ABSTRACT
What work in the philosophy of science reveals is that attacks on positivism through the 1960s and 1970s impelled a disturbing flight of thought away from science toward forms of irrealism. Bhaskar’s refounding of critical realism philosophy of science reclaims reality for science in vital ways with ramifications for both neoclassical and Marxian economics. Central to Bhaskar’s contribution is the bringing back in to science of ontology. There are two aspects to this. One is the argument that the world and all its furniture is marked by ontological depth. Hence its observed events, happenings and states of affairs are but surface manifestations of deep causal mechanisms that it is the business of science to apprehend in theory. The other is that it is precisely the nature of the ontological object that is determinant of the kind of science its apprehension demands and the epistemological and methodological resources necessary to explain how it acts in the real world outside theory. The chapter concludes with an examination of Lawson’s important critique of neoclassical economics based upon Bhaskar’s critical realism. Lawson’s work reaches its limitations, it is argued, by carrying over into his analysis a residue of positivism which claims a homogenous social ontology. This blinds Lawson to the fact of the unique ontology of capital and questions of the very intelligibility and historicity of economic theory.
