Critical Realism

The loudest argument in research is one you probably did not realise you were being asked to join.

There is a long running fight in academia between two camps. One camp says that real knowledge is objective, measurable, and repeatable, and that anything that cannot be pinned down with numbers is not really knowledge. The other camp says that experience is subjective, reality is constructed through interpretation, and the very act of measuring changes what you are measuring. Students in research methods classes are often asked, gently or otherwise, to pick a side. It feels like a foundational choice, the kind of thing that will define what kind of thinker you are for the rest of your career, and once you have chosen there is a strange pressure to defend your camp against the other one. The problem is that both answers have always been partly right, and the fight has been stopping people from saying so.

A philosopher named Roy Bhaskar argued that reality has depth. There are structures and mechanisms and forces that genuinely exist and operate whether or not anyone is looking at them, which is the insight the first camp is pointing at. And our access to that reality is always filtered through our context, our history, our language, and our theories, which is the insight the second camp is pointing at. Both are true at the same time, and the interesting work lives in the space where they meet. You do not have to choose whether the world is objective or subjective. You have to accept that it is layered, and that different layers need different ways of being studied. When have you caught yourself defending a position simply because it was the side you had been put on?

Last week we said some questions can only be answered by experiment. This week we look at the long fight between two camps in research, and at the philosopher who refused to take sides.