| Popis: |
After contrasting critical realist ontology with the implicit ontology of positivism, this chapter considers how false theories like positivism work. They do so by tacitly presupposing truth about reality, because there is no alternative (TINA) to doing so, resulting in a compromise formation in which falsity is held in tension with truth that it denies but presupposes. Bhaskar argues that, not just theories, but people and social forms in master–slave-type societies are compromise formations in which false heteronomous elements occlude and dominate a true autonomous level that they presuppose and are parasitic upon. This is the asymmetry of emancipation. The task of emancipation then becomes to throw off the false, both within ourselves and within society, in order to recover and liberate the true. That people have the potential within themselves to do this is the tacit presupposition of all the great emancipatory traditions. The concepts of negation and determinate absence are then further explicated. Finally, the key errors identified by Bhaskar’s metacritique of Western philosophy are spelt out, together with their social meaning: the ideological underwriting of the status quo in various ways. |
