language as a cultural emergent property
The empirical, the actual and the real
So far, then, we have claimed: that language users engage in language behaviors; both language users and applied linguists experience, as sensory impressions, language behavior, and this is the level of the empirical, that which speakers say and write; this behavior can be witnessed, and, for the (social) scientist, it becomes data when recorded and subjected to analysis. However, as we have seen, those facts about language which can be empirically observed do not exhaust all that language comprises. We try to identify some different senses in which we think it is helpful to conceptualize what is 'real'. The discussion necessarily takes a rather philosophical turn at this point, but we believe that the level of abstraction involved is both necessary and productive. Therefore, although at first sight 'empirical', 'actual' and 'real' may seem to be synonyms, whose respective meanings are not worth teasing apart.
The distinction between these three 'domains' of reality is drawn by Bhaskar (1978: 56). (Note that the notion of 'domains' employed here is not the same as that used by Layder about the social world) The initial context for Bhaskar's argument is the natural world, and, as we have said, there are different issues to consider in the social world of human beings. However, his core claim is that:
... the causal structures and generative mechanisms of nature must exist and act independently of the conditions that allow men [sic] access to them, so that they must be assumed to be structured and intransitive, Le. relatively independent of the patterns of events and the actions of men alike. Similarly, I have argued that events must occur independently of the experiences in which they are apprehended. Structures and mechanisms then are real and distinct from the patterns of events that they generate; just as events are real and distinct from the experiences in which they are apprehended. Mechanisms, events and experiences thus constitute three overlapping domains of reality, viz. the domains of the real, the actual and the empirical.
