Continuities Between Peircean Realism and Critical Realism: On Causation,Ontology, and Truth

In recent years, critical realists have increasingly engaged with the thought of Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), the founder of the American pragmatist tradition. But the engagement has been mostly narrow in focus and at times misinformed. This paper examines points of continuity between Peircean thought and critical realism with respect to causation, ontology, and truth. Its purpose is to lay the groundwork for further and more fruitful engagement between the traditions by bringing attention to some things critical realists may not have known, and to correct some inaccurate things they thought they knew, about Peirce's philosophy.     

Realism, Regularity and Social Explanation

Stephen Kemp and John Holmwood, Realism, Regularity and Social Explanation, pp. 165–187.
This article explores the difficulties raised for social scientific investigation by the absence of experiment, critically reviewing realist responses to the problem such as those offered by Bhaskar, Collier and Sayer. It suggests that realist arguments for a shift from prediction to explanation, the use of abstraction, and reliance upon interpretive forms of investigation fail to demonstrate that these approaches compensate for the lack of experimental control. Instead, it is argued that the search for regularities, when suitably conceived, provides the best alternative to experiment for the social sciences.     

Signs, Social Ontology, and Critical Realism

Even though sign-systems are a crucial part of society, critical realism, as developed by Roy Bhaskar, does not yet have an adequate theory of signs and semiosis. The few suggestions that Bhaskar offers can be advanced through the semiotics of C.S. Peirce. In doing so, however, it becomes necessary to reconsider Bhaskar's ontological domains of the real, the actual, and the subjective, and expand the last domain into one of semiosis. This new understanding of ontological domains, incorporating Peireian semiotics, provides the basis for rethinking the ontology of society: the customary dyad structures/agents becomes the triad structures/agents/discourses, each of which possesses material, sociological, and meaningful aspects.     

Realism, Deconstruction and the Feminist Standpoint

Feminist Standpoint Theory claims that by virtue of their social positioning women have access to, or can achieve, particular and/or better knowledge of gendered social relations. The epistemology, various versions of which are reviewed in the paper, has been criticised for over homogenising women. In its simplest form this critique claims that women's diversity rules out communality and collective interests, and that FST unawarely takes white middle class Western women as representative. In its stronger, postructuralist form this critique undermines feminism by reducing the category 'women' to an effect of discourse whose referent is, and should be, constantly shifting. The paper argues for the reality of sex difference and puts forward a realist defence of a modified Feminist Standpoint Theory.     

Social Objects, Causality and Contingent Realism

This paper is a realist argument for the existence of "social objects". Social objects, I argue, are the outcome states of a contingent causal process and in turn posses causal properties. This argument has consequences for what we can mean by realism and consequences for the development of a realist methodology. Realism should abandon the notion of natural necessity in favour of a view that the "real" nature of the social world is contingent and necessity is only revealed in outcome states. This, I argue, has both theoretical and methodological implications and I develop my argument through two case studies, of homelessness and ethnicity.     

Critical Realism,Dialectics, and Qualitative Research Methods

Critical realism has been an important advance in social science methodology because it develops a qualitative theory of causality which avoids some of the pitfalls of empiricist theories of causality. But while there has been ample work exploring the relationship between critical realism and qualitative research methods there has been noticeably less work exploring the relationship between dialectical critical realism and qualitative research methods. This seems strange especially since the founder of the philosophy of critical realism, Roy Bhaskar, employs and develops a range of dialectical concepts in his later work in order to extend the main tenets of critical realism. The aim of this paper is to draw on Bhaskar's later work, as well as Marxism, to reorient a critical realist methodology towards a dialectical approach for qualitative research. In particular, the paper demonstrates how dialectical critical realism can begin to provide answers to three common criticisms made against original critical realist methodology: that the qualitative theory of causal powers and structures developed by critical realists is problematic; that critical realist methodology contains values which prove damaging to empirical research; and that critical realists often have difficulties in researching everyday qualitative dilemmas that people face in their daily lives.     

Realism and Complexity

I will argue that from a CR perspective, social reality is complex. It just is not complex in the ways CT suggests. Even emergence, according to CR, is more complex and stronger than CT suggests. First wave CR is enough to advance the issue considerably, but I will also examine dialectical CR as a further attempt within CR to take account of complexity.     

Realism and Contingency

This paper constitutes an extended response to Athanasia Chalari's paper The Causal Impact of Resistance, which suggests that one may derive from internal conversations a causal explanation of resistance. In the context of our engagements with critical realism and digital research into social movements, we review Chalari's main argument, before applying it to a concrete case: the student protests in London, 2010. Whilst our account is sympathetic to Chalari's focus on interiority, we critique the individualism that is implicit in her argument, arguing that it emerges because of an underlying neglect of the relational aspects of resistance. Instead, we offer a relational realist analysis that treats resistance as process within an ontologically stratified account of reality that is mindful of the contingency of political acts. Taking this route, we establish resistance as an emergent relation, generative of distinctive “relational goods” in the context of collective action, which we locate at different levels of reality, as we move from an analysis of individual to collective reflexivity. In doing so we offer a sympathetic critique of Chalari, building on the thought provoking arguments contained within it, whilst also making a contribution to the theorisation of social movements and the “relational turn” within realist social theory (Archer, 2010, 2012).     

虚拟实在与实在论

文章是对翟振明《实在论的最后崩溃———从虚拟实在谈起》一文的回应。作者通过对翟先生文章的分析得出结论 :翟先生徒劳无功地企图驳倒原则上不可以驳倒的本体论的实在论 ;而在攻击可以驳倒的认识论的实在论时 ,翟先生则搞错了方向 ;翟先生所作出的唯一贡献 ,乃是证明了我所谓的因果实在论 ,虽然这也许有违翟先生想把实在论一锅端的良好本意     

Biological Realism and Social Constructivism

In this paper we attempt to reconcile two important, current intellectual traditions: Darwinism and social constructionism. We believe that these two schools have important points of contact that have been obscured because each school has feared that the other wanted to put it out of business. We try to show that both traditions have much to of offer psychology, a discipline that has often been too individualistic, too concerned with the private and the subjective. The spirit of American pragmatism can be found in both camps; like the social constructivists, pragmatists focused on social transaction rather than internal happening, and like the Darwinian they were rooted in functionalism and the biological.     

Saving Critical Realism

Critical Realism aims to be both philosophically sophisticated and morally forward looking. Unfortunately the accepted form that this point of view has taken is flawed in both these aims. However, close attention to realist formats in science and the constraints that are required to give a social psychological application of them makes possible a revision of the Critical Realist scheme strengthening its scientific claim and removing certain moral ambiguities in its applications. What follows is a schematic outline for an alternative neo-Critical Realism. Attention to the plausibility of working models leads from a substantivalist conception of social reality to a Heraclitean social metaphysics.     

Formalism, Behavioral Realism and the Interdisciplinary Challenge in Sociological Theory

In this paper, I argue that recent sociological theory has become increasingly bifurcated into two mutually incompatible styles of theorizing that I label formalist and behavioral-realist. Formalism favors mathematization and proposes an instrumentalist ontology of abstract processes while behavioral-realist theory takes at its basis the "real" physical individual endowed with concrete biological, cognitive and neurophysiological capacities and constraints and attempts to derive the proper conceptualization of social behavior from that basis. Formalism tends to lead toward a conceptually independent sociology that in principle requires only minimal reference to the empirical and ontological storehouse of other disciplines, while behavioral-realist theory leads to an interdisciplinary sociology that can be located within a hierarchy of behavioral sciences, leading to questions regarding the relationship between sociology and other disciplines as well as issues of transdisciplinary unification and possible interdisciplinary reduction. I explore the consequences of this split for the project of explanatory sociological theory within the context of how it has manifested itself in sociological network theory and social psychology. I close with a critique and assessment of formalist tendencies in sociological theorizing.     

Social Network Analysis and Critical Realism

Social network analysis (SNA) is an increasingly popular approach that provides researchers with highly developed tools to map and analyze complexes of social relations. Although a number of network scholars have explicated the assumptions that underpin SNA, the approach has yet to be discussed in relation to established philosophies of science. This article argues that there is a tension between applied and methods‐oriented SNA studies, on the one hand, and those addressing the social‐theoretical nature and implications of networks, on the other. The former, in many cases, exhibits positivist tendencies, whereas the latter incorporate a number of assumptions that are directly compatible with core critical realist views on the nature of social reality and knowledge. This article suggests that SNA may be detached from positivist social science and come to constitute a valuable instrument in the critical realist toolbox.     

Realism and antirealism in social science

Up until recently social scientists took it for granted that their task was to account for the social world as objectively as possible: they were realists in practice if not always in their methodological sermons. This situation started to change in the 1960s, when a number of antirealist philosophies made inroads into social studies.This paper examines critically the following kinds of antirealism: subjectivism, conventionalism, fictionism, social constructivism, relativism, and hermeneutics. An attempt is made to show that these philosophies are false and are causing serious damage to social studies.Next the subjective interpretation of probability is analyzed as a case of subjectivism. An approach to the subjective perception of justice is sketched as an example of the objective study of subjective experience.Finally, the three main varieties of realism — naive, critical, and scientific — are outlined. It is argued that the scientific attitude involves scientific realism, which is put in practice even by scholars who, like Weber and Simmel, called themselves antirealists.     

Critical Realism and the Althusserian Legacy

This paper undertakes an historical re‐evaluation of Louis Althusser's philosophical legacy for modern Marxism. While Althusser self‐consciously sought to defend the scientific character of Marxism, many of his closest followers eventually exited the Marxian paradigm for a post‐structural post‐Marxism. We argue that this development was predominately rooted in a series of philosophical errors that proved fatal in a period of retreat for European socialism. There has always been, however, a second post‐Althusserian legacy associated with the critical realist conception of Marxism initiated by Roy Bhaskar. Bhaskar found part of his inspiration in Althusser's successful posing of the question of Marx's science and this paper sets out to excavate the proper links between Althusser and Bhaskar in order to deepen the relationship between critical realism and scientific Marxism.     

现实主义的蜕变与误读

自19世纪以来,现实主义概念几经变迁,在接受过程中被误读,先后演化为苏联的“社会主义现实主义”和中国的“革命现实主义”。那么,现实主义的真实内涵是什么?它是如何蜕变的?这些问题有待于知识考古学的细致研究。     

马克思主义与批判实在论的辩证法

黑格尔的绝对理念、马克思的辩证唯物主义和批判实在论都属于辩证哲学的家族。马克思敲碎了黑格尔的坚果,拣起了一些碎片,他的伟大在于发现了结构矛盾与颠倒。巴斯卡与马克思分享了三种矛盾(结构矛盾、颠倒与科莱蒂矛盾),又增加了埃奇利矛盾。批判实在论指出,辩证法的本真面目是四重缺失:使对使缺失成为缺失的约束成为缺失。