Interdisciplinary phase
Bhaskar suggests that - whilst his earlier arguments about what is real (ontology) are an important philosophical precondition for emancipation - nevertheless, the actual practice of emancipation in the world requires ways of finding knowledge about what is real (epistemology). This epistemology, or way of finding knowledge, is likely to involve interdisciplinarity to cope with the layered complexity of reality. Bhaskar goes so far as to say that applied critical realism - i.e., critical realist research aimed at addressing real-life issues - is identical to interdisciplinarity. He therefore argues that it is important to develop a general theory of interdisciplinarity and much of his work towards the end of his life was dedicated to this task. This phase of Bhaskar's work is somewhat different from his other phases in that he at times carried it out in collaboration with others. A key early text was a joint paper by Roy Bhaskar and Berth Danermark (2006) entitled Metatheory, interdisciplinarity and disability research ; and another key chapter written by Bhaskar is found in the edited volume by Roy Bhaskar, Cheryl Frank, Karl Hoyer, Petter Naess, Jennifer Parker (2010) entitled Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change. See also Bhaskar, Danermark and Price (2017) Interdisciplinarity, Health and Wellbeing; and the chapter on interdisciplinarity in Enlightened Common Sense (Bhaskar 2016).
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We have known for a long time that we cannot deal with social problems without interdisciplinarity, but what is it about our world that makes interdisciplinarity so important? According to Bhaskar, it is because our world, in fact the universe, is not ‘flat’; it has texture, or depth. This texture is the result of emergence. Emergence occurs when the activity of many individual beings (say molecules or people) results in a new level of reality (such as weather patterns or society). These emergent beings cannot be reduced to their constituent parts. Therefore, we cannot understand weather by simply measuring molecules; and we cannot understand society by simply understanding individual people. Hence, we need interdisciplinarity because different disciplines are needed to study the different levels of reality (e.g., social science is needed to study emergent social structures, and conversational analysis or discourse analysis is needed to study interactions between individual humans).
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In emergence, generally, new beings (entities, structures, totalities, concepts) are generated out of pre-existing material. Part of why we know that these emergent beings, such as society, are more than just the sum of their parts is because they can act back on their constituent components. So, when I talk about how humans are affected by society, I cannot just as easily talk about how humans are affected by humans. There is something about society that can’t just be replaced by talking about people. Therefore, society acts back on its humans; and whilst individuals can change society, they are born into a society that pre-dates them and will have constraining and enabling effects on them. This idea, of society as emergent from people is summarised by the Transformational Model of Social Activity (TMSA)(for more information about the TMSA see Figure 1 on our page Critical Naturalism).
If there was no emergence, and therefore no depth to the world, then the world would consist only of individuals (agents). We have already mentioned that this means that we could understand the weather simply by measuring individual molecules, and we could understand society simply by understanding individual people. Another way of saying this, is that we could REDUCE our understanding of these things to ONE discipline, the discipline that measures the individual things. Thus, sociology could become reduced to the study of individual people, perhaps simply their psychology. Positivist/empiricist methodologies, associated with reductionism have attempted to do just this. However, because we understand that society emerges from people, and weather emerges from individuals, we cannot reduce our understanding of emergent things (weather, societies) to the measurable behaviours of their individual components (molecules, people). We have to use theory (not only measurement) to surmise the existence of emergent things (hence we have the Theory of Climate Change, or Marx’s theory of Labour, which are surmised from empirical measurements). Therefore, social researchers must be interdisciplinary. As such, we need to understand social phenomena from the perspective of several disciplines; and exactly which disciplines would be determined by the question we are trying to answer. The way that researchers arrive at theories of, for example, evolution, climate change or oppression is via a logic called retroduction, which is when we ask "what must have been" (hence the retro part of the term) in order to explain what we can empirically see or otherwise measure.
What is the difference between this version of interdisciplinarity and other versions? Mainstream versions of interdisciplinarity are filled with complex contradictions because it is commonly perceived that the different disciplines have incommensurable methodologies. However, the critical realist version of interdisciplinarity argues that this incommensurability is present because researchers assume that they are all dealing with the same (flat) level of reality – they have no understanding of reality as consisting of depth and of the existent of emergent beings. We can distinguish at least two mainstream non critical realist approaches to interdisciplinarity:
1. Mainstream interdisciplinarity that leans towards empiricism
In this version, scientists tend to want all the involved disciplines to be based in ‘evidence’ – they want all their disciplines to have the same empiricist methodology. There will be a focus on (multi-disciplinary) ‘factors’ correlated with relevant parts of reality. This results in an instrumental, shallow understanding of the situation, and similarly leads to instrumental suggestions for amelioration of perceived problematic situations. (e.g. if drinking alcohol is a factor associated with gender violence, then instrumentally one would ban alcohol; but without understanding the complex situation around why people are drinking, it is likely that people will simply make their own, more dangerous alcohol).
2. Mainstream interdisciplinarity that leans towards interpretativism or postmodernism
In this version, scientists tend to argue that methodological incommensurability is something to be expected and celebrated. This results in difficulties with addressing questions of research quality (relativism) and it seriously impedes action as, without some grounding of what is ‘true’, it is hard to justify action at all.
The question of how scientific reseachers know how to judge validity (roughly the likelihood of truthfulness) is a key one for critical realists. Mainstream scientists have always understood validity in terms of induction and deduction, but how can they judge it in terms of retroduction? They can use something called ‘judgemental rationality’. Judgemental rationality is based on the great truism discovered by Karl Popper, which is that falsification is an important way to approach epistemology: namely that we cannot know that things are true, but only that things are not true. Critical realist validity is based on an adjusted version of this falsificationism. It works like this: say we have two competing theories, both of which are trying to explain the same phenomenon. We would choose the theory, as the most truthful one (as far as we can known now), by working out that it explains more of the situation than the competing theory. We therefore use judgemental rationality to show up the inadequacies of the competing theory, we therefore essentially ‘falsify’ it. The theory that we prefer is the one that is not shown to be inadequate.
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In mainstream versions of interdisciplinarity, people intuit that interdisciplinary research is more integrative than multidisciplinary work, but it is really hard to understand exactly what the difference is (Price 2021). In the critical realist version of interdisciplinarity, the key difference between multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity is the existence of the transfactual epistemological phase called transdisciplinarity, in which retroduction plays a key role (see Figure 3). Whether we ourselves arrive at integrative theory, or whether we use a well-established integrative theory (such as from Marxism, or feminism) will depend on the context of our research. The great thinkers, who gave us the big theories such as Karl Marx, Charles Darwin and Simone de Beauvoir, were all interdisciplinary at heart. Marx considered history, economics, psychology; Darwin considered genetics, geography, history, biology; de Beauvoir considered society, biology, history, psychology. Using their, and similar, theories results in interdisciplinarity. We need interdisciplinarity because the world has a deep, structured ontology as the result of the process of emergence. In terms of the social part of reality, the structures of society are emergent from the actions of people. This idea, that society as emergent from people, is summarised by the Transformational Model of Social Activity (cf. Figure 1 on the page Critical Naturalism). However, there are more emergent levels than just society emerging from individuals. Bhaskar put forward that one way to understand these different emergent levels is by thinking of them as levels of scale. The different levels of the scale require different disciplines to be understood (cf. Seven Laminations of Scale, Figure 2 below).
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We are able to surmise the existence of the deep layers of the world via the logic of retroduction, which provides theories about transfactual structures and mechanisms, and which we can call the transdisciplinary phase of the process of achieving interdisciplinarity (cf. The Phases of Interdisciplinarity, Figure 3). Transdisciplinary theories provide the mechanism by which multidisciplinarity is able to become interdisciplinarity. As Bhaskar has shown, empiricist scientists do not have an ontology for emergent things. Ecosystems are emergent from individual organisms; society is emergent from individuals. But for the empiricist, only the people or the organisms are real, whilst the emergent things are not real, and can be reduced to the people or organisms themselves. For empiricists scientists therefore, society and ecosystems are merely useful metaphors, and are not, as DeLaplante and Picasso (2011, 203) claim, ‘part of the furniture of the world’ (which is another way of saying that they have no ontology). Their lack of ontology creates certain problems for mainstream interdisciplinarians. On the positive side, mainstream interdisciplinarity correctly assumes that knowledge can be interconnected and interdependent, and it correctly assumes that the different disciplines can easily be connected by common concepts and skills, but it does not in any way suggest how such interdependency and integration can be achieved.
As a poor alternative to saying how we can achieve integration, this mainstream approach suggests that interdependent knowledge will magically happen naturally if we try to be interdisciplinary in a ‘real life context’. But what is it about a ‘real-life context’ that allows integration to happen? The mainstream version of interdisciplinarity is silent on this issue; and in the void of silence what in fact happens is relativism, with all of its associated potential for abuse. It leaves no way to judge between better or worse ways of integrating the knowledge. Now, the only way to integrate knowledge is through broad, retroductively-derived, theories about what is happening in the world of emergent beings. This kind of theorising happens naturally amongst human communities all the time and therefore the mainstream version is not wrong to assume that interdisciplinary integration will happen in real-life contexts. However, by allowing this step of metatheorizing to be something that ‘just happens’, by accident almost, makes it possible for ideological metatheories to be assumed to be true, without being able to be challenged – that is, the relativism associated with not acknowledging the role of metatheory allows powerful social groups to maintain their discourse dominance.
For example, let us say that there is interdisciplinary research about a national health service in a certain country. Statisticians tell us that the life expectancy in the country is declining, psychologists tell us that the children in the country are unhappy, gerontologists tell us that the elderly people are suffering too. Economists warn that there are not enough funds to support the health system. Theory is what integrates this research and knowledge about the states of the country’s health system. However, there may be competing theories to explain these multidisciplinary findings:
1. one theory may be that the health system is failing because of immigration and that there are too many foreigners in the country;
2. another theory may be that the problems are due to the conversion of the health care system into a profit model, with certain so-called efficiency measures, designed to maximise profit, having reduced the standard of care.
How do we decide which theory is correct? Because the need for theory is not acknowledged in formal approaches to interdisciplinarity, there is no transparent, public way to choose between the theories which somehow magically exist. What therefore happens is that the theory that most benefits certain political players, usually the ones with the most power, is the theory that is taken to be the truth of the situation. This is why it is important to have the concept of judgemental rationalism, as is provided by critical realism, which requires that all of the existing theories are taken seriously, but they are then judged as more or less complete. If we then choose the most complete theory to guide our practice, we will have acheived this choice in a transparent way, and such transparency is anaethema to ideology.
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The process of arriving at a the best theory that explains the empirical evidence is called ‘the transdisciplinary phase’; of interdisciplinarity and it can be carried out in community contexts or by individuals. It involves retroduction, which, as already mentioned, is where you theorise about ‘what must have been’ in order to explain the disciplinary knowledge that we have already collected together in the multidisciplinary phase. Retroduction is left out of mainstream philosophy of science, but it is hugely important, and it is a basic component of the kind of thinking that is central to democracy.
You might ask why this stage of retroductive theorising has been left out of mainstream approaches to interdisciplinarity, and this is because, currently, the philosophy of science has no ontology for "the what" - that is, for the structures and mechanisms - that are behind the things that we can measure. This means that our retroductive theories cannot be taken seriously, as they are assumed to not be about anything. They are assumed to be mere opinions. It is because critical realism has an ontology for structures and mechanisms that it gives us, as scientists, permission to take structures and mechanisms seriously and not to leave them up to chance or ideological propaganda. Another important point is that: it is because these structures and mechanisms are real and continue to work whether we talk about them or not - and it is because we have theories about them ‘in the shadows’ so to speak, even if our theories of science deny them - that the incorrect, ontology-denying philosophy of science used to support current versions of interdisciplinarity can seem to work. Therefore, critical realism is not suggesting that we do anything new; merely that we bring honesty and transparency to what we are already doing. That is, we need to walk our talk, and bring our philosophy of science in line with our practice of science. In our practice, we assume that structures and mechanisms are real; critical realism merely provides the philosophical theory that matches this practice and in so doing, it brings transparency. It is this transparency that is vital to making it possible to challenge the status quo discourse about what is happening.
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During a parliamentary debate in England, a Labour minister suggested that the austerity implemented by the Tories had resulted in reduced health care and he was told that he was irresponsible for putting forward an unproven theory. This is an example of how the scientific validity of theories that challenge the dominant discourse can be called unscientific, or merely opinion. This reaction, however, would not be tolerated in a world that was realist about structures and mechanisms; instead, the Labour minister's theory about what was happening would have to be taken seriously and would have to be compared to competing theories.
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If we return to this critical realist version of interdisciplinarity, we can see that the middle phase, the transdisciplinary phase, is the phase that is necessary to allow us to be interdisciplinary and it is highly politically charged because it is about theorising about what is really happening in society. It therefore has the potential to challenge the way that things are currently done, that is, to challenge the current discourses and ideology. The mainstream version of interdisciplinarity, because it leaves out this step, or at least, lets it happen by accident and without a formal requirement for it, is unlikely to challenge the status quo. If a challenge does arise, it will easily be dismissed with the epistemological argument that the challenge is an unproven theory and not proper science.
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