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.
Postmodernism and the Three ‘Pomo Flips’
Postmodernism and the Three ‘Pomo Flips’
Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistic bought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany (Marx and Engels, 1974, p. 37).
Faced with theoretical or philosophical positions that seem untenable, it is tempting to counter them ...
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