A Critical Realist Perspective on Decisions Involving Risk and Uncertainty

The term critical realism has been used in a number of different ways. In general, a critical realist philosophy is critical of the traditional realist view of science and social science, in particular the assumption that the objective study of the physical and social world is achievable. Rather, it accepts that human conceptions of the world are altered or distorted by people’s mental processes in different ways. Nevertheless, unlike relativism, it does not go as far as to argue that that all such conceptions are completely subjective and relative. The particular variant of critical realism discussed in this article is the philosophy developed by Roy Bhaskar and his colleagues since the 1970s (Archer, Bhaskar, Collier, Lawson, & Norrie, 1998). In this case, the name was derived from Bhaskar’s general philosophy of social science that he called transcendental realism, and