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methodology over another located within a general critical realist framework’(Jessop
2004:40,41). In general, critical realism has an ontological realist foundation;
ontological levels are threefold –real, actual, empirical. This realist foundation in
ontology touches upon the relational haecceity of these three ontological levels; that
is, upon internally necessary and external contingent relations within and between
these levels. ‘In particular, the naturally necessary properties of the real may(or may
not) be actualised in specific initial conditions and/or through specific (non-
)interventions’. To that effect, ‘properties’ are tendencial; and critical realists
consider these and real phenomena as necessarily contingent and contingently
necessary. On the one hand, real phenomena are necessarily contingent insofar as
‘tendencies are themselves tendencial because their operation depends on the overall
reproduction of the social relations and processes that generate them’. On the other
hand, those are contingently necessary as well because under certain historical
circumstances ‘combination of tendencies and counter-tendencies... makes one
particular outcome(or a set of outcomes) rather than another necessary’(ibid.:40).
Contra Hume, causality, for critical realists, is ‘the necessary ways-of-acting of an
object which exist in virtue of its nature’. In Hume, change is infinitely fortuitous
because real does not have any intrinsic causal mechanism. Still the real in Hume
itself is almost a mechanism of contingency; it systematically extirpates any causal
mechanism as a particular ‘configuration’ of contingencies. That is to say, outside
any conceptual system, causal mechanisms are not causal at all because that would be
antithetical to the real. To that effect, Hume’s is a pseudo-retroduction that
nonetheless argues retroduction itself is redundant/delusory. In more blunt words,
change is always fortuitous may be as fallible as it never is; but because Hume is
partial to the former proviso, he must consider real as an impeccable system of change
so that all would be perforce contingent, say, a continuum of incessant déplacement.
Secondly, Hume cannot thus contrast ‘the concepts of a change in the nature of things
[with the concepts of] successive replacements for the thing’, he is obnoxiously
noncommittal about ‘changes in things’. Critical realists, on the other hand, touch
upon ‘causal powers’ in things; but ‘whether either of these causal powers are ever
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