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For anyone interested, here is the Introduction to Roy Bhaskar's A Realist Theory of Science;

Introduction
The aim of this book is the development of a Systematic Realist Account Of Science.
Such an account [expositions] must provide a comprehensive alternative to the Positivism [see note below] which since the time of Hume has fashioned our image of Science.
Central to the Positivist vision of Science is the Humean Theory Of Causal Laws.
It is a principal concern of this study to develop some new arguments and show how they relate to more familiar ones against this still widely accepted theory.
In particular I want to argue that not only is a constant conjunction of events not a sufficient, it is not even a necessary condition for a scientific law; and that it is only if we can establish the latter [scientific law] that we can provide an adequate rationale for the former [constant conjunction].
It has often been contended that a constant conjunction of events is insufficient, but it has not so far been systematically argued that it is not necessary.
This can, however, be shown by a transcendental argument from the nature of experimental activity.



It is a condition of the intelligibility of experimental activity that in an experiment the experimenter is a causal agent of a sequence of events but not of the Causal Law which the sequence of events enables him to identify.
This suggests that there is a ontological distinction between scientific laws and patterns of events.
Obviously this creates a prima facie problem for any theory of Science.

I think that it can be solved along the following lines:
To ascribe a law one needs a theory.
For it is only if it is backed by a theory, containing a model or conception of a putative causal or explanatory ‘link’,
that a law can be distinguished from a purely accidental concommitance.
The possibility of saying this clearly depends upon a non-reductionist conception of theory.
Now at the core of theory is a conception or picture of a natural mechanism or structure at work.
Under certain conditions some postulated mechanisms can come to be established as real.
And it is in the working of such mechanisms that the objective basis of our ascriptions of Natural Necessity lies.

It is only if we make the assumption of the real independence of such mechanisms from the events they generate
that we are justified in assuming that they endure
and go on acting in their normal way outside the experimentally closed conditions that enable us to empirically identify them.

But it is only if we are justified in assuming this that the idea of the universality of a known law can be sustained or that experimental activity can be rendered intelligible.
Hence one of the chief objections to Positivism is that it cannot show why or the conditions under which experience is significant in Science.
Most critics have emphasized its depreciation of the role of theory; this argument shows its inadequacy to experience.

Moreover it is only because it must be assumed, if experimental activity is to be rendered intelligible,
that natural mechanisms endure and act outside the conditions that enable us to identify them
that the applicability of known laws in open systems, i.e. in systems where no constant conjunctions of events prevail, can be sustained.
This has the corollary that a constant conjunction of events cannot be necessary for the assumption of the efficacy of a law.

This argument shows that real structures exist independently of and are often out of phase with the actual patterns of events.
Indeed it is only because of the latter [actual events] that we need to perform experiments and only because of the former [real structures] that we can make sense of our performances of them.

Similarly it can be shown to be a condition of the intelligibility of perception that events occur independently of experiences.
And experiences are often (epistemically speaking) ‘out of phase’ with events—e.g. when they are misidentified.
It is partly because of this possibility that the scientist needs a scientific education or training.

Thus I will argue that what I will call the Domains of
1. the real,
2. the actual and
3. the empirical
are distinct.

This is represented in Table 0.1 below:-
.....................REAL..............ACTUAL.........EMPIRICAL
Mechanisms.........Y.....
Events................Y...................Y..
Experience..........Y............ .......Y.................Y.........


The real basis of Causal Laws are provided by the generative mechanisms of Nature.
Such generative mechanisms are, it is argued, nothing other than the ways of acting of Things.

And Causal Laws must be analysed as their Tendencies.
Tendencies may be regarded as powers or liabilities of a Thing which may be exercised without being manifest in any particular outcome.

The kind of conditional we are concerned with here may be characterised as normic.
They are not counter-factual but transfactual statements.

Nomic Universals, properly understood, are transfactual or normic statements with factual instances in the laboratory (and perhaps a few other effectively closed contexts) that constitute their empirical grounds;
they need not, and in general will not, be reflected in an invariant pattern or regularly recurring sequence of Events.

The weakness of the Humean concept of laws is that it ties laws to closed systems, viz. systems where a constant conjunction of events occurs.
This has the consequence that neither the experimental establishment nor the practical application of our knowledge in open systems can be sustained.
Once we allow for open systems then laws can only be universal if they are interpreted in a non-empirical (transfactual) way, i.e. as designating the activity of Generative Mechanisms and Structures independently of any Particular Sequence or Pattern Of Events.
But once we do this there is an ontological basis for a Concept Of Natural Necessity, that is necessity in nature quite independent of men or human activity.

In Science there is a kind of dialectic in which
1. a regularity is identified,
2. a plausible explanation for it is invented, and
3. the reality of the entities and processes postulated in the explanation is then checked.

This dialectic is illustrated in Diagram 0.1 below.

Dialectic:
1. the art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions.
2. inquiry into metaphysical contradictions and their solutions.

If a classical empiricist tradition in the philosophy of Science stops at the first stage,
a rival neo-Kantian or transcendental idealist tradition (discernible in the history of the philosophy of Science) stops at the second.
If and only if the third step is taken and developed in the way indicated above
can there be an adequate rationale for the use of laws to explain phenomena in open systems, where no constant conjunctions prevail.

It is the unthinking presupposition of closed systems together with the failure to analyse experimental activity (which presupposes open systems)
that accounts for the most glaring weakness of orthodox philosophy of Science:
viz. the nonexistence in Science of Humean causal laws, i.e. of universal empirical generalizations,
and hence the inadequacy of the criteria of explanation, confirmation (or falsification), scientific rationality etc.,
that are based on the assumption that a closure is the universal rule rather than the rare and (for the most part) artificially generated exception that I contend it is.

It is because our activity is (normally) a necessary condition of constant conjunctions of events that The Philosophy Of Science needs an ontology of Structures and Transfactually active things.

Diagram 0.1.
The Logic of Scientific Discovery


Bhaskar Logic of Scientific Discover

1. Classical Empiricism

• Results / Regularity

Model Building

2. Transcendental Idealism

• Imagined /imaginary

Empirical Testing

• Generative Mechanisms in Models
  Events; Sequences; Invariances

3. Transcendental Realism

• Real

The position advanced here is characterized as Transcendental Realism, in opposition to the Empirical Realism common to the other two traditions.

Both the neo-Kantian or transcendental idealist tradition and Transcendental Realism see the step between (1) and (2) in Diagram 0.1 as involving creative model building, in which plausible generative mechanisms are imagined to produce the phenomena in question.

But Transcendental Realism sees the need for the step between (2) and (3) also, in which the Reality of the mechanisms postulated are subjected to empirical scrutiny.

Transcendental Realism differs
from Empirical Realism in interpreting (1) as the invariance of an (experimentally produced) result rather than a regularity;
and from Transcendental Idealism in allowing the possibility that what is imagined in (2) need not be imaginary but may be (and come to be known as) real.

Without such an interpretation it is impossible to sustain the rationality of scientific growth and change.

A conception of Science is argued for in which it is seen as a process-in-motion, with the dialectic mentioned above in principle having no foreseable end.
Thus when a new stratum or level of reality has been discovered and adequately described Science moves immediately to the construction and testing of possible explanations for what happens at that level.
This will involve drawing on whatever cognitive equipment is available and perhaps the design of new experimental techniques and the invention of new sense-extending equipment.
Once the explanation is discovered Science then moves on to the construction and testing of possible explanations for it.
At each level of reality law-like behaviour has to be interpreted Normically, i.e. as involving the exercise of Tendencies which may not be realised.

Empirical Realism is underpinned by a metaphysical dogma, which I call the Epistemic Fallacy, that statements about Being can always be transposed into statements about our knowledge of being.

As ontology cannot, it is argued, be reduced to Epistemology
this mistake merely covers the generation of an implicit ontology based on the category of experience;
and an implicit realism based on the presumed characteristics of the objects of experience, viz. atomistic events, and their relations, viz. constant conjunctions.
(These presumptions can, I think, only be explained in terms of the need felt by philosophers for certain foundations of knowledge.)

This [mistake] in turn leads to the generation of a methodology which is
either consistent with epistemology but of no relevance to Science;
or relevant to Science but more or less radically inconsistent with epistemology.
So that, in short, philosophy itself tends to be out of joint with Science.

It is argued in Chapter 1 that the very concept of the empirical world embodies a category mistake,
which depends upon a barely concealed anthropomorphism within philosophy;
and leads to a neglect of the important question of the conditions under which experience is in fact significant in Science.
In general this depends upon antecedent social activity.
Neglect of this [social] activity merely results in the generation of an implicit sociology, based on an epistemological individualism in which men are regarded as passive recipients of given facts and recorders of their given conjunctions.

Against this it is argued that knowledge is a social product, produced by means of antecedent social products;
but that the objects of which, in the social activity of Science,
knowledge comes to be produced, exist and act quite independently of men.

These two aspects of the Philosophy Of Science justify our talking of two dimensions and two kinds of ‘object’ of knowledge:
1. a transitive dimension, in which the object is the material cause or antecedently established knowledge which is used to generate the new knowledge; and
2. an intransitive dimension, in which the object is the Real Structure or Mechanism that exists and acts quite independently of men and the conditions which allow men access to it.

Transitive: able to take a direct object (expressed or implied), e.g. saw in he saw the donkey.
Intransitive: not taking a direct object, e.g. look in look at the sky.

These dimensions are related in Chapter 3.
Two criteria for the adequacy of an account of Science are developed:
(i) its capacity to sustain the idea of knowledge as a produced means of production; and
(ii) its capacity to sustain the idea of the independent existence and activity of the objects of scientific thought.

It is the overall argument of this study then
that knowledge must be viewed as a produced means of production
and Science as an ongoing social activity in a continuing process of transformation.

But the aim of Science is the production of the knowledge of the mechanisms of the production of phenomena in nature that combine to generate the actual flux of phenomena of the world.
These Mechanisms, which are the intransitive objects of scientific enquiry, endure and act quite independently of men.
The statements that describe their [these Mechanisms’] operations, which may be termed ‘laws’,
are not statements about experiences (empirical statements, properly so called) or statements about events.
Rather they are statements about the ways things act in the world (that is, about the forms of activity of the things of the world)
and would act in a world without men,
where there would be no experiences and few, if any, constant conjunctions of events.
(It is to be able to say this inter alia that we need to distinguish the domains of the Real, the Actual and the Empirical.)

Although the primary aim of this book is constructive,
it is an important subsidiary aim to situate the conditions of the plausibility of Empirical Realism
and to show it as depending upon what is in effect a special case.
These conditions [re Empirical Realism] are briefly:
a naturally occurring closure,
a mechanistic conception of action and
the model of man referred to earlier.

The attempt [of Empirical Realism] to reduce knowledge
to an individual acquisition in sense experience
and to view the latter as the neutral ground of knowledge that (literally) defines the world
results in the generation of an ontology of atomistic and discrete events,
which if they are to be related at all (so making general knowledge possible) must be constantly conjoined.
(Hence the presupposition of a closure.)
On this view the causal connection must be contingent and actual; by contrast I want to argue that it is necessary and real.

Chapter 1 establishes the necessity for an ontological distinction between causal laws and patterns of events (see esp. 1.3) and contains a sketch of A Critique Of Empirical Realism (see esp. 1.6).

Chapter 2 develops in detail the conditions required for The Humean Analysis Of Laws and provides An Analysis Of Normic Statements (see esp. 2.4.).
Determinism is shown to be an immensely implausible thesis;
and the central tenets of Orthodox Philosophy of Science—such as
• the principle of instance-confirmation (or falsification),
• the Humean theory of causality,
• the Popper-Hempel theory of explanation,
• the thesis of the symmetry between explanation and prediction, the criterion of falsifiability, etc.—
to be manifestly untenable.

Chapter 3 sets out to give a rational account of the process of scientific discovery; in which both Nature and our knowledge of Nature are seen as stratified, as well as differentiated (see esp. 3.3).
A Theory Of Natural Necessity is developed which it is claimed is capable of resolving inter alia the problems of induction and of subjunctive conditionals and Goodman’s and Hempel’s paradoxes (see 3.6).

Chapter 4 rounds off the argument and summarises some of the main themes of this study.

Moving towards a Conception Of Science as concerned essentially with possibilities, and only derivatively with actualities, much attention is given to the analysis of such concepts as tendencies and powers.
Roughly the theory advanced here is that statements of laws are tendency statements.
Tendencies may be possessed unexercised, exercised unrealised, and realized unperceived (or undetected) by men; they may also be trans-formed.
Although the focus of this study is Natural Science, something is said about the social sciences and about the characteristic pattern of explanation in history.

If the first half of this work is concerned with establishing the necessity for an ontological distinction between causal laws and patterns of events
and tracing the implications of the distinction between open systems and closed, that is, of the differentiation of our world,
the second [half] is concerned principally with showing how Science can come to have knowledge of Natural Necessity a posteriori.

The differentiation of the world implies its stratification, if it is to be a possible object of knowledge for us.
If generative mechanisms and structures are real
then there is a clear criterion for distinguishing between a necessary and an accidental sequence:
a sequence “Ea -> Eb” is necessary if and only if there is a generative mechanism or structure
which when stimulated by the event described by ‘Ea’ produces Eb.

If we can have empirical knowledge of such generative mechanisms or structures then we can have knowledge of Natural Necessity a posteriori.
In showing how this is possible a non-Kantian ‘sublation’ of empiricism and rationalism is achieved.

In the transitive process of Science three levels of knowledge may be distinguished.
At the first (or Humean) level we just have the invariance of an experimentally produced result.
Given such an invariance Science moves immediately to the construction and testing of possible explanations for it.
If there is a correct explanation, located in the nature of the thing whose behaviour is described in the putative law or the structure of the system of which the thing is a part,
then we do have a reason independent of its behaviour as to why it behaves the way it does.
Now such a reason may be discovered empirically.
And if we can deduce the thing’s tendency from it then the most stringent possible (or Lockean) criterion for our knowledge of natural necessity is satisfied.

For example, we may discover that copper has a certain atomic or electronic structure
and then be able to deduce its dispositional properties from a statement of that structure.
We may then be said to have knowledge of natural necessity a posteriori.

At the third (or Leibnizian) level we may seek to express our discovery of the electronic structure of copper in an attempted Real definition of the Thing.
This is not to put an end to enquiry, but a stepping stone to a new process of discovery in which we attempt to discover the mechanisms responsible for electronic structure.

In 3.5 the grounds for inductive scepticism are examined and shown to be fundamentally mistaken and in 3.6 the problem, which arises from the ontology of atomistic events (and closed systems), resolved.

Dynamic Realist Principles of substance and causality are shown to be a condition of the intelligibility of experimental activity and the stratification of Science.
Science, it is argued, is concerned with both taxonomic and explanatory knowledge: with what kinds of things there are, as well as how the things there are behave.
It [Science] attempts to express the former [what they are] in real definitions of the natural kinds
and the latter [how thing behave] in statements of causal laws, i.e. of the tendencies of things.
But it is concerned with neither in an undiscriminating way.
It is concerned with things only in as much as they cast light on reasons; and reasons only in as much as they cast light on things.
A realist theory of the universals of interest to Science complements the realist theory of scientifically significant invariances, i.e. invariances generated under conditions which are artificially produced and controlled.

It is the argument of this book that
if Science is to be possible
the world must consist of enduring and transfactually active mechanisms;
society must consist of an ensemble of powers irreducible to but present only in the intentional actions of men;
and men must be causal agents capable of acting self-consciously on the world.
They [men] do so in an endeavour to express to themselves in thought the diverse and deeper structures that account in their complex manifold determinations for all the phenomena of our world.

....END of Introduction..

Next [no more posting];
Chapter 1. Philosophy and Scientific Realism
1. TWO SIDES OF ‘KNOWLEDGE’

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Contents
Introduction by Mervyn Hartwig ix
Preface xxvii
Preface to the Second Edition xxxii
Introduction 1

Chapter 1. Philosophy and Scientific Realism 11
1.Two Sides of ‘Knowledge’ 11
2.Three Traditions in the Philosophy of Science 14
3.The Transcendental Analysis of Experience 20
A. The Analysis of Perception 21
B. The Analysis of Experimental Activity 23
4.The Status of Ontology and Its Dissolution in 26 Classical Philosophy
5.Ontology Vindicated and The Real Basis of Causal 35 Laws
6.A Sketch of a Critique of Empirical Realism 46

Chapter 2. Actualism and the Concept of a Closure 53
1.Introduction: On the Actuality of the Causal Connection 53
2.Regularity Determinism and the Quest for a Closure 59
3.The Classical Paradigm of Action 69
4.Actualism and Transcendental Realism:
The Interpretation of Normic Statements 81
5.Autonomy and Reduction 95
6. Explanation in Open Systems 107
Appendix. Orthodox Philosophy of Science and the Implications of Open Systems 117

Chapter 3.The Logic of Scientific Discovery
1.Introduction: On the Contingency of the Causal Connection 133
2.The Surplus-Element in the Analysis of Law-like
Statements: A Critique of the Theory of Models 139
3.Natural Necessity and Natural Kinds:
The Stratification of Nature and The Stratification of Science 154
4.The Social Production of Knowledge by Means of Knowledge 176
5.Objections to the Account of Natural Necessity Proposed 190
6.The Problem of Induction 206
Appendix. Natural Tendencies and Causal Powers 221

Chapter 4. Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science
Postscript to the Second Edition

# Bibliography 255
# Index of names 263
# Index of subjects 267