Unobservables

Unobservables are entities and processes that cannot be directly observed but are nonetheless real and causally significant. Institutional structures, cultural meanings, power relations, and collective identities all shape observable outcomes through features that cannot be captured by measuring only what is directly visible.

The problem of unobservables arises because empiricist standards of explanation systematically exclude them — yet excluding them would eliminate precisely the phenomena that social research needs to understand. Critical realism’s stratified ontology resolves this: unobservable mechanisms exist in the Real domain and are investigated through their effects (via Retroduction) rather than through direct observation. The chapter’s image of blindfolded observers and the elephant captures the difficulty — each accurate partial observation still misses the structure that connects them.

Discussed in chapter-03 §III.

Further reading: Critical realism (Wikipedia)