Skeptical Realism: From Either/or to Both-And

In this paper a rapprochement is attempted between epistemological skepticism and ontological realism, two positions hitherto understood to be incompatible by most sociospatial theorists. It is done by recontextualizing key aspects of these two positions within an analysis of individual human finitude. Avoiding both individualism' and ‘decisionism’, and taking full account of poststructuralist insights concerning fragmented or multiple subjectivity, the analysis calls attention to the constraints imposed upon discourses concerning what is real and how we can know the real by the inherent limitations of the human individuals through which such discourses are unavoidably mediated. After arguing for the continuing relevance of ‘the epistemological subject’, I present an abstract heuristic model of this subject in order to clarify the concepts of ‘finitude of scope’ and finitude of faculties', which are defined with reference to the work of David Harvey, Marcus Doel, Noel Castree, and Donna Haraway. These two concepts are then employed in a critical reading of Roy Bhaskar's ‘critical realism’, where I argue that, in an important sense, critical realism would be more consistent and truer to its founding principles if it were understood as a skeptical realism. In the final section, I sketch some of the implications which might flow from such a rapprochement of skepticism and realism. The most important of these implications would be felt less in the substance of sociospatial research than in the ethics of debate and discourse. I close with a brief discussion of the recent work of J K Gibson-Graham, which implicitly incorporates some of the key components of skeptical realism, and (perhaps) offers a preview of things to come.