Specifying the ontology of natural necessity as non-reductive naturalism : critical realist debates on the relation between agency and society

Critical realism is underpinned by the ontology of natural necessity. This ontology cannot be derived from empirical fact. It is deduced, transcendentally, from the intelligibility of intentional activity. For this reason, critical realist explanations of intentional activity itself must be non-reductively naturalist. The ontology of natural necessity and non-reductive naturalism are inextricably connected by the axiom that if conscious activity conceivably alters the objective world, then it must be a causally irreducible part of this world. Non-reductive naturalists appear to agree that intentional activity has emerged from physico-chemical and organic processes. However there is significant disagreement about exactly how, in what sense consciousness occupies a newer, higher stratum. Naturalists such as Hartmann and Bunge disagree about the spatiality of consciousness, the categorical relation between consciousness and the human organism and about the relationship between sociality and intentional activity. The difficulty and significance of these questions is manifest in a debate within the critical realist school itself. On one hand, Bhaskar and others argue that sociality and intentional activity occupy ontologically distinct yet casually interdependent strata. On the other hand, Archer insists that material practices precede and inform social being. I hope to show that neither of these positions is compatible with the temporality of stratification. Both positions are moreover incompatible with the critical realist axiom that objects exist as natural kinds. I argue that sociality and intentional activity must be categories occupying a single natural stratum and that human organismic existence is intrinsic to the casual and taxonomic specificity of this stratum. I posit that the highest natural stratum is occupied by the human organism endowed with sociality and consciousness. Drawing on Marx, Lukacs and Kozek, the paper concludes that social labour defines the human organism as a reality, as a natural kind.