‘[T]here is more to normative social science than creative redescription. [....] [T]the identification of the *source* of an experienced injustice in social reality, necessary for changing and remedying it, involves much more than redescription, even if it depends on that too centrally. It is a matter of finding and disentangling webs of relations in social life, and engaging explanatory critiques of the practices that sustain them. This may indeed often involve the detection of various types of false and otherwise unhappy consciousness (and more generally being). And this in turn may lead on to *critiques” of the vocabularies and conceptual systems in which they are expressed, and the additional social practices with which they are implicated. Moreover, such explanatory critiques will lead, ceteris paribus, to action rationally directed to transforming, dissolving or disconnecting the structures and relations which explain the experience of injustice and the other ills theoretically informed practice has diagnosed. Poets, like philosophers, need to think of explaining to change, rather than just reinterpreting or redescribing to edify, the world. [....]

In virtue of the fact that effecacious reasons are causes of intentional behaviour [cf. Finnis on Aquinas], not just redescriptions of them, the agent’s account of her reasons has a special authority…but this authority is not absolute. Rather, it is subject to negotiation, as we come to understand better, both in general, and in the individual case, “how we work,’ that is, what makes us do the apparently irrational or otherwise explanatorily interesting things we do. (One consequence of this is that language can change us, as in “the talking cure,” but also when inspired by poetry.) Unconscious motivation and tacit skills are only two of the sources of opacity in social life; others are unacknowledged conditions and unintended consequences. So although society is a skilled accomplishment of agents, it does not follow from this that theoretical social science (informed by participants’ understanding) is redundant. The task of the theoretical social sciences will be to establish the structural conditions, consequences and contours of the phenomenologically experienced world. In some, perhaps many, cases the critical redescription and structural explanation of that experience, and the accounts based on it, will be necessary.

In so far as an agent is interested in preserving or extending or deepening or gaining some freedom, this will always involve trying to understand, in the sense of explaining, the character of some social or socially conditioned or affectable entity, structure or thing–in order to maintain (reproduce) or change (transform) or otherwise dissolve or defuse, or to simulate or release it. To become or remain “free,” in the simple sense of being “unconstrained,” always *potentially* involves both a theory of those constraints and, in so far as the freedom is feasible, a practice of liberation or liberty preservation. One may be free or desire freedom, in this sense, from any kind of thing.

On the other hand, emancipation, and more specifically self-emancipation, involves…possessing the power and the disposition to act in or towards one’s real interests…and…the transformation of unneeded, unwanted and oppressive to needed, wanted and empowering *sources* of determination. Emancipation, that is to say, depends on the transformation of structures rather than just the amelioration of states of affairs. And it will, at least in the case of self-emancipation, depend in particular upon a conscious transformation in the transformative activity or praxis of the social agents concerned. As such, empancipation is *necessarily* informed by explanatory social theory.

The emancipatory social sciences may, for their part, take as their starting point some human need or aspiration (say for poetry) and enquire into the natural and social conditions (if any) of its non-fulfilment. Or they may begin with an immanent critique of prevailing social theories or ideologies, which may move on to the explanatory critique of falsity-generating or otherwise malevolent (ill-producing) social structures. In either case, the social sciences will be participants in a theory-practice dialectic or spiral with the emancipatory practices concerned. In this process the kind of creative radical self or society redescriptions, to which Rorty calls our attention, may play a vital role in individuation or identity (including group and kind (or species) identity) formation. And this activity of *seeing themselves under a new description which they have helped to create,* will generally figure crucially in the *transformed transformative praxis* of the self-emancipating agents.

See the above and other works by Bhaskar by way of filling out his critical realism, social theory and moral philosophy, a taste of which is provided here.

Two books I find myself returning to again and again to better understand the meaning and mechanisms of the social sciences, are Richard W. Miller’s Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and the Social Sciences (1987), and Harold Kincaid’s Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences (1996). On the ‘entanglement’ of fact(s) and value(s), I’ve found the work of Iris Murdoch, Amartya Sen, Hilary Putnam, Martha Nussbaum, among others, to be indispensable.

There are really two questions. One is the extent to which there can be social science at all. I think I’m more sanguine than Taylor (or you), as I read this, in thinking there is more to the science of human behavior than anthropological narrative. There must be some testable propositions when we stand apart from the issue. But I agree that there are many cases in which the rats in the experiment are studying themselves.

The second is the extent to which that science makes any difference in the moment of choice of action. That is Christine Korsgaard’s point in The Sources of Normativity. I believe that even if there are legitimately testable and falsifiable propositions in the human sciences, they still are a description of the “is” and do not inform or predict how any single agent will interpret the “ought” ex ante.

Neat post!