Structures, Agents and Criticism: Assessing Bhaskar's Fact-To-Value and Value-To-Fact Arguments

Most discussion about critical realism concerns the concepts of structure and agency. This neglects Bhaskar's arguments about facts and values. Bhaskar argues that we can move from facts to values with 'explanatory critiques' and from values to facts with 'descriptively adequate' accounts of 'value impregnated' events. The argument in this article is that both of Bhaskar's arguments are untenable and that the alternative is the value-to-value argument.