Roy Bhaskar's Life and Work

"Ram Roy Bhaskar was an English philosopher of science who is best known as the initiator of the philosophical movement of critical realism."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Bhaskar

About his work:

Although Bhaskar argued that both natural science and social science were at base naturalist, he nevertheless fully agreed with the hermeneuticists that there are differences between the subject matter of the natural and social sciences. He stated that these different in terms of:

1.      Activity dependence

Social structures are dependent on human activity in a way in which natural structures are not.  For instance, gravity does not depend on human beings, but capitalism does.

2.      Concept dependence

Social structures cannot operate independently of some conceptualisation by agents, they are concept or belief dependent.

3.      Space time dependence

Social structures are more space time dependant in general than natural structures.

4.      Internal relationality

As a social scientist, one’s beliefs about the subject matter may themselves be a part of the subject matter.  Or looking at it in another way, the social scientist or the philosopher of social science, are part of, are immersed in, society. They are a part of their subject matter and this means that a social scientist has to be reflexive in a way that a natural scientist does not have to be.

A list of some of Roy Bhaskar's published work:



1975a     ‘Feyerabend and Bachelard: two philosophies of science’, New Left Review 94

1975b    ‘Forms of realism’, Philosophica 15 (1) 99‑127.

1975c     A Realist Theory of Science, 1st edition, Leeds: Leeds Books.

1978a     ‘On the possibility of social scientific knowledge and the limits of naturalism’. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 8(1) 1-28. Reprinted in Issues in Marxist Philosophy, Vol III, eds J. Mepham & D. Hillel-Ruben. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

1978b    A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd edn.  Brighton, Sussex/New Jersey: Harvester/Humanities.

1979a     The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, 1st edition, Sussex: Harvester.

1980       ‘Scientific explanation and human emancipation’, Radical Philosophy 26: 16-28; reprinted in Reclaiming Reality (1989).

1981a     ‘The consequences of socio-evolutionary concepts for naturalism in sociology: commentaries on Harré and Toulmin’, in U. J. Jensen & R. Harré (eds), The Philosophy of Evolution, Sussex: Harvester.

1981b    Entries on Aristotle’s theory of causes, determinism, dialectic, empiricism, epistemology, experiment, idealism, Kant’s theory of knowledge, laws, materialism, matter and form, metaphysics, models, naturalism, ontology, open texture, Plato’s theory of forms, positivism, pragmatism, prediction, rationalism, realism, simplicity, tacit knowledge in B. Bynum & R. Porter (eds), Dictionary of the History of Science, London: Macmillan.

1982       ‘Emergence, explanation, and emancipation’, in P. F. Secord (ed) Explaining Human Behaviour, Consciousness, Human Action and Social Structure, Beverly Hills, London and New Delhi: Sage.

1983a    ‘Beef, structure and place’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 13 (1) 81-96.

1983b    Entries on contradiction, determinism, dialectics (reprinted with corrections in 1989b), empiricism, idealism, theory of knowledge (reprinted with corrections in 1989b), materialism (reprinted with corrections in 1989b), realism, science, and truth in T. Bottomore (ed) A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Oxford: Blackwell. (2nd edn. 1991).

1983c     Entries on dialectic and ideology in R. Harré & R. Lamb (eds), The Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Psychology, Oxford: Blackwell.

1986       Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, London: Verso.

1989a     The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, 2nd edn., with a Postscript, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

1989b    Reclaiming Reality, London & New York: Verso.

1990       (ed.), Harré and His Critics: Essays in Honour of Rom Harré with his Commentary on Them, Oxford: Blackwell.

1991a     Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom, Oxford, UK & Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.

1991b    ‘Social theory and moral philosophy’, Appendix 1 in 1991a.

1991c     ‘Marxist philosophy from Marx to Althusser’, Appendix 2 in 1991a.

1993a     Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, London & New York: Verso.

1993b    Entries on determinism, dialectic, empiricism, theory of knowledge, materialism, model, naturalism, ontology, paradigm, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, realism, truth in T. Bottomore & W. Outhwaite (eds), The Blackwell Dictionary of Modern Social Thought, Oxford: Blackwell.

1994       Plato Etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and their Resolution, London & New York:Verso.

1997a     ‘On the ontological status of ideas’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 27 (2/3): 135–47.

1997b    A Realist Theory of Science, 3rd edition, London & New York: Verso.

1998a     ‘General introduction’, in M. S. Archer et al. (eds), Critical Realism: Essential Readings.

1998b    (with Tony Lawson) ‘Introduction: basic texts and developments’, in M. S. Archer et al. (eds), Critical Realism: Essential Readings, Part I.

1998c     (with Andrew Collier) ‘Introduction: explanatory critiques’, in M. S. Archer et al. (eds), Critical Realism: Essential Readings, Part III.

1998d    (with Alan Norrie) ‘Introduction: dialectic and dialectical critical realism’, in M. S. Archer et al. (eds), Critical   Realism: Essential Readings, Part IV.

1998e     The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, third edition, London & New York: Routledge.

1998f      (with Ernesto Laclau) ‘Discourse theory vs. critical realism’, Alethia 1 (2): 9–14; reprinted in his 2002a and in A. Brown et al. (eds), (2002) Critical Realism and Marxism.

1999       (with Christopher Norris) ‘Interview’, The Philosophers’ Magazine Online (http://www.philosophers. co.uk/ current/bhaskar.htm), also available in the Bhaskar Archive: http://www.raggedclaws.com/criticalrealism/ archive/rbhaskar_rbi.html; excerpt published in The Philosophers Magazine 8, Autumn 1999.

2000a     From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul, London & New York: Routledge.

2000b    ‘Introducing transcendental dialectical critical realism’, Alethia 3 (1): 15–21; reprinted in 2002a.

2001       ‘How to change reality: story vs. structure – a debate between Rom Harré & Roy Bhaskar’, in J. López & G. Potter (eds), After Postmodernism.

2002a     From Science to Emancipation: Alienation and Enlightenment, New Delhi: Thousand Oaks & London: Sage.

2002       (with Rom Harré) ‘Critical Realism and Ethnomethodology’ in From Science to Emancipation: Alienation and Enlightenment, by R. Bhaskar, 96-124. New Delhi: Thousand Oaks & London: Sage.

2002b    Reflections on Meta-Reality: Transcendence, Emancipation and Everyday Life, New Delhi: Thousand Oaks & London: Sage.

2002c     The Philosophy of Meta-Reality, Volume I: Meta-Reality: Creativity, Love and Freedom, New Delhi: Thousand Oaks & London: Sage.

2002d    (with Mervyn Hartwig) ‘The philosophy of meta-reality, part 1: identity, spirituality, system’ (interview), Journal of Critical Realism (incorporating Alethia), 5 (1): 21–34; reprinted in 2002a.

2002e     (with Mervyn Hartwig) ‘The philosophy of meta-reality, part 2: agency, perfectibility, novelty’ (interview), Journal of Critical Realism (new series) 1 (1): 67–94.

2003a     Entries on determinism, dialectic, empiricism, theory of knowledge, materialism, model, naturalism, ontology, paradigm, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, realism, truth in W. Outhwaite (ed.), The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth Century Social Thought, 2nd edn., Oxford: Blackwell

2003b    (with Alex Callinicos) ‘Marxism and critical realism: a debate’, Journal of Critical Realism 1 (2): 89-114.

2006       (with Berth Danermark) ‘Metatheory, Interdisciplinarity and Disability Research – A Critical Realist Perspective’, Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research 8 (2006), 278-297.

2007     ‘Theorizing ontology’. In Contributions to Social Ontology, eds C. Lawson, J. Latsis and N. Martins. London: Routledge, pp. 192–204.

2008a   A Realist Theory of Science, 4th edn. London: Routledge.

2008b  Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.

2009a   Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.

2009b  Plato Etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and their Resolution, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.

2010a   Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.

2010b  Reclaiming Reality, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.

2010c   ‘Contexts of interdisciplinarity’. In Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change, eds R. Bhaskar, C. Frank, K.-G. Høyer, P. Næss and J. Parker. London: Routledge, pp. 1–34.

2010d  Editor with C. Frank, K. G. Høyer, P. Næss and J. Parker. Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change. London: Routledge.

2010e   (with M. Hartwig). The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective. London: Routledge.

2011a   From Science to Emancipation: Alienation and Enlightenment, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.

2011b  Reflections on MetaReality: Transcendence, Emancipation and Everyday Life, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.

2011c   ‘Critical realism in resonance with Nordic ecophilosophy’. In Ecophilosophy in a World of Crisis, eds R. Bhaskar, K.-G. Høyer and P. Næss, 9-24. London: Routledge.

2011d  Editor with K.-G. Høyer and P. Næss. Ecophilosophy in a World of Crisis. London: Routledge.

2011e   (with M. Hartwig). ‘Beyond East and West’. In Critical Realism and Spirituality, eds Mervyn Hartwig and Jamie Morgan, 187-203.

2011d  (with M. Hartwig). ‘(Re-)contextualizing metaReality’. In Critical Realism and Spirituality, eds Mervyn Hartwig and Jamie Morgan, 206-217. London: Routledge.

2012     The Philosophy of MetaReality: Creativity, Love and Freedom, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.

2013     ‘The consequences of the revindication of philosophical ontology for philosophy and social theory’. Prolegomena to Engaging with the World: Agency, Institutions, Historical Formations, eds M. Archer and A. Maccarini. London: Routledge.



Posthumous publications



Scott, D., Bhaskar, R. 2015a. Roy Bhaskar: A theory of education. Springer.

Bhaskar, R., Esbjörn-Hargens, S., Hedlund, N. and Hartwig, M. eds., 2015b. Metatheory for the twenty-first century: Critical realism and integral theory in dialogue. Routledge.

Bhaskar, R. 2016. Enlightened common sense: The philosophy of critical realism. Routledge.

Bhaskar, R., Danermark, B. and Price, L., 2017. Interdisciplinarity and wellbeing: a critical realist general theory of interdisciplinarity. Taylor & Francis.

Bhaskar, R. 2018. Empiricism and the Metatheory of the Social Sciences. Routledge.

Bhaskar, R., 2020. Critical realism and the ontology of persons. Journal of Critical Realism, 19(2), pp.113-120.

from: https://davidgraeber.org/people/roy-bhaskar/


Roy Bhaskar Obituary by David Graeber


Roy Bhaskar - One of the most influential voices in the philosophy of science and a political revolutionary.

Roy Bhaskar, who has died aged 70 of heart failure, turned to philosophy only after becoming an economics lecturer at Oxford University in the late 1960s. Feeling that economic science had virtually nothing useful to say about real-world issues of global wealth and poverty, he embarked on research that led to the foundation of the philosophical school known as critical realism.

The Oxford curriculum for PPE – philosophy, politics and economics – provided a training for would-be politicians and civil servants who were more likely to contain or even reinforce society’s problems than resolve them. Roy wanted to provide the tools for understanding society’s problems in a deeper, structural sense that might allow ways to put them right.

Before long, he concluded that the problem ran deeper: western science and social theory itself were based on a series of intellectual mistakes, which created false dichotomies such as those between individualism and collectivism, and scientific analysis and moral criticism. The most important of these he called “the epistemic fallacy”, arising from the conventional study of how we can know things, or epistemology. Almost invariably, philosophers have treated the questions “does the world exist?” and “can we prove the world exists?” as the same. But it is perfectly possible that the world might exist and we could not prove it, let alone be able to obtain absolute knowledge of everything in it.

In this way, Roy argued, the two camps into which the left has been divided – positivists, who assume that since the world does exist, we must, someday, be able to have exact and predictive knowledge of it, and postmodernists, who believe that since we cannot have such knowledge, we cannot speak of “reality” at all – are just rehearsing different versions of the same fundamental error. In fact, real things are precisely those whose properties will never be exhausted by any description we can make of them. We can have comprehensive knowledge only of things that we have made up.

Roy’s approach adopted a version of Kant’s transcendental method of argument, which asks “what would have to be the case in order for what we know to be true?” For science, he argued that two key questions must be asked simultaneously: first, why are scientific experiments possible, and second, why are scientific experiments necessary, in order to obtain verifiable knowledge of what scientists call natural laws. Why is it possible to contrive a situation where you can predict exactly what will happen, when, say, water is heated to a certain temperature in a controlled environment, but also, why is it that one can never make similar predictions in natural settings – no matter how much scientific knowledge we acquire, we still cannot dependably predict the weather. Why, in other words, does it take so much work to create a situation where one does know precisely what will happen?

His conclusion was that the world must consist of independently existing structures and mechanisms, which are perfectly real, but they must also be, as he put it “stratified”. Reality consists of “emergent levels” – chemistry emerges from physics, in that chemical laws include physical ones, but cannot be reduced to them; biology emerges from chemistry, and so forth. At each level, there is something more, a kind of leap to a new level of complexity, even, as Roy put it, of freedom. A tree, he argued, is more free than a rock, just as a human is freer than a tree. What a scientific experiment does, then, is strip away everything but one mechanism at one emergent level of reality. To do so takes enormous work. But in real-world situations, like the weather, there are always all sorts of different mechanisms from different emergent levels operating at the same, and the way they interact will always be inherently unpredictable.

The resulting books, A Realist Theory of Science (1975) and The Possibility of Naturalism (1979), made Roy one of the most influential voices in the philosophy of science.

He later applied this approach to a critique of the “new realism” of Tony Blair. Vaunted as a belated adjustment to the facts of political life, Roy said that it fails to recognise the underlying structures and generative mechanisms, such as property ownership and the exploitation of labour, that produce observable phenomena and events such as low pay and intolerable working conditions. In other words, New Labour was based on realism of the most superficial sort. He presented these and other political implications of his work at the Philosophy Working Group of the Chesterfield Socialist conferences, associated with Tony Benn and Ralph Miliband, in the late 80s. This work was eventually published as Reclaiming Reality (2011).

Roy was a political revolutionary. The unifying purpose of his work was to establish that the pursuit of philosophical knowledge necessarily implied social transformation; the struggle for freedom and the quest for knowledge were ultimately the same.

His way of engaging with the world was wide-eyed, playful, impractical, always evolving and learning. He continually announced new breakthroughs. In the 90s, he announced that the Hegelian dialectic – an assertion, its contradiction, and the resolution of the two – was but an odd and idiosyncratic version of a universal principle that formed the basis of all human thought and learning. This launched the second phase of his philosophy, culminating in the ambitiously titled Plato Etc: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (1994), inspired by Alfred North Whitehead’s famous claim that “all of philosophy is but a footnote to Plato”.

Roy came to realise that Whitehead was speaking of only western philosophy; respect for the full range of human thought required engagement with eastern philosophy too. This had to mean taking spiritual ideas seriously – a domain of human experience that the left had abandoned to the fundamentalist right. In a number of books, notably The Philosophy of MetaReality: Creativity, Love and Freedom (2012), he argued that spiritual experiences should be considered a constant feature of everyday life; that every successful act of communication is, in effect, an example of the spiritual principle of nonduality, where both parties become, momentarily, the same person.

These developments created heated contention among critical realists, but Roy maintained his cheerful generosity of spirit, playing an active role in the Centre for Critical Realism and the International Centre for Critical Realism, always brimming with projects, visions, and ideas.

Born in Teddington, west London, to an Indian father, Raju Nath Bhaskar, a GP, and an English mother, Kumla (nee Marjorie Skill), an industrial administrator, Roy was educated at St Paul’s school, London, and gained a PPE degree at Balliol College, Oxford (1966). Another critic of the PPE course and student activist was Hilary Wainwright: in 1971 they married, and they collaborated intellectually and politically for the rest of Roy’s life.

Roy fought against the grain of conventional academic philosophy throughout his career. Following his time as an economics lecturer at Pembroke College, Oxford, he held philosophy posts at Linacre College, Oxford; Edinburgh University; the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, Uppsala; and the University of Tromsø, Norway.

After losing a foot in 2008 to Charcot’s disease, he made use of a wheelchair, and survived on only a partial salary as a world scholar at the Institute of Education in London. Nonetheless, he remained a figure of unparalleled energy and invention, and of almost preternatural kindness and good humour.

His recent partner was his carer Rebecca Long. She survives him, as do Hilary and his brother, Krish.



David Graeber for Gardian



“Roy Bhaskar’s too brief life was a gift to humanity. His life’s work gave us a solid ontological grounding for all those intuitions that most of us feel we should be able to justify, but are constantly being told by the reigning intellectual authorities we can’t: that the world, and other people, are real, that freedom is inherent in the nature of the cosmos, that genuine human flourishing can never be at the expense of others. Bhaskar lived to provide the intellectual heavy artillery for simple com-mon decency and good sense. Much of his work was written in exceedingly diffi-cult language. This book, however, makes it accessible to those who have the most to gain from it: anyone trying to make the world a better place.”

David Greaber for

Enlightened Common Sense The Philosophy of Critical Realism

For someone that is new to the writing of Roy Bhaskar and the idea of "Critical Realism", are there certain works that are better jumping off points than others?

The Order of Natural Necessity: A Kind of Introduction to Critical Realism is based on the transcripts from six hours of live streamed talks given by Professor Roy Bhaskar, originator of Critical Realism, in 2014, at University College London: Institute of Education.
Drawing from the transcript of the talks and keeping as close as possible to the original intention of the talks, the book aims to present the complexity of Critical Realism in an accessible and informative way, assuming that the reader has had little exposure to both the philosophical position taken by Critical Realism and the philosophical positions that Critical Realism challenges. Which therefore makes the book ideal for anyone wanting to begin his or her investigation of CR whilst it offers the reader that is more familiar with Roy Bhaskar a handy guide to the most important feature of the three phases of his work.
Gary Hawke, who hosted and worked closely with Roy Bhaskar in producing the original streamed talks, has edited the book. He has expanded the original text addressing the questions that students raised during the live streaming through the inclusion of over a 100 footnotes, tables, and diagrams.

Timothy Norton wrote:For someone that is new to the writing of Roy Bhaskar and the idea of "Critical Realism", are there certain works that are better jumping off points than others?

Great question, Tim!

I just finished reading "The Order of Natural Necessity" listed above, and I found it a little dense.

I think I'm going to go for "Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar's Philosophy" next!

Good to know, thank you.

I have read some excerpts and summaries on the topic already but haven't made the dive into one of his published works yet. I can appreciate that it might not be the light reading that I normally enjoy!

I think I might try out the introduction book as well and see how well I wrap my head around the concepts.

Paul suggested I read the book,

"The Order of Natural Necessity".

This book is a collection of talks given by Professor Roy Bhaskar, about his work.  


I had no idea what I was getting into.

Thank you Gary Hawke and Donald Clark for your insight and tenacity to record Roy Bhaskar speaking and for bringing his work to life!






Prof. Roy Bhaskar had a way of offering very complex philosophical ideas understandably and making them useful.


To begin with, Roy talks about looking deeply, honesty and without judgment at reality.

Then separating in our mind, what we know about reality.

What is real?
What do I know about what is real?
There is more to reality than what I know.



Everybody knows this.  " there is more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophies".

When Roy says it though, it opens my mind.



His work is full of simple truths, presented in ways that make real societal change seem possible.

In the book, Roy helps us break down the way we see the world.   By looking at the many levels on which something is occurring, and separating them in our mind, a thing becomes more manageable and specific actions become clear.

Roy Bhaskar believed in the power of each of us, as free individuals, to affect positive change.
The culture does not reproduce itself.  Our action is required.  In the past this has often been unconscious.   Now that we understand what is happening, we can take an active role.

Roy said we must each do our work.  He felt it is not enough to be fed and happy, to be content and live with our needs met.  There is a need that will gnaw at us for a lifetime.  It is the work we have come to do in the world.



The way Roy explains his philosophy of Critical Realism, it sounds like he is talking about permaculture.

start with observation
take action based on your observations and observe results.
Roy is helping us tend the garden of our mind and our social and societal experience.

Roy uses a bunch of academic philosophy language, which can be alienating for everyday people and permaculture pragmatists.

I try to keep in mind that permaculture language can seem alienating to people at a eco-scale level 1-3 level.  

It's mostly an exercise in translation, I think, and requires time, patience, and attention from the newcomer.  Which are very valuable things, not easily coaxed from someone.

Still, I think what Roy offers is worth the investment.  I'm looking for that good "tell me what Roy Bhaskar was all about like I'm an 8-year-old" treatment that can connect the the majority of people.

Here is a thing he said about applied science in A Realist Theory of Science:

Roy Bhaskar wrote:The applied scientist must be adept at analysing a situation as a whole, of thinking at several different levels at once, recognizing clues, piecing together diverse bits of information and assessing the likely outcomes of various courses of action.

This is probably the most directly permaculture-related thing I've seen Bhaskar say, although it must be noted that he is not advocated for this kind of scientific work.



Here's one that doesn't necessarily stand alone or make sense out of context, but I like its poetry:

Roy Bhaskar wrote:We are contingent temporary
flotsam on a sea of being.

That is actually probably my favorite thing I've seen of Roy's, and I think it would like great as a wood-burned sign hanging in Bhaskar Auditorium, for instance.



Here is one rather cosmic quote.  At least it sounds like people would understand it and maybe like it.

Roy Bhaskar wrote:It is not that there are the starry heavens above and the moral law within, as Kant would have it; rather, the true basis of your virtuous existence is the fact that the starry heavens are within you, and you are within them.

He has some interesting things to say about logic:

Roy Bhaskar wrote:Logic merely defines how the world must be if we are to successfully apply certain techniques.

What Bhaskar says about "the fallacies of human understanding" is pretty good and accessible.
He's talking about the cognitive biases and limitations that people have in understanding reality, namely the tendency to mistake our limited perception of the world for the world itself.  This leads to poor interpretations and conclusions about the underlying structures and causal mechanisms in play.

I think if someone wanted to get a quicker "big picture" of what Bhaskar is trying to articulate, the framework in this figure is helpful:


I like the idea of connecting disparate parts.  That to me is key in permaculture.  Maybe we can find some "quotes" that deal directly with that.

I found this break-down of the key points about Bhaskar's "fallacies of human understanding":

Epistemic fallacy:
This is considered the central fallacy, where people mistakenly believe that the way we can know something defines what actually exists, essentially reducing reality to our knowledge of it.
Ontological mono-valence:
This fallacy assumes that things only have one meaning or interpretation, neglecting the complex and multi-faceted nature of reality.
The "empirical" vs. "real":
Bhaskar distinguishes between the observable empirical world (what we experience) and the underlying "real" world with its causal powers, arguing that our limited perception can often obscure the true nature of reality.
Critique of positivism:
Bhaskar's concept of fallacies directly challenges positivist views that believe scientific knowledge directly reflects reality, as he argues that our methods of inquiry can be influenced by our inherent biases.

His obit in the guardian paints a nice picture of him.  He is certainly a heavy hitter in modern philosophy and science.

I've been sitting down with Roy's book The Order of Natural Necessity for the past couple Saturday mornings to start my day, and here I'll compile the notes I've taken. I'd originally sent these to Paul, and he requested I post them here for everyone to review.

Other folks seem to be directly and immediately relating his words to permaculture concepts. I'm not necessarily taking that approach at the moment. For now, I just want to do my best at interpreting his work, and finding a way to explain it to an average, curious person. If anyone wants to correct me or ask for clarification, please do so. It's been a minute since I've worked on describing philosophy to someone else.

Part 1 of my Notes is in this post.

///

Chapter 1: Critical Realism - How Do We Understand the World?

To sum it up:
Referent -> Sense -> Judge -> Interpret
Reality is made up of Referents, and relying mainly on your personal interpretation does not necessarily lead to accurately understanding reality.

I'll note "Referent" after the other three items.
Sense: The methods by which you can perceive something in the world around you. Sight, hearing, touch, etc.
Judge: How we comprehend, understand, and apply meaning to what's been sensed. Using your mind to piece together an accurate picture of what you've picked-up with your senses.
Interpret: The order and predictability and reasoning that results from the judgment we've applied to/on what we have perceived/sensed. Now that we've thought about what we've sensed, we can understand a bit more of how it fits into the world, helping form our world view.

Referent: The target of our sensory perception. The object idea, the experience, etc. to which we will apply judgment. When we talk about something, we are referring to what we've perceived about the referent we are discussing. The referent is the originator of our sensing and perception of it.

Referents are not dependent upon our senses, judgment, or interpretation in order to exist. It's the other way around. Referents - the "whole story" - are there, whether or not we know of them.

Other useful terms... (personally, I have to frequently remind myself of these definitions, and Bhaskar uses these terms quite a bit)
Epistemology: the study of what is known.
Empiricism/Empirical Knowledge: deriving information from our senses.
Ontology: the philosophical study of being/existence.

Stephen's editorial: Bhaskar directly criticizes post-modernism early in the book, stating that it's based on Interpretations. This obscures understanding of the world, since individual Interpretations can be inaccurate (at least in terms of how the world really works), or just flat-out wrong. Denying the validity of someone's interpretation isn't the goal here. Rather, acknowledging that someone's interpretation can be flawed/inaccurate is something we encounter while we begin to understand reality. It's this statement that attracted me to keep reading and to work hard at understanding Bhaskar's work.

Chapter 2: Basic Critical Realism (or "BCR")

Six components of BCR:
1. Philosophical Under-Laboring: BCR is a philosophical approach, and its purpose is to increase understanding of the world. Bhaskar uses the phrase, "to clear out the rubbish" that prevents understanding of the world.
2. Seriousness: BCR strives to never settle on absurd conclusions. Bhaskar criticizes David Hume and his conclusions based on Interpretation instead of Referents. For example, "It makes no difference whether we leave a building from the door on the ground floor, or from the second story window." It's a conclusion that's ignorant of Physical Laws (in this case, Gravity).
3. Immanent Critique: Considering an idea or concept "from the inside," and working within its boundaries to determine whether or not it remains consistent when tested.
4. Philosophy as a Pre-Supposition: Challenging what we "take for granted" and also testing that for consistency.
5. Enhanced Reflexivity or Transformative Practice: Putting one's thoughts and beliefs to the test through intellectual exercise and/or debate and discussion, and when necessary you update and refine them to be more consistent with the way the world works.
6. Principle of Hermeticism: "Do not believe something just because I have said it." Make one's own observations, considerations, and conclusions. Put the declarations of others to the test instead of believing them at face value. Do not fall victim to the Credibility Fallacy (to put it in terms of our kitchen's "logical fallacy" poster).

...To be continued...