This article scrutinizes some theoretical procedures prevalent in the philosophy of social science. These procedures are exemplified in Elder-Vass’s critical realism, which promises to place the social sciences on a sound ontological footing. The article focuses on the way that Elder-Vass’s general emergentist ontology is constituted and on the methods through which it is applied to society. It is contended that the ontology is not and could not be grounded in science and that its philosophical use distorts what it is (...) applied to. The incoherent methods that social ontological projects constitutionally rely on entail that they cannot ground social scientific explanation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCritical realism's insight into depth ontology creates the possibility for re-imagining sociology as a science of the social world. However, critical realism has yet to gain a strong foothold in sociological analysis. Challenging the available criticism of critical realism, I argue that its main flaw is its inability to draw an appropriate epistemological strategy from its insights into depth ontology. I propose that this limitation can be overcome when we anchor the depth ontology of critical realism to the two-step epistemological (...) strategies of Bourdieu's field theory: first, objectifying common sense to develop a scientific model of social structure; and second, objectifying the scientific point of view to re-introduce common sense in the scientific model of social structure. I argue that by anchoring the ontological insights of critical realism to the epistemological strategies of field theory, we can create the long-sought core around which sociology can progress as a science of the social world. (shrink)

The recent literature on genocide shows signs of taking what might be called a “processual turn,” with genocide increasingly understood as a contingent process rather than a singular event. But while this second generation's turn may be clear to those within the literature, the theory guiding the change is insufficiently specified. The theory regarding process and contingency is implicit, and, as such, genocide theory does not realize its full generative potential. The primary goal of this article is to provide a (...) more robust theoretical framework for making sense of the continually evolving dimensions of genocide. It builds on the literature's existing foundations, most notably Mann's (2005) notion of “contingent escalations.” In the spirit of the recent revival of American Pragmatism in sociology, it draws on the work of Dewey, Mills, Follett, and Addams (among others) as part of a theoretical reconstruction using pragmatist concepts such as rupture, perplexity, vocabularies of motive, and experimentation to consider examples from the Rwandan genocide and show how we might explore the potential for non-teleological intentionality on the part of genocidal actors. The result is an enhanced theoretical framework that offers “fresh eyes” for considering one of the worst (and most under-theorized) social problems. (shrink)

University of Turku, Finland In this article, relationalist approaches to social sciences are analyzed in terms of a conceptual distinction between "philosophizing sociology" and "sociologizing philosophy." These mark two different attitudes toward philosophical metaphysics and ontological commitments. The authors’ own pragmatist methodological relationalism of Deweyan origin is compared with ontologically committed realist approaches, as well as with Bourdieuan methodological relationalism. It is argued that pragmatist philosophy of social sciences is an appropriate tool for assisting social scientists in their methodological work, (...) especially as regards problem-driven case studies. Key Words: metaphysics • pragmatism • realism • relationalism. (shrink)

There are realist philosophers and social scientists who believe in the indispensability of social ontology. However, we argue that certain pragmatist outlines for inquiry open more fruitful roads to empirical research than such ontologizing perspectives. The pragmatist conceptual tools in a Darwinian vein—concepts like action, habit, coping and community—are in a particularly stark contrast with, for instance, the Searlean and Chomskian metaphysics of human being. In particular, we bring Searle's realist philosophy of society and mind under critical survey in this (...) paper and contrast it with a pragmatist, sociologizing approach. Drawing from Dewey, James, and recent antirepresentationalism, we propose for research work a methodological relationalism of its own kind, altogether detached from the ontologies of society and mind. (shrink)

In this paper, two alternative naturalistic standpoints on the relations between language, human consciousness and social life are contrasted. The first, dubbed “intrinsic naturalism,” is advocated among others by the realist philosopher John Searle; it starts with intrinsic intentionality and consciousness emerging from the brain, explains language as an outgrowth of consciousness and ends with institutional reality being created by language-use. That standpoint leans on what may be described as the standard interpretation of Darwinian evolution. The other type of naturalism, (...) in contrast, making use of the concept of evolutionary niches, suggests that the search for the explanatory mechanisms of language and consciousness should begin with the human community, because that is the cultural niche for everything distinctively human to evolve, including language and human consciousness. (shrink)

This article explores a key difference that Elder-Vass has identified between critical realism and pragmatism: their divergent views on the viability of the concept of social structure. Noting that...

Social robotics is a rapidly developing industry-oriented area of research, intent on making robots in social roles commonplace in the near future. This has led to rising interest in the dynamics as well as ethics of human-robot relationships, described here as a nascent relational turn. A contrast is drawn with the 1990s’ paradigm shift associated with relational-self themes in social psychology. Constructions of the human-robot relationship reproduce the “I-You-Me” dominant model of theorising about the self with biases that (as in (...) social constructionism) consistently accentuate externalist or “interactionist” standpoints as opposed to internalist or “individualistic”. Perspectives classifiable as “ecological relationalism” may compensate for limitations of interactionist-individualistic dimension. Implications for theorising subjectivity are considered. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between pragmatism and critical realism, first as alternative philosophies for the social sciences in general, and second, as an illustration, in the social stu...

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...

Intellectual traditions can be seen as complex patchworks of ideas, constructed differently by each observer as they learn about the tradition, and harmonized to an extent through the boundary work...

Critical realists offer a set of philosophical underpinnings for social research. Critical realists also engage constructively with social theory, but they are more than just theorists. In this chapter I list and describe various innovative methodological contributions made in recent years by realists. I point out ways in which research methods (i.e. techniques) fit with particular methodological assertions. There is a historical legacy of empiricism which critical realists often use as a foil to make their own position more clear. However, (...) among realists, a wide variety of methods are used, and the range of realist methodological assumptions is wider than one might expect because of their efforts to work with social theory.The introduction to the chapter covers ontology as it relates to research methods. The second section of the review introduces retroduction, a major methodological starting-point common to most realists. The third section reviews concretely the realist debate over statistics and some realist contributions to qualitative methodology, qualitative methods, and action research as used by realists. The fourth section takes up the challenge of realist claims about knowledge (debates usually known as epistemology). An important aim in this chapter is to argue that 'factual' statements usually embody layers of meaning, and thus are contestable; that enquiry using quantitative methods can coherently be done from a realist perspective; and that among realists qualitative enquiry is a broad and useful set of methods which have made genuine innovations in methodological knowledge. Meta-critique and pluralism are widely-used realist contributions to the methods tool-basket in social science, and the realist approach to social statistics is a much better guide to how statistics is, in practice, done than any currently available empiricist quantitative textbook (Ron, 2002). However 'quantitative' research always rests upon conceptual, theoretical and qualitatively derived frameworks and therefore is derived from qualitative work, whereas the converse is not true; qualitative research does not require any quantitative research. In the current scene, mixed methods also play a key role as a growing area of research methods. In this way, within sections one and two, the reader is given an overview of Volume 1 of this collection. Sections two and three of this chapter review Volumes 2 and 3 (realist methods, and empirical examples, respectively). Section four reviews the epistemological theme that is at the core of Volume 4. This introduction thus roughly parallels the contents of the rest of the volumes. (shrink)