How Metaphors Help Researchers Master the Demanding Philosophy of Critical Realism

Critical realism has quietly become one of the most influential metatheoretical frameworks in the social sciences, offering researchers a way to argue that a reality exists independently of our descriptions of it while still acknowledging that our knowledge of that reality is historically, socially and linguistically produced. Yet for all its appeal, the framework is notoriously difficult to learn. Its vocabulary of stratified ontology, generative mechanisms, emergence and transcendental argument can feel impenetrable to graduate students, clinicians and interdisciplinary researchers who arrive at it without formal training in philosophy. A new study published in Higher Education examines this problem directly, asking how dense philosophical theory is actually learned in applied higher education settings where philosophical infrastructure is unevenly distributed across disciplines, institutions and career stages.

The study, led by Sandy Rao of Wilfrid Laurier University together with Aman Ahluwalia-Cameron, Nicola Hodgson, Andreas Vavvos and Susan McGuire, draws on an empirical and reflective analysis of the first cohort of the Applied Critical Realist Fellowship, an international higher education initiative designed to support researchers who want to use critical realism in their work. Rather than treating the fellowship as a conventional curriculum, the authors treat it as a lived learning environment in which the perennial pedagogical challenge of making foundational theory accessible and meaningful can be observed in real time. Their guiding question is deceptively simple: what actually happens when people who are not philosophers try to learn a demanding philosophy together?

To answer it, the researchers turned to a concept borrowed from science and technology studies: metaphor-work, developed by Cowan and Rault in 2022. Metaphor-work describes the deliberate, collaborative use of metaphors, images and analogies as resources for reasoning, not merely as decorative simplifications. Within the fellowship, a subgroup of participants formed specifically to engage with critical realist concepts through this kind of figurative labour. Instead of parsing Bhaskar’s original texts line by line in isolation, members generated and tested metaphors for ontological depth, stratification, causation and emergence, negotiating which images captured the theory faithfully and which distorted it. The metaphor became a shared object of thought, something the group could point at, refine and argue with.

The analytical payoff of the study lies in what this process revealed about the nature of learning itself. The authors conclude that learning critical realism is not a purely cognitive achievement, a matter of grasping propositions and reproducing definitions. It is simultaneously cognitive, affective, relational and structurally mediated. Cognitively, metaphors allowed participants to hold abstract claims about an intransient reality and its emergent social strata in working memory long enough to interrogate them. Affectively, the work surfaced anxiety, excitement and the vulnerability inherent in admitting confusion about foundational ideas. Relationally, the group’s dialogue and mutual care provided the safety needed for that vulnerability. Structurally, differences in disciplinary background, institutional resources and access to philosophical mentoring shaped who found the theory approachable and who struggled.

This multidimensional account challenges a persistent assumption in research training: that theory is best transmitted through authoritative exposition followed by individual application. The fellowship’s experience suggests the opposite. When formal instruction is unavailable or uneven, learners can construct their own scaffolding collectively, and metaphor is one of the most powerful materials for that construction. Metaphors operate as what the authors, following earlier literature on threshold concepts, might recognise as portals into troublesome knowledge. Concepts such as emergence or the difference between the transitive and intransitive dimensions of science are precisely the kinds of ideas that Meyer and Land described as threshold concepts: ideas that transform how learners perceive a field, often causing disorientation before yielding genuine understanding.

The technical heart of the study is its treatment of metaphor as epistemically productive rather than epistemically suspect. Within critical realism there has long been a debate about the role of figurative language, reaching back to Paul Lewis’s 1996 analysis of metaphor and critical realism in the Review of Social Economy. Metaphors can mislead, reifying one stratum of reality into another or smuggling in assumptions the theory rejects. The fellowship subgroup addressed this risk by treating metaphors as provisional and revisable. A metaphor for generative mechanisms, for example, would be proposed, stress-tested against the text, challenged for the ontological commitments it implied, and then refined or discarded. This iterative negotiation meant the group was doing philosophy, not bypassing it. The metaphor-work functioned as philosophical reasoning conducted through images rather than despite them.

The findings have immediate practical implications for graduate education and faculty development. Doctoral students attempting critical realist dissertations frequently report isolation, a problem documented in earlier work by Hastings, Davenport and Sheppard on the loneliness of the long-distance critical realist student and their later account of thinking like a critical realist. The new study suggests that structured collective metaphor-work could be institutionalised within writing groups, research training programmes and interdisciplinary research centres as a deliberate pedagogical practice. Conveners need not be critical realist experts; they need to facilitate the disciplined generation, comparison and critique of analogies, creating conditions of dialogue, reflexivity and care in which difficult concepts become discussable.

The study also speaks to a structural inequity in global higher education. Access to philosophers of science, to Departments capable of teaching metatheory, and to the time required for deep theoretical reading is unevenly distributed across institutions and regions, particularly between the global North and South. Initiatives such as the Applied Critical Realist Fellowship, and the educational development scholarship of researchers like Chris Bouhey and Sioux McKenna, highlight that the capacity to teach theory is itself a resource requiring cultivation. By theorising metaphor-work as a collective pedagogical practice that does not depend on expensive philosophical infrastructure, the authors offer a scalable model for theory-informed research training in contexts where such infrastructure is thin. The practice is low-cost, transferable across disciplines, and compatible with existing forms of collaborative learning.

Crucially, the authors frame the learning they observed as an emotionally and relationally supported process rather than a cold transfer of content. Participants’ affective responses were not noise interfering with cognition; they were constitutive of it. The care members showed one another, the patience with repeated confusion, and the willingness to revisit failed metaphors created what the analysis describes as conditions for reflexivity, the hallmark disposition of critical realist inquiry itself. In this sense the pedagogy mirrored the philosophy: just as critical realism insists that knowledge production is a socially situated, stratified and fallible process, the fellowship’s learning was socially situated, layered across cognitive and emotional registers, and openly revisable. The medium became a lesson in the message.

The study’s contribution is therefore twofold. Empirically, it documents how a specific international cohort grappled with one of the most philosophically demanding frameworks in contemporary research, providing rare granular insight into the mechanics of metatheoretical learning. Theoretically, it elevates metaphor-work from a scattered set of classroom tricks into a named, analysable collective pedagogical practice with implications for interdisciplinary learning, graduate supervision and professional development across the applied sciences. For the growing community of researchers in social work, health research, management, psychology and environmental studies who cite critical realism as their framework but struggle to explain it to colleagues and students, the message is encouraging: the way into difficult theory may not be through solitary philosophical endurance, but through the shared, careful, sometimes playful labour of finding the right words and images together, and then, crucially, finding out together where those words and images break down.

Subject of Research: Collective metaphor-based pedagogy for learning critical realism in higher education

Article Title: Learning critical realism in higher education: metaphor-work as collective pedagogical practice

Article References: Rao, S., Ahluwalia-Cameron, A., Hodgson, N., Vavvos, A., & McGuire, S. (2026). Learning critical realism in higher education: metaphor-work as collective pedagogical practice. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01777-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01777-0

Keywords: critical realism, metaphor-work, pedagogy, higher education, collective inquiry, threshold concepts, interdisciplinary learning, graduate education, faculty development, applied philosophy, Learning, critical