Tuukka Kaidesoja provides an important analysis and critique of Roy Bhaskar's philosophical method in his theory of critical realism in Naturalizing Critical Realist Social Ontology. This work provides a careful and detailed account of the content of Bhaskar's central ideas, as well as the relation those ideas have to other positions within and adjacent to critical …
Reply to Elder-Vass, Hartwig, and Groff on critical realism
Critical realism is a hot topic now in sociological theory and philosophy of social science. It turns out that there are some pretty strong disagreements about the foundations of the theory. Recent posts here have highlighted my own (admittedly non-expert) reading of Bhaskar’s assumptions about ontology (link), my discussion of the limited and friendly critique …
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Replies by Elder-Vass and Hartwig to Cruickshank/Little
Two leading exponents of critical realism, Dave Elder-Vass (The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency) and Mervyn Hartwig (Dictionary of Critical Realism), have offered critical replies to my post presenting some of Justin Cruickshank's criticisms of CR and indirectly to my own post on "Bhaskar's Core Ideas." I have invited them to …
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Guest post by Ruth Groff on the ontology of critical realism
Ruth Groff is Assistant Professor of Political Science at St. Louis University. She specializes in the philosophical underpinnings of Western social and political thought. She is author of Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism (2012, with John Greco), Ontology Revisited: Metaphysics in Social and Political Philosophy (Ontological Explorations) (2012), and Revitalizing Causality: Realism about Causality in Philosophy and Social …
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Is ontology an apriori field of knowledge?
youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NmVVu7gF9c&w=420&h=315 The critical realists -- Roy Bhaskar in particular -- attach a great deal of importance to the question of ontology. A theory of ontology should describe the kinds of things, relations, and forces that exist in a realm. So the pre-Socratic philosophers were engaging in ontological theorizing when they asked the question, what does …
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Cruickshank’s central critique
Justin Cruickshank is a friendly critic to critical realism, not a hostile one. He criticizes the philosophical method but supports many of the substantive conclusions about realism. (Here is a prior post on the gist of Cruickshank's criticisms.) Cruickshank provides a useful analysis of critical realism and its anti-matter double, social constructivism, in “Positive and Negative,” …
Bhaskar’s core ideas
Critical realism has become an important topic within sociological theory, and several prior (and upcoming) posts have addressed the theory. As a point of reference for this ongoing discussion, consider a few key statements by Roy Bhaskar about transcendental [critical] realism in A Realist Theory of Science. Here is a simple and clear definition of Bhaskar's …
Making institutions
The new institutionalists have largely focused on the maintenance and evolution of major social and political institutions. So Kathleen Thelen's excellent book, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan, examines the stability and change within the institutions through which skill is transmitted, Paul Pierson looks at …
Relevant to what?
source: Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (cover) source: Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, p. 15 An earlier post raised the question of the value of academic research and concluded that we shouldn't expect academic research to be "relevant" (link). That is a strong conclusion and needs some further dissection. Plainly research needs to …
Who made economics?
The discipline of economics has a high level of intellectual status, even hegemony, in today’s social sciences — especially in universities in the United States. It also has a very specific set of defining models and theories that distinguish between “good” and “bad” economics. This situation suggests two topics for research: how did political economy …
Understanding Society 