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This chapter is a summary of the book. Roy Bhaskar's version of Critical Realism has the following characteristics: a re-vindication of ontology , as distinct from but (ultimately containing) epistemology ; a distinction between the domains of the real, the actual and the empirical ; and a belief that objects and generative mechanisms in the world have causal powers which may or may not be exercised, but still exist independently of human cognition or the individual's ability to know them. Further to these, Bhaskar drew a distinction between the transitive world of knowing and the intransitive world of being ; arguing that the social world is stratified, and incorporates mechanisms at different levels with elements of these mechanisms irreducible to those of the level from which they emerged. This implies that objects have emergent properties, which interact with each other, and as a result new properties are created or emerge from old combinations of objects. This means that the relation between structure and agency is the key framing device at the ontological level; and furthermore, that all observational or experiential statements are framed by a specific set of conceptual relations, that is, all observational or theoretical statements are in some sense theory-laden. As a consequence, any description of the world is both explanatory within a particular set of conceptual relations and potentially transformative of those relations. In short, educational processes take place in open systems.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-19836-1_6

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