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Causation-in-the-World: A Contribution to a Meta-Theory of IR

Hidemi SuganamiAberystwyth University

hss@aber.ac.uk

Presented at the Millennium Conference on Materialism 20-22 October 2012

Abstract

Whether causing is a feature of the world, rather than purely an idea we use to make sense of our experience of the world, is a question that has puzzled many philosophers. The position which says that causing is a feature of the world is called ‘causal realism’; the view that causing is purely an idea which we use to make sense of our experience of the world is called ‘causal idealism’. A number of philosophically-oriented contributors to the study of world politics have drawn attention to this issue. Those who are most vehement among them in debating this question are causal realists (or scientific/critical realists who subscribe to causal realism). While being sympathetic to their position, I have found myself unpersuaded by some of their key contentions: (1) that causal idealism inevitably leads to an ‘anything goes’ attitude; (2) that causal idealism lacks ontological grounding because it claims causal necessity to be only an idea, not a component of the world; and (3) that causal idealism is erroneous because it privileges epistemology over ontology. While partly accepting (3), I argue (4) that revealing the weaknesses of causal idealism does not necessarily show the strengths of causal realism and that the latter has to be argued for independently, and (5) that the epistemological status of causal realism as an everyday natural belief and necessary condition of scientific knowledge production should be more explicitly acknowledged. I spell out an important implication of (5) to the causal realism/idealism divide and conclude with a discussion of what all this means to the study of world politics.

Key Words: Bhaskar, causation, critical realism, IR, meta-theory, ontology

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Introduction

“I believe it to be an essential (though not the only) part of the business of philosophy to act as the under-labourer, and occasionally as the mid-wife of science.”

(Bhaskar 2008: 10).

Whether causing is a feature of the world, rather than purely an idea we employ to make sense of our experience of the world, is a question which has puzzled many philosophers and, among others, a number of philosophically-minded contributors to IR. Our answer to this question depends partly on what we understand by the term ‘causing’; it also depends on what we understand by ‘the world’. In this paper, I aim to identify the epistemological status of ‘causal realism’, or the view that ‘causing’ is a feature of the world, not just an idea in our head, and discuss the implications of my finding to the philosophical (realist/idealist) debate concerning causation-in-the-world and its further impact on the study of world politics.

In what follows, I first explain the two positions, causal realism and causal idealism. I use R. G. Collingwood’s erudite and provocative essay (1938) to explicate the causal idealist position while acknowledging that he is not himself a thorough-going causal idealist. I then rehearse a standard interpretation of David Hume’s philosophy of causation as an example of causal idealism while also acknowledging that there are some revisionist philosophers who present Hume as in fact a causal realist. I then introduce causal realism, propounded by critical realists, as a prima facie plausible ontological claim. This is followed by a second section where I identify and evaluate some standard grounds on which critical realists, espousing causal realism as one of their key tenets, have objected to causal idealism. Noting that causal realists would in turn need to ground their ontological claim, or explicate its argumentative structure and basis, I introduce the philosophy of causation in the thought of Roy Bhaskar, a founding figure of critical realism and influential advocate of causal realism. Bhaskar’s argument reveals that his causal realist ontology is grounded in his understanding of the practice of knowledge production in science – a point he, in any case, explicitly acknowledges. Noting that the philosophical issues surrounding the causal realist/idealist debate are very complex, I go on to reveal that the advocates of causal realism, from the critical realist camp, are in fact aware of the complexities and make important qualifications, though relatively inconspicuously, to their often staunchly expressed realist stance. I go on to discuss briefly how we may fruitfully extricate ourselves from this apparent philosophical conundrum; this involves understanding the epistemological nature of the causal realist ontological claim, bridging the gap between realism and idealism, and seeing the distinction between them in fact collapses. Noting that the two positions can be united against the regularity view of causation, I conclude with a discussion on what all this means to the study of world politics.1

Causal realism and causal idealism

Collingwood’s historical observation, with which I wish to begin my brief discussion of ‘causal realism’ and ‘causal idealism’, is pertinent to the question of what ‘causing’ means.

1 My discussion relates to the theme of ‘materialism’ only to the extent that I believe this to be a form of causal realism. Identifying the epistemological status of the latter will contribute to identifying the nature of the former at least in part. Whether any position contrasted to ‘materialism’ is also a form of causal realism is an interesting point. Commenting on the constructivist view of the world, Martin Bunzl argues: ‘to take the social construction of our lives seriously means taking it seriously as a causal feature of the world. And in this causal theorizing we display our realist commitments’ (1977: 25, emphasis original).

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According to his study, in the historically original sense of the word ‘cause’, ‘that which is caused is the free and deliberate act of a conscious and responsible agent, and “causing” him to do it means affording him a motive for doing it’ (1938: 86). Regardless of what we may make of Collingwood’s historical claim, it is interesting to note that what some philosophers have come to distinguish from ‘causes’ as ‘reasons (for particular human actions, specifically)’ was precisely what the word ‘causes’ used to mean in earlier periods in the history of human consciousness (Davidson 1963). Importantly, Collingwood adds: ‘For “causing,” we may substitute “making,” “inducing,” “persuading,” “urging,” “forcing,” “compelling,” according to differences in the kind of motive in question’ (1938: 86). In other words, to ‘cause’, in one important sense, is to ‘motivate’ (someone to do something) in a variety of modalities.

We may note here, parenthetically, that Collingwood does not include ‘enabling’ in his illustrative list of motivational modalities. This is perhaps because, in his own analysis, to enable someone to do something is to provide the person with the means by which to implement what s/he is already motivated to do. It seems possible, however, to enable someone to motivate him/herself to do something, e.g., through encouragement; after all, ‘causing’ is ‘affording a motive’.2 I would therefore add ‘enabling’ to Collingwood’s list. This seems warranted especially when we note that the difference between ‘enabling’ and ‘compelling’ is not always obvious – as when a parent enables/compels his/her child to become more independent. Which verb is the more appropriate one to use would seem to depend on one’s judgement on a number of factors, such as the value of the ends, the appropriateness of the means, and the willingness of the persons being enabled/compelled.3

One important point arising from the above consideration is this: stating the modality of how someone was caused to act in a certain way – whether s/he was ‘compelled’, ‘induced’, ‘encouraged’, for example – which is a significant component of causal understandings with respect to human social interactions everywhere, including the field of world politics, involves judgement, interpretation, and ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz 1973: 5-6, 9-10). This can be contrasted to ‘causing’ in a different context, where the effect-event is not (what we interpret as) an act of a free agent. For instance, when severing an apple from its branch causes it to fall to the ground, the apple is neither compelled reluctantly, nor induced, nor encouraged, to fall. We cannot talk of an apple having been afforded a motive to do so in whatever modality.4

Therefore, if ‘causing’, very strictly speaking, is really equivalent to, and only to, ‘affording a motive’, as Collingwood suggests was the case initially in the history of the idea of cause, then it is anthropomorphic to remark that an apple was ‘caused’ to fall, a billiard ball was ‘caused’ to move forward, and so on. ‘Causing’, in such contexts, being a metaphorical expression, cannot, in Collingwood’s understanding, be what literally goes on in the world. If Collingwood is right, it follows that ‘causing’ is real/literal in relation to people being caused (in the sense of being afforded a motive) to do something but metaphorical/imaginary in other contexts of what we normally call causation. 5

2 Heidegger (1977: 7-9) interprets Aristotle’s (1996) idea of ‘cause’ as implying ‘thanks to’. 3 An interrogator ‘compels’ the captive to confess; the Spartan society ‘compelled’ the citizens to become good fighters – or did it ‘enable’ them? An athletics coach ‘enables’ a runner to become a world-class competitor – though at times through a ‘cruel’ training regime. Is the training of a contortionist a ‘compelling’ or ‘enabling’ process? Both perhaps. On the related issue of moral judgement and causal explanation, see Suganami (2011).4 It is, of course, inadequate to say that the event of severing an apple causes another event, its falling to the ground; the first event leads to the second due to the operation of the gravitational force. 5 Collingwood (1938: 104-105) gives a brief historical account of how the commonplace ideas of ‘reluctance’ and ‘compulsion’ in inter-personal relations came to be incorporated into Newton’s explanation of the movement of a physical object in terms of ‘inertia’ and ‘force’. See also Russell (1912-13: 11).

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However, Collingwood’s way of thinking here involves a sharp divide between the literal and the metaphorical, which is problematic. For ‘affording someone a motive to do something’ is in turn an explanation of the person’s act, a way of representing how s/he came to do what s/he did with a view to making it intelligible. Whether anything went on in the world and, in particular, in this person’s mind, that literally corresponds to this explanatory representation is a moot point. Of course, the person in question may confirm that this, actually, was what happened but that will in turn be his/her own explanatory representation. This suggests that ‘causing’ is inescapably an explanatory concept – ‘all the way down’. Underlying this ‘all-the-way-down’ causal idealism is an understanding that no symbolic representation, e.g., through the use of a language, can simply re-present reality as it is. When we say we are ‘compelled’ to do something, this is a particular characterization of the situation in the light of which we make sense of what is going on and this enables us to identify (in the sense of ‘attach a label to’), and thereby express, our experience of it within the vocabulary available to us.6

If this way of thinking is correct, ‘causing’ – understood as the operation of what we may broadly call ‘causal powers (or liabilities)’ – is only the mind’s way of making sense of the world and not a feature of the world itself – except perhaps where what is caused is a human act produced by a motivating cause; and, even there, it appears, a causal statement is an explanatory statement involving judgement and interpretation. The doctrine that ‘causing’ is only an idea and not a feature of the world is called ‘causal idealism’ and is commonly associated with David Hume’s philosophy. Jaegwong Kim (1993: 233), for instance, states that ‘Hume’s celebrated critique of “necessary connexion” as an objective relation characterizing events themselves was perhaps the first – clearly the most influential – expression of a systematically articulated irrealist [i.e., idealist] position on causation’. A standard interpretation of Hume’s view, based Hume (1969[1739]; 1962[1777]), runs as follows.

When we say that one event has caused another, what we have in mind is that the first event brought about, or necessitated, the second event.7 Hume accepted this; according to him, as John Mackie (1974: 19-20) rightly notes, the idea of bringing about, or necessitating, was integral to our concept of causation. Hume thought, however, that this idea has no correspondence in our observations; we have no sensory experience of causing or causal powers realising themselves. This created a puzzle for him as he believed that our concepts were imprints of our experiences (or ‘impressions’). His task, therefore, was to give an account of how our idea of causal powers/necessity arose.8

Hume’s solution was to offer an ingenious causal story, predating Pavlov’s famous experiments by over 150 years. According to Hume, we develop an idea of causal powers/necessity because, and to the extent that, we encounter a regular sequence of events, which psychologically conditions us into expecting a relevant effect-type event to follow when we see a cause-type event. Our idea of causal necessity is nothing other than this 6 On the socially or culturally available vocabulary, which is historically enriched by poetic interventions, see Scheler (1954: 238ff). What makes such interventions possible, what lies at the heart of the aesthetic (i.e., representational) creativity, is an intriguing issue.7 Hume remarks: ‘I begin with observing that the terms of efficacy, agency, power, force, energy, necessity, connexion, and productive quality, are all nearly synonymous’ (Hume 1969[1739]: 207-207). In this paper, I treat causal necessity, causal necessitation, causal potential, the operation of causal powers, compulsion and the like, as synonyms.8 Collingwood (1938: 95), however, maintains that the idea of causal powers arose ‘from impressions received in our social life, in the practical relations of man to man; specifically, from the impression of “compelling” or “causing” some other man to do something when, by argument or command or threat or the like, we place him in a situation in which he can only carry out his intentions by doing that thing; and conversely, from the impression of being compelled or caused to do something’. Besides, can we not say that we experience, or have a sensation of, being ‘pushed’ in one direction or another physically?

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conditioned expectation transposed to the world. For Hume, therefore, causal necessity is solely an idea and a causal relation is nothing but a regularly observable event-sequence.

This is the gist of the so-called Humean theory of causation, also known as a regularity theory. Hume’s position, presented in this way, is one case of ‘causal idealism’ inasmuch as, for him, causation, in the sense of causal necessitation, is only an idea, and not a feature of the real (mind-independent) world. As I shall touch on later, however, there are a number of philosophers who reject this standard interpretation of Hume as a causal idealist.9

But here arises an intriguing question: regardless of whether Hume himself argued for it or not, how is causal idealism possible? How is it plausible to suggest that ‘causing’ – understood as the operation of causal powers – is not a feature of the world? I ask this because I am inclined to think, as with most other people that I know, that ‘causing’, understood in this way, is a feature of the world. Are they (myself included) all living a philosophically unsound, illusory life? After all, if I bang my head hard against a stone wall, it will hurt regardless of what I think or say. So, how could all this square with the view of causal necessitation as only an idea?

In asserting that head-banging ‘causes’ pain, however, we are, I think, already assuming ‘causing’ to be a feature of the world. Wendt (1999: 56), among numerous others, claims that there are brute facts about the world regardless of our state of knowledge but this does not necessarily mean that something ‘causing’ something else is one such fact, as, for example, Wight (2012: 269) seems to suggest. The latter proposition, which cannot be shown (Bhaskar 208: 186), needs to be argued for rather than treated as immediately obvious from our empirical observations.10

It turns out that the doctrine of causal idealism – that ‘causing’ is not a feature of the world – is in fact quite plausible, and I would say ‘correct’, if ‘the world’ is equated with the ‘empirical’ world. This is a simple point: since the operation of causal powers is not something we can experience or observe, ‘causing’, of course, is not an ingredient of the (empirical) world.11

However, the idea that what we think of as ‘the world’ is exhausted by what we call ‘the empirical world’ can be countered by a broader notion of ‘the world’. Patomäki and Wight (2000, 223), following Bhaskar (2008), thus speak of the world of which ‘the empirical world is only part’. Their view is that causal powers are an ingredient of this (wider-than-the-empirical) world.12 And it does appear that the idea of the world in which there are causal powers is regularly entertained in our way of making sense of how things work in nature and society (independently of our understandings). This will not mean that such an idea is integral to human thought in any timeless sense (Elias 1991). But the existence (or presence-in-the-larger-than-the-empirical-world) of such powers is widely taken

9 See Read and Richman (2007).10 It is also often remarked in defence of the causal realist ontology that ‘[i]f humanity ceased to exist we have good grounds for assuming that sound would continue to travel and that heavy bodies would fall to the earth’ (Wight 2006: 28). However, since causal realism holds that causal powers are real despite their unobservability, the imagined absence of humanity to observe empirical (and observable) phenomena is irrelevant as a ground for believing in causal realism. The category of ‘real though unobservable’ and that of ‘observable but not observed’ should not be conflated.11 It should be clear that Collingwood is not a causal idealist insofar as he believes that causing (in the sense of ‘motivating’) someone to do something is what actually happens in the empirical world. He thinks that we have a direct experience of causing someone to do something, or being caused to do something, which we capture accurately by using precisely these expressions. See fn 8 above.12 The idea of the ‘wider-than-the-empirical’ world should not be taken literally to suggest that the world is a spatial object, containing a smaller spatial object called ‘the empirical world’. The idea is meant to suggest that what we think of as ‘the world’ is not exhausted by the sum of what we experience or can in principle experience. In particular, potentialities, liabilities, tendencies, inclinations, (causal) necessities, and the like – all relating to the idea of ‘power’ – could, or perhaps should, be thought of as features of the world.

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for granted. The view that ‘causing’, in the sense of the operation of casual powers, is a component of the world is called ‘causal realism’. This is associated with Harré and Madden (1975), Bhaskar (2008), among others, and adopted by the so-called critical realists, some of whom are eminent contributors to the meta-theory of IR (Patomäki and Wight, 2000; Wight, 2006; Joseph, 2007; Kurki, 2008).

Critical Realists’ frequently voiced objections to causal idealism

In social science and IR, causal idealism, conventionally associated with Hume, has been the dominant assumption. However, there is a determined opposition to this Humean hegemony by a relatively small but powerful circle of scholars, known as critical realists.13 While I am sympathetic to their view that what we call ‘the empirical world’ is only one aspect of what we consider to be ‘the world’ and that causal powers can be conceived of as ingredients of this wider world, I am not entirely persuaded by some of the arguments advanced by critical realists against causal idealism. Three such arguments may be touched on here: (1) that causal idealism is likely to lead to the relativist (‘anything goes’) stance; (2) that causal idealism lacks ontological grounding; and (3) that causal idealism is erroneous because it privileges epistemology over ontology.14

(1) The accusation that causal idealism is likely to lead to the ‘anything goes’ stance may be countered. Causal idealism is a doctrine which says that causing, understood as the operation of causal powers, is no more than an idea. The version of this doctrine, usually attributed to Hume, suggests that causal relations (in the world, the empirical world) are regularity relations. Within that paradigm, therefore, empirically observed regularities matter and circumscribe what can or cannot be treated as causal relations; clearly, not ‘anything’ goes.15 Another version of causal idealism suggests that causal relations are explanatory relations.16 Within that framework, processes presented as causal are judged by the extent to which they explain their respective outcomes and, of course, the adequacy of a given explanation is subject to assessment by various criteria.17 In neither case is it possible to

13 Their standing is sufficiently significant for Patrick Jackson (2011) to consider them as one of the four main schools of thought in IR, each based on distinct philosophical underpinnings, the other three being ‘Neopositivism’, ‘Analyticism’, and ‘Reflexivity’. The origin of the term ‘critical realism’ is explained as follows in ‘General Introduction’ (by Roy Bhaskar) in Critical Realism: Essential Readings (Archer et al, 1998: ix): ‘The term “critical realism” arose by elision of the phrases “transcendental realism” and “critical naturalism”, but Bhaskar and others in this movement have accepted it since “critical”, like “transcendental”, suggested affinities with Kant’s philosophy, while “realism” indicated the differences from it.’ It may be noted that critical realists, as social scientists, will engage in the practice of explanatory critique, a form of a critique of ideology (Collier 1998), but that is not the sense in which critical realists’ approach is ‘critical’. They are interested in identifying the conditions of the possibility of (scientific) knowledge but claim (Bhaskar 2008) that their enquiry differs from Kant’s in that, unlike him, they are asking an ontological question: what must the world be like for scientific knowledge to be possible. ‘Scientific realism’, by contrast, is a term that usually refers to the view that at least some of the theoretical entities scientists use to explain natural phenomena are real or must/can be considered to be so. Alex Wendt (1999) is one of the best-known advocates of scientific realism in IR. Critical realists and scientific realists, however, overlap in their acceptance of causal realism. 14 I have distilled these points from my reading of Patomäki and Wight (2000: esp 219, 229), Wight (2006: esp 8, 22), and Kurki (2008: esp 10, 11, 26, 33, 148, 155-6, 159-61, 173, 187, 294, 296) and from my conversations with these authors over the years. 15 See, inter alia, Jackson’s discussion of Neopositivism, a doctrine which subscribes to the regularity theory of causation and stresses the importance of hypothesis-testing (2011, 41-71).16 Michael Scriven is an outspoken supporter of this line of thinking about causation. According to him, a ‘cause is an explanatory factor (of a particular kind)’ (1975: 11, emphasis in original); causation ‘is the relation between explanatory factors (of this kind) and what they explain’ (1975: 11); and ‘causation can only be understood as a special case of explanation’ (1975: 4). See also Kneale (1949: 60).17 For example, how followable is the explanation/the causal process depicted and how well does it make the outcome intelligible? How does the explanation fit with factual information we have about the process?

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point to something as a cause of something else, or a process as a causal one, arbitrarily simply because causing, in the sense of causal necessitation, is only an idea.18

(2) In dealing with the second objection concerning ‘ontological grounding’, it is important to distinguish between an ‘ontological claim’ and its ‘grounding’. The former is an assertion, the latter argumentation, explicating the structure and basis of the assertion. Moreover, it should not go unnoticed that the causal idealist claim – that causal necessity is not a component of the world – is an ontological claim; it concerns what the world does/does not consist of. One other point should be noted: it does not follow from the fact that, according to causal idealism, causal necessity is not a component of the world that this (ontological) claim has no grounding (where the ‘grounding’ is rightly understood as argumentation explicating the structure and basis of the assertion).

The key issue is whether causal idealism has an adequate grounding or not, which is really about whether it is backed by a persuasive argument. It may or may not be possible to advance a persuasive argument for accepting this particular ontological claim. We may find that causal realism has a more convincing argument backing it. Considering these issues is what constitutes ontology (understood as a branch of philosophical deliberation concerning ‘existence’). The fact that causal idealism claims causal necessity to be only an idea, and not a feature of the world – and here one might be lured into remarking ‘not grounded in the world’ – does not ipso facto deprive grounding (or argumentative backing) from that particular ontological claim. More simply put, if I were to hold that x was only an idea and not a feature of the world, or even ‘not grounded in the world’, it would not follow that my belief to that effect necessarily lacked a grounding (or an argumentative basis); think of a unicorn. What we need is not ‘ontological grounding’ in the sense of grounding in an ontological assertion, or stance, but a particular ontological claim’s grounding, an ontology’s grounding.19

(3) Causal idealism is also said to be a mistaken doctrine because it privileges epistemology over ontology. There is a sense in which causal idealism does this. It does this to the extent that it presents an epistemological claim – that we cannot have knowledge of causal powers because we cannot experience them – as a ground for making an ontological claim that such powers do not exist in the world and that they are only an idea in our head. This will be an instance of an epistemological claim being used as a basis for an ontological claim. And I agree that there are problems here. There are two problems that I see: (1) the epistemological claim that we cannot have knowledge of causal powers because we cannot experience them may be opposed; and (2) the claim that what exists is reducible to what we can know to exist may too be opposed. Of these two oppositions, the former only challenges

18 Bhaskar (2008: 43) is right to say that ‘it is only if the working scientist possesses the concept of an ontological realm, distinct from his current claims to knowledge of it, that he can philosophically think of a rational criticism of these claims’. But, for example, for Neopositivist social scientists, their concept of an ontological realm is ‘the empirical world’ and they subject their claims to rational criticisms. Of course, we can debate about whether their (or any other) ontological thinking is adequate. The point being made here is not necessarily that the causal idealist ontology is adequately grounded but rather that the accusation that causal idealism inevitably leads to an ‘anything goes’ attitude requires a further articulation and defence. 19It is not a sign of ‘ontological coyness’ (Patomaki and Wight 2000: 229) to accept, or not to accept, causal idealism as such; it is ‘ontologically lazy’, however, not to clarify the argumentative structure and basis of a particular conception of the world (e.g., one which equates the world with the empirical world). I wish to add here that the term ‘ontological’ is often used carelessly. For example, Wight declares, ‘I advocate a realist definition that treats mechanisms as ontological’ (2006: 32) and Kurki remarks, ‘Causes are seen to consist in the real causal powers of ontological entities’ (2008: 11) and refers also to ‘ontological causal powers’ (2008: 52) and ‘ontological real causes’ (2008: 202). In such instances, the adjective ‘ontological’ seems to mean ‘(really) existing’. But it is the aim of ontology to argue about what ‘(really) existing’ means and what therefore can be said to exist.

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casual idealism for basing itself on an erroneous epistemology. It is the latter that really challenges causal idealism for giving priority to epistemology over ontology.20

However, whether causal realism triumphs over causal idealism on these two points will depend on the persuasiveness of the argument advanced. And whether the argument produced in defence of the realist ontological claim is sound or not is a question that needs to be scrutinised independently of the realist complaint that causal idealism privileges epistemology over ontology in the sense just explained. Even though causal realism may be free of this mistake, its ontological claim must in turn be backed by some further argument and such an argument (or the causal realist ontology’s grounding) may also turn out to be problematic – in a different way. In short, arguing that the grounding of the causal idealist ontology is defective is not by itself sufficient to show that the grounding of the causal realist ontology is adequate. Bhaskar’s grounding of the causal realist ontology

The critical realist claim that causation, understood as the operation of causal powers, is a feature of the world stems from Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy of science (2008). Bhaskar formulates his idea of the world – his ontological claim – on the basis of his interpretation of the practice of scientific experiments. Experiments are, of course, what scientists conduct regularly to test their causal hypotheses. When conducting experiments, scientists try to see if producing x will lead to y, in conformity with the causal hypothesis in question, but within an environment which they try their best to keep free of interference by other causal factors.

Bhaskar interprets the practice of experimentation as one where the scientist produces x to see if it, in turn, produces y, now that other causes (it is hoped) are prevented from interfering with the process. Such an interpretation is not Bhaskar’s idiosyncratic account but seems to conform to scientists’ own understanding of what they are doing when they engage in experiments. It is on the basis of such an understanding that scientists engage in what they do; and a key element of this understanding is the concept of a cause as that which has the power to produce its effect – so that, in order to let the cause (x) produce its effect (y), the scientists need to prevent extraneous causes from interfering with their experiments. Bhaskar’s argument (which he calls ‘transcendental realism’) is that without an assumption that causal powers exist and are present in the wider-than-empirical world, what scientists do when they conduct experiment would not be intelligible as rational and that therefore it would not be possible for the scientific community to continue to engage in what they do. He twists his argument somewhat here and suggests that because science is possible, given that it occurs (2008: 29, 52), the assumption that causal powers are present in the wider-than-empirical world must hold, leading him to the conclusion that while causal powers cannot be shown, they can be known, to exist (2008: 186).

Bhaskar’s argument therefore involves the following moves: (1) causal powers cannot be shown to exist; but (2) what cannot be shown to exist may yet be known to exist; (3) causal powers are known to exist in the sense that the assumption that they exist can be argued to be valid (given what scientists do); and (4) causal powers exist because they are known to exist. His argument is not that causal powers exist regardless of whether we can know them to exist (which will be an odd argument in any case) but rather that we can and do know them to exist (in the sense of ‘to know’ just specified) even though we cannot show (or experience) them. This strikes me as either an epistemological claim – it would seem so up till step (3) – or an ontological claim, when (4) is added, based on an epistemological claim (regarding what

20 What Bhaskar calls ‘the epistemic fallacy’ is the view ‘that statements about being can always be transposed into statements about our knowledge of being’ (2008: 16). It appears, then, that route (2) concerns the ‘epistemic fallacy’, whereas route (1) points to an inadequate (or mistaken) epistemology.

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counts as ‘knowledge’). If the latter, Bhaskar, too, would appear to commit an ‘epistemic fallacy’.21

Moreover, there is a problem in Bhaskar’s representation of experiments. Are scientists right in their interpretation that not only do they produce x (or cause x to happen) in an environment they try to control, but that x in such an environment in turn produces y (or causes y to happen)? They may claim to have an immediate experience of producing x. Bhaskar, for his part, considers it ‘clear that we are aware of ourselves as causal agents in a world of other causal agents; and that unless we were so aware we could not act intentionally, or come to know ourselves as causal agents at all’ (2008: 215). But he certainly cannot make the same claim regarding the x-y sequence. Bhaskar, in incorporating scientific practice as a ground on which to build his causal realist argument, seems to make an important assumption here: for him, it is not simply that, under experimental conditions scientists create, y is found ‘actually, in fact’ (Hume 1962[1777]: 63) to follow x regularly but, crucially, that, in those conditions, x, which they produce, in turn produces y. But how can Bhaskar claim to know that, in this x-y sequence, a causal power is in operation, such that, in the circumstances, x (‘actually, in fact’, one might say) brings about y? He offers two lines of argument here.

Bhaskar, as a philosopher, dealing with concepts and assumptions, and not with processes of nature, cannot claim to know that this is what happens. But he argues that the ‘putative causal or explanatory “link”’ (showing how x brings about y) is given in scientists’ theory ‘containing a model or conception’ of that link (2008: 12). He refers to such a model or conception of the putative causal or explanatory link by the term ‘postulated mechanisms’ and adds that ‘[u]nder certain conditions some postulated mechanisms can come to be established as real’ (2008: 12, emphasis added). Bhaskar does not say what these conditions are. According to my reading of him, however, ‘established as real’ must mean ‘accepted as real by the existing scientific community’; ‘reality’ he speaks of is relative to scientific community’s understandings of nature.22

The other line of argument is perhaps the more important. Bhaskar points out that causal laws identified under experimental conditions are (thought by scientists to be) also operative outside the experimental space; otherwise they would not resort to experiments to identify causal laws which they then use to try to explain phenomena in open systems. This means, argues Bhaskar (2008, passim), that causal laws are not on the same plane as de facto regularities observable under experimental conditions; rather, they should be interpreted as depicting the ways causal powers/mechanisms operate in closed, as well as open, systems, even though it is only in closed systems that scientists manage to make their operations manifest themselves as regular patterns. In other words, scientists’ causal laws are not regularities observed under experimental conditions (let alone mere ‘empirical generalizations’) but the laws state the ways of workings of nature which underlie and generate the regularities observed.23

21 We may note here Colin Wight’s remark that ‘since Bhaskar’s concern is with both the ontological and the epistemological conditions of possibility for science it is simply incorrect to view him as giving ontology priority over epistemology’ (2006: 23).22 See Elias (1991: 77) for the idea of ‘reality congruence’ which explicitly pays attention to this point. As Wight remarks, ‘[t]he dialectic of science is never ending and no scientific discovery, or claim, is ever beyond critique’ (2006: 24).23 It is very important to note here that Bhaskar (2008: 47, 51) presents the (natural) world as consisting, not of events, but of things and (generative causal) mechanisms. But ‘a generative mechanism is nothing other than a way of acting of a thing (Bhaskar 2008: 51), ‘[causal] laws are nothing but the tendencies or ways of acting of kinds of thing’ (Bhaskar 2008: 109), and ‘tendencies are roughly powers which may be exercised unfulfilled’ (Bhaskar 2008: 93). In other words, Bhaskar presents the (natural) world as consisting of things and their causal powers, the ways of workings of which are stated in causal laws. We could say that in this interpretation, causal powers are always already contained in the world whereas Hume, having presented the world as a series of events, then need to find a connection between them in ‘causality’ which he cannot do within his event-ontology

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I find Bhaskar’s characterization of science quite persuasive.24 However, it is important to note that his causal realist ontology is not a description of the world as it really is independently of our knowledge claims but is grounded in – and, I think, replicates – (what he interprets) as the ontological assumption underlying scientific knowledge production. Bhaskar states that his central question is ‘what must the world be like for science to be possible?’ (2008, 23). But he effectively translates this into: ‘what concept of the world can philosophical analysis reveal scientists to presuppose in their activities in order that scientific activities can be understood as rationally intelligible and therefore possible activities?’. And Bhaskar claims that there is nothing untoward, and everything right, about this move. He states:

Ontology, it should be stressed, does not have as its subject matter a world apart from that investigated by science. Rather, its subject matter just is that world, considered from the point of view of what can be established about it by philosophical argument. The idea of ontology as treating a mysterious underlying physical realm… has done much to discredit it; and to prevent metaphysics from becoming what it ought to be, viz. a conceptual science’ (2008: 36, emphasis added).

Hence his claim, at the very beginning of the book in fact, that the primary aim of his book is ‘the development of a systematic realist account of science’ (2008: 8, emphasis added). He also states: ‘I do not claim in this book to solve any general problems of philosophy. It is my intention merely to give an adequate account of science’ (2008, 10, emphases added).25

Critical Realists’ disclaimers

In view of the considerable complexities that one faces in this terrain of philosophical argumentation, it is not surprising to find that some of the leading critical realists make important qualifications to their set of assertions which they are known to express often very forcefully.

because ‘causing’ is not an additional event linking a cause-event and an effect-event (Harre and Madden 1975: 57, 131). The distinction, in Bhaskar’s thinking, between ‘causal powers’ and ‘generative/causal mechanisms’ is somewhat elusive. However, ‘a powers statement is a promissory note cashed in the development of science, a schematic explanation filled out in the growth of science’ (Bhaskar 2008, 177). It is in the course of this growth that causal mechanisms come to be explicated and, under certain conditions, treated as real, according to Bhaskar. Precisely what the ‘causal mechanisms talk’ does may require further analysis, which is a task for another paper. As Kurki remarks (2008: 177), ‘the relationship of causes and mechanisms is not a self-evident one: and has not been clarified well enough within the realist philosophical tradition’. 24 But this is still a provisional statement on my part. As Collingwood (1938: 103-15) explains, our habit of thinking of causation-in-nature in terms of (causal) powers evolved from our early belief in God as the first cause. According to this belief, God made it to be the case that x would cause y by giving x the power to cause y, but, as Collingwood points out, the very idea of God making this to be the case is , in turn, based on an anthropomorphic image of God. If so, the ‘operation of causal powers in nature’ is an ingredient of our understanding of nature expressed through the use of an anthropomorphic metaphor, which, however, has become so settled in our thinking that we no longer notice its metaphorical character.25 Bhaskar’s causal realist ontology may be said to be ‘scientific’ in the sense that it is a presupposition of science; it is ‘philosophical’, however, because it is through philosophical analysis that we come to identify such a presupposition and because this ontological presupposition is not itself a scientific claim. Thus, Patomäki and Wight (2000: 215) consider causal realism as a ‘philosophical’ (and not a ‘scientific’) ontological view. Patrick Jackson (2011), however, points out that causal realism, in turn, makes a deeper philosophical presupposition or what he calls ‘mind-world dualism’. See Suganami (2012, forthcoming) on Jackson’s discussion of ‘dualism’ and ‘monism’. There is, however, awareness of the part of some writers on IR that real philosophical ontology goes deeper and concerns itself with the very nature of ‘being’ (or ‘the world’). See Michel (2012) and Prozorov (2012).

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For example, Milja Kurki, having argued strongly against the Humean regularity view of causal relations, comes towards the end of her book to make an important qualification: ‘the question of causation is not a problem that can be solved: it is merely a problem that can be solved in various different ways’ (2008, 307; emphasis added). It is somewhat unexpected to encounter this at the end of the book which gives the impression that its author is strongly opposed to the Humean regularity theory of causation on philosophical grounds.26 Still, Kurki may be right in the qualification she makes here; there may be no ultimate solution to the philosophy of causation and that may well be the very nature of all philosophical enquiries.

Another example of an unexpected qualification is found in Colin Wight’s book: ‘All substantive ontological claims require epistemological justification’ (2006, 121). This almost looks like a hidden disclaimer, given his persistent stress on the need to avoid privileging epistemology over ontology. But, if Wight is thinking here that a causal realist ontological claim must be backed by argumentation, addressing, among other things, the issue of how, and in what sense of the word, we can claim to know that there really are causal powers, I broadly agree with his statement.

At this point, I should quote a passage, which appears in the last two pages of Roy Bhaskar’s A Realist Theory of Science:

There is no way in which we can look at the world and then at a sentence and ask whether they fit. There is just the expression (of the world) in speech (or thought)… Science is an activity, a process in thought and nature which attempts to express in thought the natures and constitutions and way of acting of things that exist independently of thought… We express [our understanding of] (sic) nature in thought.

Science, then, is the systematic attempt to express in thought the structures and ways of acting of things that exist and act independently of thought (2008, 249-50).

A number of key ingredients are intertwined in this passage: ‘the world’, ‘the structures and ways of acting of things that exist and act independently of thought’, ‘our understanding of nature’, ‘(to) express [our understanding of] (sic) nature in thought’, ‘expression (of the world) in speech (or thought)’. My way of sorting out this cluttered passage is to consider Bhaskar to be making the following assertion: that science is a systematic attempt to express in speech (or language) our understanding concerning the structures and ways of acting of things that exist independently of thought. I believe Bhaskar will not object to this paraphrasing; I agree with this characterisation of natural science; and I accept that the idea of causal powers is integral to science, which is a way of expressing our understanding of nature that exists independently of our thought.

Bhaskar’s position, however, may now sound like a causal idealist position inasmuch as the idea of causal powers is said to be integral to a way of expressing our understanding of nature. The main difference I can see between this and Bhaskar’s causal realist position is that, according to the latter, causal powers are not just an idea but this idea accurately captures what happens in the world. But, of course, as Bhaskar rightly acknowledges in the 26 Note, however, that Kurki has remarked as follows halfway through the book: ‘While it would of course be difficult to prove conclusively the correctness of any philosophy of causation, it is accepted here that philosophical realism provides good reasons for accepting the ontological reality of causes, their ontologically deep nature and the legitimacy of their study by scientists, in both natural science and social inquiry’ (2008, 173). I took Kurki to mean that, although it would be difficult to prove this to be the case conclusively, the causal realist ontology is supported by a stronger argument than the causal idealist ontology. This appears to me to be a stronger claim in favour of causal realism than what Kurki states at the end of the volume.

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above passage, there is no way in which we can look at the world and then at a sentence (‘causal powers are in the world’ would be one such sentence) and ask whether they fit. In fact, Bhaskar’s ‘world’, where he thinks ‘causal powers’ are located, not being the ‘empirical world’, is not somewhere we can ‘look’ at all.

And here is one final quotation that I have found highly illuminating. This comes from Heikki Patomäki.

Realist ontological concepts such as ‘powers’, ‘producing’ and ‘mechanisms’ are themselves metaphorical, and should be assessed as such… There is little that is strictly literal. The ‘literal’ meanings are either routinely reproduced metaphors or are based on immanent bodily and social experience, which ground metaphors’ (2002, 130).

What I find most interesting here is the fact that this is virtually identical to Collingwood’s position discussed at the outset. It will be recalled that he is not a thorough-going causal idealist insofar as he believes that causing (or motivating) someone to do something is what actually happens in the (empirical) world. He thinks that we have a direct experience of causing someone to do something, or being caused to do something, which we capture accurately by using precisely these expressions. And for Collingwood, in those cases of causing, where the effect-event is not an act of a free agent, the idea of ‘causing’ is metaphorical – as it is for Patomäki.

But in discussing Collingwood’s argument, I noted that the distinction between literal and metaphorical is problematic for two reasons: even the allegedly literal use of the word ‘causing’ is ultimately a way of representing what went on in the mind of the actor who has been motivated to take a particular action; there is no guarantee that this corresponds literally to what actually happened there; and, indeed, the very idea of literal correspondence is meaningless here. This takes us back to ‘all-the-way-down’ causal idealism. Yet, I do not doubt for the moment that causal powers are real and that they exist independently of our understandings.

Where to, from here?

On the one hand, causal idealists are right to say that causal powers are an idea we employ to make sense of what goes on in the world but would be wrong if they were to insist that causal powers were only an idea and not a feature of the world. If we cannot know what we cannot experience, then we cannot know whether or not causal powers exist given that we cannot experience them. And if we cannot know whether or not they exist, we cannot say that they definitely do not.27 On the other hand, causal realists are right to say that without thinking

27 This, incidentally, is said to be Hume’s position by those revisionists who oppose the standard interpretation of him as a causal idealist. According to Galen Strawson (2007), a leading revisionist, Hume accepted the existence of causal powers as part of our natural beliefs and in any case his empiricist epistemology would not have allowed him to say that they definitely did not exist. The well-known ‘Humean’ regularity definition of causal relations was, according to Strawson, Hume’s attempt to state what he felt able to say within his empiricist epistemology concerning the nature of causal relations. In other words, according to Strawson, Hume was not suggesting that causation-in-the-world was nothing but regular conjunctions – a suggestion he could not have allowed himself to make given his empiricist epistemology – but acknowledged that we have no way of knowing the nature of ‘causal powers’. Here Hume was following Newton (1995: 439-43), who said he could not explain the nature of what he called gravitation. Hume (1962[1777]: 63-64) wrote: ‘In reality, there is no part of matter, that does ever, by its sensible qualities, discover any power or energy, or give us ground to imagine, that it could produce any thing, or be followed by any other object, which we could denominate its effect… The scenes of the universe are continually shifting, and one object follows another in an uninterrupted succession; but the power of force, which actuates the whole machine, is entirely concealed from us, and never

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that causal powers are a feature of the world scientists could not go on engaging in scientific activities, such as, in particular, experiments, and we could most probably not live the way we normally do; but they would be wrong to conclude that causal powers could be known to be ingredients of the world – if by ‘knowledge’ they meant something firmer than an understanding that is pragmatically necessary, so much so that it is taken for granted as true.

Causal powers, in short, are a concept, one among many no doubt, that enables us to live in society and with nature in the way we have come to do. I am tempted to suggest that the notion of causal powers is an idea which, in the long evolution of human consciousness, has come to be constitutive of our very thinking and living. Causal realists would add that there is a good reason for this – human consciousness has captured the world accurately, the idea of causal powers is reality-congruent. I would, however, suggest that this is something that human consciousness cannot ever discover or know to be the case; still, it is a taken-for-granted, or natural, belief which keeps us going. I believe Kurki would agree with this since, according to her, the position she endorses ‘argues that all scientific, and everyday, accounts of the world require the assumption of [causal] realism’ (Kurki 2008, 187; emphasis added). In my view, this succinctly summarises the epistemological status of the causal realist ontological claim.

Here then is an answer to the question, ‘what is the epistemological status of the causal realist ontological claim?’. It is an assumption which is required by scientific and everyday accounts of the world we experience. According to this assumption, causal powers are everywhere but to demonstrate the operation of a particular causal power, it is necessary to reduce interference by creating an experimental space approximating as much as possible to a closed system. Where there is little or no interference, we can demonstrate the operation of a causal power (or what we present as its operation) any number of times, and in that sense, regularly (or, more to the point, repeatedly). This is the sense in which causality produces regularity. Regularities, therefore, are not an intrinsic feature of any causal relations but a phenomenon we note as a manifestation of the operation of causal powers under appropriate conditions – an epiphenomenon, even. Causal relations and observable regularities are, therefore, not the same kind of thing. Indeed, we mostly acknowledge (or say we know) that causation and correlation are not the same. And when we reflect on what we mean by this claim, we will become aware of our (perhaps hidden) belief in the reality of causal powers. I think critical realists are right to remind us that this is what we actually believe.

But the realization that, even according to critical realists espousing causal realism, the belief in the reality of causal powers (potentialities, necessities and the like) is an assumption required by scientific and everyday accounts of the world we experience is highly significant. It brings home the fact that causation-in-the-world is an idea. However, by their frequent use of a standard illustration – such as, for instance, if I shoot you in the head, you will die – as though this empirical truth were by itself sufficient to prove the reality of causal powers, critical realists may have given a misleading impression that the reality of causal powers, too, is an empirical truth. This, unfortunately, encourages causal idealists to dwell on their Humean anxiety that, surely, causal powers do not belong to the empirical world (in the way in which the shooting-dying sequence can be said to do) – a point which causal realists, of course, appreciate.

‘All-the-way-down’ causal idealists are right to say, of course, that there is nothing in (pre-discursive) reality that literally corresponds to our idea of causal compulsion and the like. Indeed, this too is a point even causal realists accept. However, causal idealists err when they suggest that causation, in the sense of the operation of causal powers, is ‘only’ an

discovers itself in any of the sensible qualities of body’. However, it is one thing for a scientist to say that s/he does not (yet) understand the nature of the ‘power of force’; it is not possible for a philosopher, qua philosopher, to discover it.

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idea. There may be many things in the world which qualify as ‘only an idea’ – for example, the supposition that the Moon is a huge lump of blue cheese. But the idea of causation-in-the-world is not just any idea. It is practically impossible to live or think without it. This is an idea we have – and we cannot translate this into a non-causal idea (Taylor 1975) – to make sense of important features of what we experience.

It now appears that the contrast between causal realism and causal idealism loses much of its significance; the divide collapses. Causal realists and causal idealists are agreed that the idea of necessity is integral to the concept of cause; they agree that causal necessity is not an ingredient of empirical reality; and causal idealists can agree with causal realists that causal necessity is an indispensable idea. Furthermore, the critical realist interpretation that regularities are not an intrinsic feature of any causal relations but a phenomenon we note as a manifestation of the operation of causal powers under appropriate conditions seems unanswerable; and, in my view, there is nothing in causal idealism as such that opposes this interpretation. This means that causal realism and causal idealism are not only not in contestation against each other but can be united in their opposition to the regularity view of causation, which holds observable regularities to be an intrinsic feature of causation.

Conclusion: Implications for the study of world politics

Causal realism is a necessary presupposition of our everyday living and thinking. But if causal realism is such a natural belief, and everyone really believes in it, what difference does explicitly subscribing to it make to the study of world politics? There are two responses to this question.

One is to say ‘none’; we can just go on engaging in causal enquiries regarding anything that happens in the field of world politics whose causes we feel curious about. There is some truth in this. If we are inclined to engage in causal enquiries, we are already assuming that there is something that ‘brings/brought about’ the event or the situation whose causes intrigue us. That is what being curious about its causes means. So, reminding ourselves that causes are things that have the powers to ‘bring about’ their effects hardly add anything to our enquiries.

However, critical realists (a group of scholars most explicit and vehement in stressing their allegiance to causal realism) tend to argue that this reminder is in fact a highly significant, indeed a necessary, one. And there is some truth in this, too. In particular, causal realism would remind us that, when in search of a causal explanation of an event (y), we are not in fact in search of an empirical generalization that subsumes a particular sequence of events (x leading to y). Searching for empirical generalizations in open systems – and world politics is a primary example of an open system – is largely futile and even where one is found, it may not be a manifestation of one and the same causal process. From the viewpoint of causal enquiries in world politics (or in any study of an open field), a search for a ‘covering law’, in the sense of an empirical generalization in the open system, is quite misguided; empirical generalizations simply aren’t causal laws. Here is a characteristically strong statement, coming from the leading critical realist:

… practically all the theories of orthodox philosophy of science, and the methodological directives they secrete, presupposes closed systems. Because of this, they are totally inapplicable in the social sciences (which is not of course to say that the attempt cannot be made to apply them – to disastrous effect). Humean theories of causality and law, deductive-nomological [or ‘covering-law’] and statistical models of explanation, inductivist theories of scientific development and criteria of confirmation, Popperian theories of scientific rationality and criteria of falsification,

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together with the hermeneutical contrasts parasitic upon them, must all be totally discarded. Social science need only consider them as objects of substantive explanation (Bhaskar 1998: 45).

Thinking of causation in terms of causal powers scattered in the world (the larger-than-the-empirical-world), ‘exercised unrealised or realised unperceived (or undetected)’ (Bhaskar 2008: 184), rather than as having to do with discernible regular patterns, if any, in the empirical world has a significant impact, therefore, especially in the field, such as International Relations still dominated by the regularity view of causal relations. The regularity view is so dominant, in fact, that even those professional historians who study the history of some aspects of world politics, betray their acceptance of it when they claim not to be engaged in a specifically ‘causal’ enquiry (as they do not believe their explanations are based on covering laws or statistical generalizations). Conflating ‘theoretical’ with ‘generalizing’, they also often say they are doing ‘history’, not ‘theory’.

Once freed of the regularity view, we begin to realise that there is something rather strange in the obsession to seek regular patterns in international relations (where hardly any is found) and to try to explain them by a parsimonious causal theory (in the field where complexity appears to be the rule). Kenneth Waltz’s (1979) contention that theories explain regular patterns begins to sound hollow and alien. He himself found no regular patterns to speak of, beyond what he treated as ‘recurrent’ patterns – though of the ‘rain would fall’ variety, e.g., ‘war would recur’, ‘the balance of power would recur’. Where, exceptionally, this method is applied with apparent success, as in the case of the Democratic Peace Theory, its political impact can be pernicious as Wight warns:

The attempt to construct a parsimonious theory of IR is not only flawed and doomed to failure, but also politically and ethically dangerous. It is dangerous … because such theories are apt to provide scientific legitimacy for particular forms of political practice. The promotion of western forms of democracy based on the scientific validity of a theory of democratic peace is but one example of this process (2006: 8).

Leaving the regularity view behind does not, of course, tell us how we should or could construct a causal account of a significant singular event or condition, such as the outbreak of the First World War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the current economic crisis, or global warming, to name but a few obvious candidates in the field of IR. But at least we are reminded that such events likely require a combination of causal factors specific to particular cases. Thus Kurki (2008: 173) remarks, quoting Collier (1994: 122), ‘a causal explanation is “a historical narrative in which a multiplicity of transitive verbs maps a complex causal sequence”’. She adds strikingly:

IR theorists should seek to understand the historical causal process in a holistic way, that is, concentrate on accounting for the complex interactions of various causes in specific historical contexts (2008: 286).

And further:

Parsimonious framings of world politics [have to be] rejected as world politics [is] conceputalised as a complex web of interacting and counteracting causal powers and (structures of) social relations (2008: 297-98).

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Thus the conventional disciplinary barrier between IR and historical studies of world politics, and more generally between theory and history, breaks down as does the old, naïve – ‘second debate’ – distinction in IR between a ‘classical approach’ (openly embracing judgements) and ‘science’ (proclaiming to aspire towards scientific objectivity) 28 as it is now freely admitted that ‘any explanation of a historical social process always involves a balance of judgement and that balances of judgement will remain contested’ (Kurki 2008: 286).

Moreover, when we realise that causal powers are everywhere – exercised but not always fulfilled – we begin to move beyond the study of ‘international relations’ narrowly conceived towards a study of ‘global politics’. Kurki again:

On the basis of the broad causal ontology accepted here, the ‘taken-for-granted’ nature of IR as a separate discipline must be questioned. Indeed, in order for IR to come up with explanatorily adequate causal accounts of complex global realities, it should open up to an analysis of social relations beyond the traditional scope of ‘International Relations’ (2008: 18).29

In my judgement, such a critique of mainstream IR, focused on inter-state relations and involving a search for empirical generalizations and a parsimonious causal theory, in favour of a historical (or not a-historical) study of global social relations, which pays attention to causal complexes, diversity of historical contexts, and the contested nature of causal interpretations, is unanswerable.30 There is therefore a sense in which the anti-regularity stance is not oriented towards producing an ‘IR Theory’; its interest is more in the direction of historical (or historically alert) studies of various aspects of global social relations.31 Beyond that, this stance does not, and should not be used to, sanction any particular substantive argument in the study of world politics.32

And, finally, any approach to the study of world politics, which is explicitly claimed to be based on critical realism, or its central tenet, causal realism, must be clear about the nature of that philosophical doctrine as an assumption embedded in the practice of knowledge production, which clearly includes the very approach being adopted. Like a rudder which is part of a boat, the causal realist ontology is part of the mode of enquiry which it steers, not a ‘philosophical foundation’ in the sense of something which philosophers prepare in advance of, and separately from, the production of substantive knowledge claims.33 However, since critical realism/causal realism is a philosophical (meta-theoretical/meta-historical) doctrine, we must engage with it at that level. Given the apparent tendency of critical realists to try to demonstrate their philosophical correctness with considerable vehemence, it is important to

28 See Bull (1969) and Kaplan (1969).29 Wight agrees: ‘under a structural relational account, we should think not of international relations, but of global social relations’ (2006: 299).30 See Kurki and Suganami (2012).31 See, for example, works by Matthew Paterson (1996, 2007).32 See Joseph (2007) and Brown (2007).33 I do not think that philosophers, qua philosophers, can build such a foundation for the empirical disciplines. See Kuhn (1977). This, of course, does not mean that such disciplines have no foundational assumptions; they do – they have them embedded in them – and it is a role of philosophical analysis to identify and expose them and encourage us to reflect on them comparatively. How such a reflection may be conducted in one intriguing question. Bernstein (2010) aptly remarks: ‘Sometimes it is hard to know where politics ends and metaphysics begins: when, that is, the stakes of a political dispute concern not simply a clash of competing ideas and values but a clash about what is real and what is not, what can be said to exist on its own and what owes its existence to an other’. Whether political principles, such as those which value freedom and equality, in turn can be derived from a philosophical foundation, worked out independently of prior commitment to such values, is an interesting question, which, however, is beyond the scope of this paper. See an intriguing account by Prozorov (2012, forthcoming).

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engage with their philosophical argumentation in detail. We are familiar with the critical realists’ often repeated claims that their view is correct or superior to others because (1) it does not allow the ‘anything goes’ attitude, (2) because it is ontologically grounded, and (3) because it does not make the error of privileging epistemology over ontology. I have argued that these grounds, when looked at closely, are either invalid, or not without serious difficulties. In my judgement, critical realism does not require such justifications. Nor is its central tenet, causal realism, demonstrated to be true by pointing out that if I try to fly unaided, I will fall, or that a material object will fall to the ground even if no-one is there to witness it. Such examples and the talk of ontological grounding and so on are rhetorical devices which critical/causal realism does not need to employ to defend itself – for all that needs to be demonstrated and accepted is that the reality of causal powers, or their presence in the larger-than-the-empirical world, is our standard assumption and necessary presupposition of scientific knowledge production. And because the reality of causal powers, or causation-in-the-world is an idea, the distinction between causal realism and causal idealism collapses. They can, however, be united against the regularity view of causation which still dominates IR – with some considerable impact on the future study of world politics.

Acknowledgements

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