ABSTRACT
This chapter describes aspects of critical realism that are relevant to environmental educators. Critical realism acts an underlabourer for the sciences and the practices of human emancipation. In its underlabouring role, critical realism challenges the Humean assumption that correlations (constant conjunctions) are the only way to know causation and offers an alternative, which is that causation is based on the layered, deep nature of reality (the real, actual and empirical). Critical realism explains how higher levels of being are emergent from lower levels; therefore society (structure) is emergent from the activities of people (agency). Environmental educators should take an interest in structure and agency, not least because certain approaches offer questionable power strategies to people and particularly governments. One consequence of the critical realist version of causation is that it becomes possible to envisage an environmental ethics that is based on an axiology that is neither absolutist nor relativist. To provide a full enough account of causation to achieve one’s purposes, Bhaskar has suggested a model, the seven laminations of scale. Bhaskar also differentiates between the transitive and intransitive realms and explains that there are questionable ideological advantages to failing to make this distinction. The intransitive/transitive realms have implications for our use of categories: critical realism explains how we can use categories to prevent oppression. Critical realism also argues against a purely positive, rather than a negative, account of the dialectic: thus change is absenting the constraints on absenting absences. Contrary to a frequent assumption made by both non-critical realists and critical realists alike, critical realism is not a return to positivism.
