scientific laws – hence a later shift to contingent confirmation, conjectures and refutation and then falsification via Karl Popper … though without ever getting to grips with the fundamental misunderstanding built into the expectation of constant conjunction law-like behavior in the world (leading also to the contrast with hermeneutics, which separated out a social realm in rejecting positivism). See Ruth’s later comments on Humeanism.

10 For a description and analysis of the Philadelphia Unemploment Project’s work, see Groff (1997).

11 Note from Jamie: for a simple introduction to correspondence theory of truth (a true statement corresponds to a fact about some aspect of the world, etc.) visit: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/ or see Ruth’s entry ‘Truth’ (Groff 2007) in The Dictionary of Critical Realism.

12 Note from Jamie: other contributors whose name may be familiar to readers of Journal of Critical Realism include Rom Harré, Nancy Cartwright and Tony Lawson.

13 Note from Jamie: for review essays on works over the years on metaphysics, Kant and Hume in Journal of Critical Realism see, for example, Morgan (2005, 2016, 2019).

14 Note from Ruth: see, especially, Watkins (2005).

15 Note from Ruth: My thesis committee at York (Canada) was composed of Asher Horowitz, who was my supervisor, David McNally and Rob Albritton. Asher is known for his work on Rousseau, Levinas and critical theory; McNally is a major figure on the Left now, theorizing the history of capitalism. Rob is probably known by critical realists for his writing about new dialectics; readers may be familiar with is review of Kathryn Dean’s Capitalism and Citizenship (Albritton 2004).