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‘realised’ or ‘activated’ depends upon contingently related conditions’. The latter ‘are
independent of the causal powers, the succession of events cannot known just on the
basis of knowledge of the causal powers’. In critical realism, ‘scientific laws’ are
‘statements about mechanisms’, and ‘the essential characteristic of law-likeness is not
universality but necessity’(Sayer 1998:124-5). Because ‘contingently related
conditions’ are exogenous to ‘causal powers’, ‘real relations are structured like
conceptual relations’ is a trivial proviso for critical realism; in fact, ‘abstract-concrete
distinction ... does not help us distinguish between what can be known from
theoretical analysis and what must be learned from (theoretically-informed) empirical
study’. Still ‘it is possible that relations between concepts can be made to map real
ones’(ibid.:125,123). Theory thereby is not all together redundant. ‘Conceptual
necessity’ must touch upon ‘an empirically-discovered natural necessity’(i.e. ‘the
necessary ways-of-acting of an object’); ‘definitions of objects’ are ‘an a posteriori
truth’ about ‘necessary consequences of its real nature’. However, although ‘it is
always an empirical question whether any real object is like our definitions’, ‘not all
natural necessities that we discover are ‘taken up’ into the language in the form of
conceptual necessities, for some can be described by contingently related
statements’(ibid.:126).
In Jessop’s strategic-relational theory, social structures are open-ended and
momentary, and are never virtually internal to themselves. Thus, no one can
unchangably and definitively contrast social relations internal to structures with those
that are external to them. As such, structures are procedural variables in that these
‘cannot be clearly demarcated from those processes which they affect’(Bertramsen
1991:106). Social sciences must consider both the contingency intrinsic to causal
mechanisms themselves and the very contingent and tendencial foundation of those
historical circumstances in which effects are immediate. In these terms, there is
always an epistemological contingency as well as an ontological contingency.
Theoretical contingency touches upon the fact that analysis of internal relations of
social forms must be precise about the particular level of abstraction and sector of
analysis in which analyst’s explanandum is first explicit. This is plainly about the fact
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