ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the following features: the idea of causality and mechanisms, the assumption that reality is stratified, the issue of closed and opens systems, the transitive and the intransitive dimensions of reality, and discusses the hermeneutic conditions of social science. It addresses the question of what the term “critical” in critical realism signifies. By and large, however, the several elements have been brought together in reports of the perspective, and the concept of “critical realism” has only been established afterwards. The realist element in critical realism indicates that it assumes that an external reality exists, independently of conceptions of it. Critical realism, however, is sceptical about the idea of incommensurability, and therefore also about methodological relativism. Judgemental relativism implies that there are no grounds for deciding when one kind of knowledge should be preferred to another – and this assumption is refuted within critical realism.
