joeadamfry

Empirical level analysis can prove for example that your trousers have fallen down, but we must concede that an unseen but realised causal mechanism is operating; in this case gravity. However, that does not mean that in all circumstances your trousers would have fallen down: maybe you were wearing a belt, maybe you had bought trousers three sizes too big, maybe you’ve lost or gained weight…causality cannot be used to predict things per se, it offers no ‘hard determinism’, but rather acknowledges the operation of causal mechanisms in an open system. Indeed, critical realism argues that ‘there are many structures operating simultaneously, some reinforcing and some contradicting each other (Porter, 1998: 173); ‘the natural world comprises a range of heterogeneous systems each with their own distinct mechanisms. The combined effects of such countervailing (and sometimes complimentary) mechanisms ensures that we can never predict the outcome of any intervention’ (Houston, 2001: 850), and thus ‘causal law must be analysed as the tendencies of things, which may be possessed unexercised, exercised unrealised, just as they may be realised unperceived’ (Bhaskar, 1989: 10). In other words, as Peacock paraphrases Lawson (1997); ‘Controlled experiment does not stand at the disposal of the social scientist. Furthermore, the openness of the social world entails that an underlying mechanism (at the level of the ‘real’) will not alone determine the course of events (the ‘actual’) which is observed by the social scientist (the ‘empirical’)’ (Peacock, 2000: 321).