Summary
Contents
Subject index
Realism and Social Science offers the reader an authoritative and compelling guide to critical realism and its implications for social theory and for the practice of social science. It offers an alternative both to approaches which are overly confident about the possibility of a successful social science and those which are defeatist about any possibility of progress in understanding the social world. Written by one of the leading social theorists in the field, it demonstrates the virtues of critical realism for theory and empirical research in social science, and provides a critical engagement with leading non-realist approaches.
Introduction
Introduction
Why critical realism? The prefix identifies Bhaskar's realist theory of social science with the project of critical social science (CSS), that is, a social science that is critical of the practices which are its objects of study. Bhaskar argues that where social research identifies misconceptions and avoidable suffering in the practices it studies, its explanations simultaneously amount to criticisms implying the removal of the misconceptions or suffering and whatever causes them (Bhaskar, 1979). If this is right, then social science can have an emancipatory potential. This argument is of course controversial, not least – in philosophical circles – because of its implication that we can deduce ought from is. In Chapter 7, I develop a different but sympathetic critique of the project of CSS ...
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