- Title
- Key critical realist concepts for environmental educators
- Creator
- Price, Leigh
- Subject
- To be catalogued
- Date
- 2015
- Type
- text
- Type
- book chapter
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/437022
- Identifier
- vital:73324
- Identifier
- ISBN 9781315660899
- Identifier
- https://www.routledge.com/Critical-Realism-Environmental-Learning-and-Social-Ecological-Change/Price-Lotz-Sistka/p/book/9780367597689
- Description
- This chapter describes aspects of critical realism that are rele-vant to environmental educators. Critical realism acts an un-derlabourer for the sciences and the practices of human emancipation. In its underlabouring role, critical realism chal-lenges the Humean assumption that correlations (constant conjunctions) are the only way to know causation and offers an alternative, which is that causation is based on the layered, deep nature of reality (the real, actual and empirical). Critical realism explains how higher levels of being are emergent from lower levels; therefore society (structure) is emergent from the activities of people (agency). Environmental educators should take an interest in structure and agency, not least because cer-tain approaches offer questionable power strategies to people and particularly governments. One consequence of the critical realist version of causation is that it becomes possible to en-visage an environmental ethics that is based on an axiology that is neither absolutist nor relativist. To provide a full enough account of causation to achieve one’s purposes, Bhaskar has suggested a model, the seven laminations of scale. Bhaskar also differentiates between the transitive and intransitive realms and explains that there are questionable ideological advantages to failing to make this distinction. The intransi-tive/transitive realms have implications for our use of catego-ries: critical realism explains how we can use categories to prevent oppression. Critical realism also argues against a purely positive, rather than a negative, account of the dialectic: thus change is absenting the constraints on absenting ab-sences. Contrary to a frequent assumption made by both non-critical realists and critical realists alike, critical realism is not a return to positivism.
- Format
- 22 pages, pdf
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Language
- English
- Relation
- Price, L., 2015. Key critical realist concepts for environmental educators. In Critical realism, environmental learning and social-ecological change (pp. 18-39). Routledge
- Rights
- Publishers
- Rights
- Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Taylor and Francis Online Terms and Conditions Statement (https://www.tandfonline.com/terms-and-conditions)
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