ABSTRACT
Critical realism is a meta-philosophy that seeks to explain the relationship between mind and world, and how both of these and the relations between them change over time. This chapter focuses on Roy Bhaskar’s ideas as they relate to knowledge and the world. Critical realism is usually thought of as having three phases, namely: basic critical realism, dialectical critical realism and the philosophy of meta-reality, while applied critical realism is often added as a distinct part of it. Transcendental realism endorses the realist conception of science as a social activity, which is directed at producing knowledge about the kinds of things that exist in the social world. Critical realism points to the error of actualism in the social sciences and the differentiation between patterns of events and causal laws. The main index of ontological stratification is the distinction between the real and the actual. The tension between structure and agency is a perennial problem in the social sciences.
