ABSTRACT
I believe that there are several important contributions made by Bhaskar’s work to thinking about causality in the social sciences. First is the renewed emphasis that it places on ontology. As he puts it in Reclaiming Reality, ‘it is the nature of objects that determines their cognitive possibilities’.3 It follows that different objects of knowledge may have distinctive cognitive possibilities because of how they differ ontologically. Second, and closely related to the first, is the emphasis on distinct levels or strata of theory in relation to the ontological distinctiveness of what is being studied. Thus it is possible that a causal power at one level of theory may be diverted, blocked, or transformed at another level. According to Bhaskar, then, the aim of social science is to ‘designate tendencies (like rates of profit to be equalized) which may never be manifested, but which are nevertheless essential to understanding (and the changing) of the different forms of social life, just because they are really productive of them’.4
