The Contribution of Systemic Thought to Critical Realism

Critical realism, especially as developed by Roy Bhaskar, embodies

at its heart systemic and holistic concepts such as totality, emergence,

open systems, stratification, autopoiesis and holistic causality. These concepts

have their own long history of development in disciplines such as

systems thinking and cybernetics, but there is an absence in Bhaskar’s

writings, and that absence is a lack of any reference to the corresponding

systems literature. The purpose of this paper is threefold: (i) to demonstrate

the extent of this correspondence; (ii) to show that critical realism

can benefit from an exposure to these other discourses; and (iii) to show

that systems thinking too can gain philosophically from critical realism.