Overlapping traditions with divergent implications? Introduction to the special issue on pragmatism and critical realism

Abstract

Intellectual traditions can be seen as complex patchworks of ideas, constructed differently by each observer as they learn about the tradition, and harmonized to an extent through the boundary work done by those interpreters who come to be seen as most authoritative for the tradition concerned (Elder-Vass and Morgan 2022; Elder-Vass 2022; Gieryn 1983). From this perspective, different traditions may sometimes overlap or interleave, and yet also sometimes conflict, with different interpreters forming different understandings of those overlaps and conflicts. This special issue provides ample evidence to support this view of the relationship between critical realism and pragmatism. That the traditions overlap should be no surprise given that leading critical realists have in places drawn, implicitly or explicitly, on the work of leading pragmatists. Roy Bhaskar himself mentions that the people who influenced him – namely the ‘anti-deductivists’, who included his supervisor Rom Harre – were themselves influenced by, amongst others, the founder of pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce, although Bhaskar also critiques these influences for their lack of an ontology (Bhaskar 1986, 3). Bridget Ritz’s recent paper on abduction and retroduction in the two traditions seems to suggest that these concepts, for example, came to critical realism from Peirce, and critical realists have then developed their own variation of the concept of retroduction (Ritz 2020) (also see Danermark, Ekström, and Karlsson 2019, 109–122). Margaret Archer draws more explicitly on George Herbert Mead’s work on the internal conversation in her influential work on reflexivity (Archer 2003). We also find intriguing parallels between the traditions even in cases where lines of influence are invisible and perhaps unlikely. Roy Bhaskar’s understanding of language and its relation to the world is remarkably similar to the work of Charles Peirce though it is unclear whether he was directly influenced by Peirce’s work (Nellhaus 1998). They are certainly close enough for Kieran Cashell to argue recently that we need a synthesis of Peirce and Bhaskar’s work on representation (Cashell 2009). Stephen Pratten provides another example in this issue in his comparison of Tony Lawson and his Cambridge group’s social positioning theory with the neglected work of John Dewey on the concept of the offices that people and things may occupy (Pratten 2022). Even in the absence of lines of influence, parallel theory developments like this suggest some similarity in the broad philosophical orientations of pragmatism and critical realism, and some potential for these traditions learning more from each other. Jamie Morgan, for example, has suggested that critical realists would find value in the work of the leading contemporary pragmatist Nicholas Rescher (Morgan 2019). Further evidence of affinity is provided by scholars who have passed through both traditions and indeed often continue to find both useful for their work (see, for example, Vandenberghe 2014). This, indeed, is one of the unexpected themes to emerge from our roundtable discussion in this issue (Barman, Porpora, and Carrigan 2022). Although we expected this to take the form of a debate between contrasting views, our contributors Emily Barman and