Process philosophy and the critique of critical realism

In a recent paper, Julie Nelson (2003) argues that the Institutionalist, Pragmatist, and Process Philosophy traditions have been neglected both by orthodox theorists and, surprisingly perhaps, by certain of their heterodox antagonists. Despite this neglect, process philosophy has found enthusiastic supporters amongst natural scientists and philosophers of science such as Prigogine (1997) and, from a Post-Structuralist perspective, Deleuze and Guattari (1994). In his response to feminist critics of an earlier paper (Lawson, 1999), published in the Feminist Economics journal, Tony Lawson (2003) - Convenor of the Cambridge Social Ontology Group - has returned to the question of what Critical Realism as an economic methodology could contribute to feminism critiques of orthodox economics. Few of the feminist respondents were convinced by Lawson's earlier arguments that their interests would be best served by espousing a Critical Realist ontology in debating with orthodoxy. In particular, Julie Nelson (2003 : 115) argued that Alfred North Whitehead's organicist ontology "locates the knower within reality and (through a broader, deeper, and more serious understanding of experience) sees the knower as having a sense of the whole and the many (or in more current lingo, the "other") as well as of the self." Lawson (2003) responded to Nelson's arguments with a five page counter-response, which incorporated a six page appendix on the similarities and differences between Process Philosophy and Critical Realism. This paper concurs with Nelson's arguments about the methodological value of process philosophy. It proceeds by examining how Whitehead's interpretations of induction and probabilistic inference came to influence Keynes during the drafting of The General Theory. While Whitehead's endorsement of the philosophy of organism mirrored the views of Frank Ramsey and G. E. Moore, it is argued that Whitehead went further than the latter authors, insofar as he felt compelled to construct a rigorous justification for probabilistic inference in an organicist world where, otherwise, everything would simply depend on everything else. To this end, he espoused the notion of an hierarchical ontology. In the paper, Whitehead's notion of a hierarchical ontology is evaluated against its Critical Realist counterpart: the three-layered ontology proposed by Bhaskar and other proponents of Critical Realism such as Tony Lawson. The paper counters Lawson's complaints about Whitehead's apparently excessive rationalism, his a priorism, and his penchant for dualistic thinking. Instead, it is argued that Whitehead's Process Philosophy affords more scope for a pluralist approach to economics insofar as it supports a more comprehensive methodological and an ethical critique of orthodox economics