ABSTRACT
Critical realism asserts that the world investigated by science consists of objects that are structured and intransitive: structured in the sense that they are irreducible to the events of experience; and intransitive in the sense that they exist and act independently of their identification. That is, the world is constituted not only by events given directly in experience, but also by the unobserved and perhaps even unobservable entities, structures, mechanisms, and so on, which, existing and acting independently of scientists’ knowledge of them, govern observable events and states of affairs. Critical realism thus stands in stark contrast to positivism and idealism (including postmodernism), which restrict the objects of scientific knowledge to, respectively, directly experienced events (and their putative constant conjunctions), and the linguistic and conceptual resources of the scientific community.
