ABSTRACTThis article presents a philosophy of science for ecology – deep naturalism – based on Roy Bhaskar’s transcendental realism. It includes a model of the emergence of ecosystems, analogous to...

Bhaskar's philosophy supports society via a process of homeostasis to resist socioecological system disintegration by developing its values and ethics in response to endogenous and exogenous change. To the contrary, positivist (first generation) and hermeneuticist (second generation) approaches to systems theory have distorted humanity's mechanism of homeostasis because, amongst other things, they disallow the use of facts to guide values/actions. Since acting on knowledge is, ceteris paribus, a given in Bhaskar's approach, resolving socioecological system problems involves correcting the method of (...) homeostasis (our method of finding knowledge and acting on it) rather than correcting the consequences of the failure of homeostasis (the poorly informed action or inaction). This is reminiscent of Gandhi's approach to social transformation in which we trust the means to arrive at appropriate ends and it releases activists from having to be keepers of the moral high-ground or having to try to change people's behaviour. (shrink)

This article illustrates the process of applied critical realist research using a case study of political decision-making in transport. Critical realism is often used to analyse socio-political cha...