ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces students, researchers and practitioners of psychology to the considerable advantages of the philosophy of critical realism. Open biological systems are complex and are best approached with epistemic humility by deploying retroduction and retrodiction in psychological research. Roy Bhaskar offered us his authoritative summary, of what he called the ‘distinctive features of the critical realist approach to philosophy’, in his final and posthumously published work Enlightened Common Sense. The intransitive reflects ontological realism and the transitive epistemological relativism but occasionally that linkage can be broken in human interactions because of action. As a discipline, psychology exists tantalisingly, and for some irritatingly, at the cusp of natural and social science. Natural scientists may be concerned with the intransitive and empirically detached world much more often than social scientists but their activity still remains human activity, shaped and determined by the personal choices they make as reflexive agents, within their social context of origin and sustenance.
