Critical Realism and Causality: Tracing the Aristotelian Legacy

Rom Harré's generative account of causality has been drawn on heavily by advocates of critical realism. Yet Harré argues that critical realists often exaggerate the extent to which powerful causal explanations of social phenomena can be developed. Certain proponents of critical realism have responded to Harré's criticisms by suggesting that it is useful to consider the relevant issues in relation to the familiar Aristotelian classification of four causes. In this paper I contribute to this debate and pursue a similar strategy. The paper adds to existing contributions in two ways. Firstly, I outline how Harré sees his generative account of causality as linking up with Aristotelian themes. It emerges that Harré at times conceives of his generative theory as part of an alternative to the Aristotelian system while at other times he draws connections between it and a reformulated account of formal causality. Secondly, I argue that when we consider the positions of Harré and proponents of critical realism on the scope of causal explanation in the social realm in relation to the interpretation of final causes offered by another philosopher profoundly influenced by the Aristotelian tradition, namely Charles Peirce, we can see both as limited in certain respects.     

Culture and the Explanation of Choice behavior

This paper shows how alternative, culturally-determined motivational forces can be substituted for self-interest or rationality in the theory of choice. Several possibilities are considered, including the replacement of preference optimization by such propellants as the selection of the `second best' or the `central' option. It is argued that although all choice behavior, even that consistent with the alternatives considered, can ultimately be understood as satisfying the criterion of rationality, richer and more meaningful explanation is obtained by focusing on culturally significant alternative motivations when the latter turn out, in particular environments, to be more important than self-interest.     

Choice Bracketing

When making many choices, a person can broadly bracket them by assessing the consequences of all of them taken together, or narrowly bracket them by making each choice in isolation. We integrate research conducted in a wide range of decision contexts which shows that choice bracketing is an important determinant of behavior. Because broad bracketing allows people to take into account all the consequences of their actions, it generally leads to choices that yield higher utility. The evidence that we review, however, shows that people often fail to bracket broadly when it would be feasible for them to do so. In addition to documenting the diverse effects of bracketing, we also discuss factors that determine whether people bracket narrowly or broadly. We conclude with a discussion of normative aspects of bracketing and argue that there are some situations in which narrower bracketing results in superior decision making.     

For Emergence: Refining Archer's Account of Social Structure

The question of social structure and its relationship to human agency remains one of the central problems of social theory. One of the most promising attempts to provide a solution has been Margaret Archer's morphogenetic approach, which invokes emergence to justify treating social structure as causally effective. Archer's argument, however, has been criticised by a number of authors who suggest that the examples she cites can be explained in reductionist terms and thus that they fail to sustain her claim for the independent causal effectiveness of social structure. This paper offers an alternative argument to support the emergentist claim for the causal effectiveness of social structure, and shows how this argument refutes a representative critique of social emergence.     

What Hindu Sati can teach us about the sociocultural and social psychological dynamics of suicide

By leveraging the case of Hindu sati, this paper elucidates the ways in which structure and culture condition suicidal behavior by way of social psychological and emotional dynamics. Conventionally, sati falls under Durkheim's discussion of altruistic suicides, or the self‐sacrifice of underindividuated or excessively integrated peoples like widows in traditional societies. In light of the fact that Durkheim's interpretation was based on uneven data, nineteenth century Eurocentric beliefs, and a theoretical framework that can no longer resist modification and elaboration, by reconsidering sati it is possible to sketch a new model that strengthens Durkheim's theory by making it more robust and generalizable. The following model is built on five principles. First, integration and regulation are not distinct causal forces, but overlapping contextual conditions. Second, to better explain the variation in suicidality across time and space, we must also pay attention to culture as it provides the underlying meanings of suicide that can increase the odds a person or class of persons become suicidal or are protected against suicidality. Third, structure still matters, but in many cases, the role power and power‐differentials play must be considered. Fourth, understanding why and how people choose suicide depends on incorporating identity and status processes. Fifth, because the expression of social emotions like shame are patterned by structural and cultural conditions, to understand how suicidality is socioculturally patterned we must further explore the link between identity/status, social emotions, and structure and culture.     

Stages do matter; and there are even more of them to consider

Shultziner and Goldberg are is correct to say we need to treat the various stages of social movement origins, protests, and outcomes separately, with detailed analysis of each stage. However, a triparte stage theory may be insufficient, as each stage can have diverse potential trajectories driven by distinct causal mechanisms. Social movement analysis should help us recognize the many points at which complex movement trajectories can be advanced or reversed, and how actions at each stage create reverberations in the wider society.     

Is the Case for Social Science Laws Strengthening?

The effectiveness of Kincaid's (1996) and McIntyre's (1996) cases for the possibility and actual existence of laws in social science is evaluated. The ways in which Kincaid and McIntyre argue against the confounding effects of four long-recognised barriers to the existence of social science laws are assessed. A brief review is presented first of definitions of causal (rather than regularity) laws. The four obstacles undermining causal laws are the non natural or social kind nature of the entities with which social science deals, the nature of mechanisms in social explanation, domain restrictions applying to causal explanation in social science, and the openness of the human systems encompassing socio-economic behaviour. Against the arguments of Kincaid and McIntyre, these four issues constitute fundamental a priori problems that continue to undermine the development of laws in social science, beyond those that can be derived by common sense, and that are potentially effective for policy-making.     

"礼器"的文化阐释

郑玄、孔颖达等训诂大师皆将《礼记·礼器》篇名及篇首“礼器”之语诠释为“礼能使人成器”。这种解释与孔子“君子不器”的哲学命题相悖 ;孔子和儒家认为人乃“天地之心” ,礼是人治国、修身之器 ,故“礼器”不得解释为“礼能使人成器” ;儒家坚信一个真正的君子不能仅有一器之用 ,而应该成为博学通才。“礼器”当为古汉语判断句式 ,意思是“礼是器具” ,可以理解为“礼是人修身之器”。     

Comparative Narratives: Some Rules for the Study of Action

The paper explores the concept of a Narrative which is defined as a connected structure on a set of constrained actions and forbearances. Explanation via Narratives is compared with explanation through variable centred methodology and an interpretation of correlations in terms of Narratives is also outlined.     

Culture and context: exploring attributions and caregiving approaches of parents of children with an intellectual disability in urban India

We utilized a sociocultural lens and a qualitative approach to examine causal attributions and caregiving approaches of parents of children with an intellectual disability in a mid‐sized Indian city. Sixteen mothers and three fathers participated in a semi‐structured interview. Findings elucidate participants' active processing of the cause of their child's intellectual disability. They seemed to simultaneously draw upon religious, biological and situational factors to construct an explanation. As far as caregiving approaches, most parents reported moving away gradually from mainstream medicine to alternative medicine and physiotherapy and from regular education settings to special schools. The themes highlight the role of sociocultural factors and also cross‐cultural similarities in parental causal attributions and caregiving approach. The findings are discussed in the context of implications for social work practice and policy in India.     

A Political Critique of Kantian Ethics in Social Work

Correspondence to Stephen A. Webb, Department of Social Work, University of Dundee, DD1 4HN. Summary This paper addresses the Kantian theory of the subject whichis found in contemporary social work discourse on ethics andvalues. It is argued here that the Kantian idea of persons as(i) rational, (ii) autonomous, and (iii) ends-in-themselvesis wholly inadequate to the social work doctrine of ‘respectfor persons’. To show this, we counterpose a Foucauldianview of history, moral codes and theory of the person, and themeaning this can have in the social worker-client relation.This alternative reading claims that social work is essentiallya political practice which is constructed by various discursiveand institutional strategies of power. Therefore, it is suggestedthat social work needs a political reading of its own discourse.To this end we outline a Foucauldian micro-political analysisof the social work ‘subject’ or person as a pointwithin a field of discursive-knowledge based strategies.     

Comment on Pommerehne et al., “concordia discors: Or: What do economists think?”

Conclusion Why do Pommerehne and associates apparently overlook the point that both their hypothesis and data contain elements which are not compatible? Their findings in fact might be interpreted as contradictory to a human capital explanation for the behavior of their sample of economists. Kuhn (1970) would propose that mainstream economics has provided a set of assumptions to place over these findings that allows a neo-classical interpretation. However, the human capital theory does not address the contradictions in the data they gathered. As Berger and Luchman (1966, pp. 62–63) would conclude, institutionalization may take place in any area of relevant conduct to provide a corresponding canopy of legitimations, stretching over a protective cover of both cognitive and normative interpretation. Once again, the institutionalization of mainstream science has been successful in suppressing alternative assumptions that could explain the data more adequately and with greater consistency.We conclude that the paper by Pommerehne and associates contains shortcomings of theorizing and method. Likewise we conclude that a theoretical formulation which takes into account the normative and therefore the cultural factors of science will provide an explanation of the opinion and behavior of economists more in keeping with their empirical findings than one based on self-interest alone.     

Stochastic Choice and Consistency in Decision Making Under Risk: An Experimental Study

This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to uncover the stochastic structure of individual preferences over lotteries. Unlike previous experiments, which have presented subjects with pair-wise choices between lotteries, our design allowed subjects to choose between two lotteries or (virtually) any convex combination of the two lotteries. We interpret the mixtures of lotteries chosen by subjects as a measure of the stochastic structure of choice. We test between two alternative interpretations of stochastic choice: the random utility interpretation and the deterministic preferences interpretation. The main findings of the experiment are that the typical subject prefers mixtures of lotteries rather than the extremes of a linear lottery choice set. The distribution of choices does not change between a first and second asking of the same question. We argue that this provides support for the deterministic preferences interpretation over the random utility interpretation of stochastic choice. As a subsidiary result, we find a small proportion of subjects make choices that violate transitivity, but the level of intransitive choice falls significantly over time.     

For an integrative theory of social behaviour: Theorising with and beyond rational choice theory

Most sociologists are not content with merely relating macrosocial phenomena to preceding macrosocial causes in their causal explanations of social phenomena. Instead they are seeking to provide (non‐reductive) microfoundations with which they can corroborate and make understandable the connection between macrosocial phenomena. In order to do so a theory (or theories) of human action is required. One such theory, rational choice theory (RCT), has long been viewed with strong suspicion in sociology. I show such suspicion to be partially justified. RCT cannot be a general theory of social behaviour. Nonetheless, there are important insights in various versions of RCT that should not be discarded. In order to improve upon RCT and move toward a more unified or integrative theory of action social‐psychological research has to be taken note of. I demonstrate how dual‐process theories and the research on heuristics can help sociologists move beyond RCT without contradicting some of its more basic insights.     

Depth Accessibility Difficulties: An Alternative Conceptualisation of Autism Spectrum Conditions

John Lawson, Depth Accessibility Difficulties: An Alternative Conceptualisation of Autism Spectrum Conditions, pp. 189–202.
Autism and Asperger syndrome are psychiatric conditions diagnosed primarily on the basis of deficits and problems in social behaviour; interaction and communication. At present the explanation of these behavioural features is dominated by three cognitive models. However, it is a characteristic of each of these models that they only explain a sub-set of the overall features.
The aim of this paper is to suggest an alternative conceptual theory of autism and Asperger syndrome that unites the current three models. Thus, the aim is to situate the existing models as special cases of the one being proposed here. This alternative conceptualisation draws heavily on distinctions and ideas present in the philosophy of science, most especially in the area of critical realism. Central to the theory is the idea that the core "problem" in autism and Asperger syndrome concerns ontological depth. More specifically, that people with these conditions find it difficult to cope with phenomena characterised by depth (underlying needs, motives beliefs etc.), open systems (rapidly changing, multiple causes) and high internal relationality (converging or changing roles and demands).     

Rules, Social Ontology and Collective Identity

Mainstream game theory explains cooperation as the outcome of the interaction of agents who permanently pursue their individual goals. Amartya Sen argues instead that cooperation can only be understood by positing a type of rule-following behaviour that can be (and often is) out of phase with the pursuit of individual goals, due to the existence of a collective identity. However, Sen does not clarify the ontological preconditions for the type of social behaviour he describes. I will argue that Sen's account of collective identity can be best interpreted in the light of John Searle's notion of collective intentionality, while Sen's explanation of rule-following behavior and agency is best understood using the critical realist transformational model of social activity.     

Housing and the Social Exclusion Agenda in England

In the period immediately following its election in 1997 the current Labour government in the UK declared a commitment to ‘combating social exclusion’ to be at the core of the domestic policy agenda. The interpretation of the term ‘social exclusion’ has been the source of extensive debate. This paper focuses on one aspect of the current debate, exploring the relationship between housing and social exclusion, both in theory and in contemporary central government policy in England. I argue that theoretical imprecision is a very real issue, not least because it allows policy makers to refer to rather vague causal mechanisms or social processes to justify actions and interventions. I identify some of the areas that require further exploration and theoretical development if we are to have a rigorous understanding of the concept of social exclusion and its link to housing. Most fundamentally, I suggest that the question of whether the concept of ‘social exclusion’ contributes anything valuable to our ability to understand social disadvantage needs to be addressed directly.     

The AART of Ethnography: A Critical Realist Explanatory Research Model

Critical realism is a philosophy of science, which has made significant contributions to epistemic debates within sociology. And yet, its contributions to ethnographic explanation have yet to be fully elaborated. Drawing on ethnographic data on the health‐seeking behavior of HIV‐infected South Africans, the paper compares and contrasts critical realism with grounded theory, extended case method and the pragmatist method of abduction. In so doing, it argues that critical realism makes a significant contribution to causal explanation in ethnographic research in three ways: 1) by linking structure to agency; 2) by accounting for the contingent, conjunctural nature of causality; and 3) by using surprising empirical findings to generate new theory. The paper develops the AART (abduction, abstraction, retroduction, testing) research schema and illustrates its strengths by employing a Bourdieusian field analysis as a model for morphogenetic explanation.     

Action as a Text: Gadamer's Hermeneutics and the Social Scientific Analysis of Action

This paper argues that Gadamer's hermeneutics offers a methodological perspective for social and political theory that overcomes the impasse created by the dichotomy between the positivist and humanist approaches to social action. Both the positivists'attempt to replace the actors'subjective concepts with the objective concepts of the social scientist and the humanists'attempt to describe meaningful action strictly in the social actors'terms have been called into question in contemporary discussions. Gadamer's approach, which is based on the hermeneutical method of textual interpretation, offers an alternative to both the positivist and humanist perspectives. Gadamer argues that understanding a text involves the fusing of the conceptual schemes of author and interpreter. Relying on Ricoeur's analysis of the parallels between actions and texts, it is argued that this understanding of the process of textual interpretation can be profitably applied to the analysis of social action. This application, furthermore, provides a means of analyzing social action that transcends the dichotomy between the positivist and humanist approaches. Gadamer's approach legitimizes the imposition of the observer's conceptual scheme without denying the constitutive role of the social actors'concepts.     

Explaining with Intentional Omissions

Determining the human activity that social processes consist in is a central task for the philosophy of the social sciences. This paper asks: which conception of agency arising from contemporary action theory is the most suitable for social science explanation? It is argued that a movement-centered, Davidsonian picture of agency is not suitable for explaining certain social processes such as strikes and boycotts because, instead of intentional bodily movements, they are explained by the intentional omissions of agents. I propose that instead of intentional bodily movements, social processes are better explained by phenomena in which an agent is taking an active relation both to her mental or bodily processes as well as to what is happening around her. Thus, to fully explain social processes, a comprehensive theory of agency that can account for intentional actions and intentional omissions and a conception of agency that includes both materialist and volitionalist aspects is needed.