Roy Bhaskar’s Qualified and Non-positivist Naturalism*
Roy Bhaskar, a British philosopher, was known for Critical Realism. He stated three fundamental qualitative differences between the topics of interest of the social and natural sciences:
1. “social structures, unlike natural structures, do not exist independently of the activities they govern”
2. “social structures, unlike natural structures, do not exist independently of the agents’ conceptions of what they are doing in their activity”
3. “social structures, unlike natural structures, may be only relatively enduring (so that the tendencies they ground may not be universal in the sense of space-time invariant)” (Bhaskar 1989: 79)
These statements attempt to clarify the limits of social scientific endeavors in emulating the natural sciences in adjudicating and determining the truthfulness and nature of the knowledge(s) that they claim.
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* From Colin Hay’s Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction