In addition to differentiating between the world and our knowledge about it, critical realism also divides the world into three different domains. The domain of Empirical, of Actual and of Real.
The domain of Empirical consists of our observations and our experienc-es. The domain of Actual consists of all events that take place, regardless of whether someone experiences them. (Thus the domain of Actual includes the domain of Empirical) “Events or outcomes are what critical realists investigate, that is the external and visible behaviours of people, systems and things as they occur, or as they have happened.” (Easton, 2010, p. 120) In addition to contain-ing the domain of Empirical and Actual, the domain of Real consists of struc-tures and mechanisms that are not directly observable, but which under certain circumstances generate or support events and phenomena in the actual domain.
The three domains are different from one another because critical realism un-derstands non-observable structures as real but different from the events they generate in the domain of Actual, and different again from the way these events are experienced or observed in the domain of Empirical. They are also different because to a critical realist appearances are deceptive, in the sense that the way we think the world is made up, is not necessarily the way the world actually is (Bhaskar, 1998, p. 41; Buch-Hansen & Nielsen, 2005, p. 24).
The domains of Empirical and Actual, together make up the exact flat earth worldview (or ontology) of empirical realists. Empirical realists believe the world
exclusively consists of potentially observable phenomena and events (Actual) along with experiences and observations (Empirical) (Buch-Hansen & Nielsen, 2005, p. 24). Bhaskar argues against this ontology by saying that for researchers to experience something they must use sense-perception, and that for this idea of sense-perception to be intelligible (to make sense in itself) the object per-ceived must be intransitive. First, if an object does not exist independently of the researcher’s perception of it, how can she then perceive it? And second, how can different people perceive the same object differently? (Bhaskar, 1998, pp. 23–24)
If changing experience of objects is to be possible, objects must have a distinct being in space and time from the experiences of which they are the objects. For Kepler to see the rim of the earth drop away, while Tycho Brahe watches the sun rise, we must suppose that there is something that they both see (in different ways). Similarly, when modern sailors refer to what ancient mariners called a sea-serpent as a school of porpoises, we must suppose that there is something which they are describing in differ-ent ways (Bhaskar, 1998, p. 24).
As I shall discuss further in the section concerning philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer would probably agree with Bhaskar here insofar as the way people perceive or interpret the world is never from a neutral point of view. Gadamer would probably argue that the reason the sailors reach different conclusions is because their interpretation of an object they perceive will always be based on their historically effected consciousness, and this means that any given
inter-Effect Analysis THE THREE DOMAINS OF THE WORLD
Domain of Empirical Observations and experiences
Domain of Actual
Events happening regardless of being observed or not
Domain of Real
Complex objects: Structures and mechanisms which can result in events happening
Observable
Not directly observable
Observed
Figure 3. The three domains of the world (Bhaskar, 1998, p. 41; Buch-Hansen & Nielsen, 2005, p. 24) includ-ing a direction of analysis and effect (Krinclud-ingelum, 2017, p. 58).
pretation of an object is subject to the contemporary historical reality of the interpreter (Højbjerg, 2013, pp. 304–305). Consequently, the object can also, in Gadamer’s view, be the same, but the interpretation of the sense-perception of the object will differ.
Critical realists emphasise the third domain, the domain of Real. Their ambition is to dive down under the observable surface and uncover some of the unobserv-able structures and mechanisms that generate or cause observunobserv-able phenomena and events (Buch-Hansen & Nielsen, 2005, p. 24, 2012, p. 282). This is illus-trated by the analysis arrow pointing downwards in figure 3, where the effect arrow pointing the other way seeks to illustrate how non-observable structures generate events that take place and can be observed (Kringelum, 2017).
Causality: Complex objects in the domain of Real
Critical realism is interested in causality, but not in terms of cause and effect.
Critical realists do not believe that one event or object influences another in one specific way based on certain rules (Sayer, 2002, p. 104).
Rather, under the directly observable surface in the domain of Real we find what critical realists call complex objects, which are able to do certain things. These are objects characterised by two things:
1. They have certain causal powers, meaning certain things they can do or certain ways they can act. These causal powers can in turn affect other objects in the domain of Real.
2. This is because all complex objects also have liabilities, meaning cer-tain ways it is possible for them to be affected by the causal powers of other complex objects (Buch-Hansen & Nielsen, 2005, p. 25).
Sayer presents the following example:
On the realist view, causality concerns not a relationship between discrete events (‘Cause and Effect’), but the ‘causal powers’ or ‘liabilities’ of ob-jects or relations, or more generally their ways-of-acting or ‘mechanisms’.
People have the causal powers of being able to work (‘labour power’), speak, reason, walk, reproduce, etc., and a host of causal liabilities, such as susceptibility to group pressure, extremes of temperature, etc. Often the causal powers inhere not simply in single objects or individuals but in the social relations and structures which they form. Thus the powers of a lecturer are not reducible to her characteristics as an individual but derive from her interdependent relations with students, colleagues, administra-tors, employer, spouse, etc. Powers and liabilities can exist whether or not
they are being exercised or suffered; unemployed workers have the power to work even though they are not doing so now and iron is liable to rust even though some pieces never get the chance to. On this view then, a causal claim is not about a regularity between separate things or events but about what an object is like and what it can do and only derivatively what it will do in any particular situation. (Sayer, 2002, pp. 104–105)
An object cannot be reduced to being something in itself. It is only what it is by virtue of its causal powers and liabilities; these tell us something about what this complex object can do (Buch-Hansen & Nielsen, 2005, p. 25). In this under-standing of causality, the question of whether a causal power or liability of an object is activated or suffered is contingent – it is a possibility, but not a necessi-ty; we cannot predict whether it will happen. It is conditioned by other objects, their causal powers and liabilities, and whether or not these will meet, support, or block each other in potentially complex combinations (Sayer, 2002, p. 107).
With the transitive and intransitive dimensions and the Johari window, I focused on personal experiences, i.e. the access the persons studied and I as the research-er studying them have to the world, and the relationship between our (potentially different) understandings of the world and the world itself.
In contrast to this, the three domains of the world, and the complex objects in the real domain, explain more specifically how the ontologically existing world is, and how the sometimes unobservable and complex interactions between dif-ferent objects make it difficult to predict the future or to understand the world accurately based on observations of it.