Tags
bhaskar, climate change, correlationism, critical realism, epistemology, interdisciplinarity, ontology
I came across the edited book called Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change through the excellent article “An Ontology of Climate Change” by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens. I decided to explore the main editor Roy Bhaskar’s particular school of thought that he coined called Critical Realism, which led me to this in-depth post at Levi Bryant’s Larval Subjects.
Bryant characterizes Critical Realism as a privileging of ontology over epistemology, due to Bhaskar’s emphasis on actual mechanisms of action in objects apart from any human observer. These mechanisms often occur in nature in what he calls ‘open systems’ such as the natural environment, where “other mechanisms or powers are at work,” thus limiting what one is able to know about a single object. For this reason, scientists must construct closed systems to understand these actants while minimizing outside disturbance. My blog post on Kant’s correlationism has helped to understand what a big issue causality is, and thus Bhaskar’s bold thesis that objects’ mechanisms can be known in-themselves but not for us, that is we can observe and take note of what is occurring (while still being socially mediated, of course) without it entirely relying on our sensory (secondary) perception.
I’m looking forward to going through Interdisciplinarity & CC to see how Bhaskar’s thought might be useful in understanding the UVM CC group’s method. One of my next goals is to figure out how Bhaskar fits in with the Speculative Realists and/or Latour.