The purpose with this special issue has been to increase the awareness on the concept of ‘judgemental rationality’, demonstrate how it can be applied in research and argumentation, probe questions...

In this wide-ranging interview, Dave Elder-Vass discusses his main contributions to critical realist theory over two decades. In the first half, he explains his early work on emergence, agency, str...

This article advocates for the validity of Realist Evaluation (RE) as a manifestation of Critical Realism in evaluation research despite criticisms suggesting that the former disregards principles from Bhaskarian ontology. Specifically, I argue that critics overstate RE's philosophical actualism in their argument that its inclination towards technocratic knowledge impedes its scrutiny of stratified social systems. Notwithstanding its limitations in fully elucidating causal structural mechanisms in social inquiry, I argue that RE's research rationale can contribute to the stages of explanatory research (...) based on CR by bridging the comprehension of mechanisms linked to micro-interventions with exploring potential structural forces operating across levels of reality. To illustrate this point, I present a case of a policy evaluation study I led that demonstrates how a RE-oriented research design facilitated a transition from investigating specific programme mechanisms within the interventions' context to proposing transcendental questions about the governance of the education system in Colombia. (shrink)

Those who study unique events and processes cannot manipulate the world to ‘test’ theories, to ensure conclusions are rational, as falsificationism prescribes. This has left historical sociologists and kindred researchers to use hermeneutics, forms of counterfactual reasoning, and covering laws, but these techniques do not ensure explanations are accountable to the object of inquiry. I repurpose the falsificationist principle of negativity to serve rational theoretical redescriptions of this class of objects. We must work in a theoretical medium, as the main (...) criticism of falsificationism maintains. Theoretical prejudices can nevertheless be held in check, making space for new conclusions, via the double break characteristic of scientific reflexivity. A directional dynamic toward rational explanations can then result by starting with negative cases, which inherently bring case-theory misfits into focus, and applying immanent critique to cycle from worse to better such fits. This allows us to manipulate our theories to ‘test’ the world. (shrink)

This paper argues that in the search for explanatory power, critical realist research has neglected, trivialized, or dismissed prescriptive power, the capacity for an explanation to offer insights for informing practical ameliorative action. In addition to explanatory power and multitheoretic-linguality, the effective exercise of judgmental rationality also requires a consideration of prescriptive power, else it fails to realize its emancipatory commitment. Building on previous discussions of the criteria for judgmental rationality, the paper considers a prescriptive fallacy in critical realist research (...) that conflates explanatory and prescriptive power, and that instead researchers have a prescriptive commitment which can be realized in part through reflective questioning. The paper hopes to stimulate reflection and debate on the role of prescriptive power throughout the research process, and thereby support increased impact in research. (shrink)