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Given the widespread acceptance of the view that positivism and postpositivism stand as binary opposites the claim that they share much in common will likely strike many IR scholars as perverse. Within the philosophy of science and social science, however such a claim would not appear at all controversial. Larry Laudan, for example, has explored the common structure of assumptions they share. Foucaul openly admitted hid empiricism and Peter Dews has even gone as far as to label him a positivist. One could quite easily point to many of these shared assumptions; the fascination with language, for example, which is hardly in doubt as far as postmodernism is concerned, but the fact that the more radical of the logical positivists attempted to reduce philosophy, and to an extent also science, to the systematic analysis of language, seen as logical statement, seems to have been lost on IR scholars.

The attack on the Cartesian subject, again so energetically pursued by postmodern writers, was carried out in an equally vigorous manner by positivists in their attempt to purge the residues of subjectivity from their epistemology. Even in the relations between facts and values one cal find evidence of a common structure, with many of those beyond the boundary of negativity echoing the positivist injunction that one can never move from facts to values; that value positions are simply divorced from factual considerations. One could, as Laudan and others have done, provide additional examples such as, these, but we think there is a more fundamental issue that unites there seemingly opposed positions, that of their anti-realism; whether explicit or implicit.

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For critical realism, reality is differentiated yet interconnected. So, although facts are nor merely values and vice versa, they are mutually implicating. Facts are always value-laden, because at the transitive dimension of science truth is a positive value and truth as correspondence to the world is a regulative metaphor guiding scientific and other practices. But this is the radical move. For if the facts are always in this sense value-laden, then values must in a sense be factually embedded. Nietzsche captures nicely what is at stake here arguing, “Let us articulate this new demand: we need critique of moral values. The value of these values themselves must be called into question – and for that there is needed a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances under which they grew, under which they evolved and changed”.

The complication of this point is clear. We can move from the facts to values. Indeed, we must in order to explain those values themselves. No doubt this will appall both positivists and many postpositivists. For positivists this move is inadmissible, and foe many postpositivists unnecessary (values simply being contingent preferences). Critical realism, on the other hand, situates a genuinely critical moment at the heart of analysis; a moment that depends at once upon values being factually explained and facts being subject to evaluation.