Avoiding “violence to reality”: taking Chick’s critique of critical realism further

Victoria Chick engaged substantially with issues of method in economics, often in collaboration with Sheila Dow. She criticised dualistic understandings of pairs such as 'open' versus 'closed' and 'individualism' versus 'holism'. She also defended the use of mathematical methods. This position led to tension with Tony Lawson's critical realism. Chick accepted the more descriptive parts of Lawson's ontology but rejected his definitions of open and closed systems, his conceptualisation of social systems and his views on abstraction. We argue that Chick's disagreements with Lawson result from his commitment to transcendental realism and an essentialist approach to inquiry. We develop this argument by defining a weak and a strong version of critical realism. The weak version consists of statements that are relatively uncontroversial from a post-Keynesian perspective. We argue that the ontological claims that comprise the strong version should, however, be rejected. We think that Chang's pragmatist realism provides a better methodological foundation for post-Keynesian economics than critical realism; pragmatism has clear affinities with Chick's approach to economic inquiry, given the attention she paid to the role of judgement, and her affinity with Keynes.