New Epistemological Framework o f Social Sciences; Materialist Oriented Critical Realism

New materialist social inquiry: designs, methods and the research-assemblage

Critical Realism and the Limits to Critical Social Science

Critical social scientists argue that explanations of social practices must be critical precisely in order to be explanatory, and that the necessity of critique gives social science a potentially emancipatory character. In practice, critiques of social phenomena are enormously contentious because it is difficult to establish agreement about what constitute problems, solutions or improvements, a...

Why Critical Realism Fails to Justify Critical Social Research 1

Many social scientists have argued that research should be designed to perform a ‘critical’ function, in the sense of challenging the socio-political status quo. However, very often, the relationship between the political value judgements underpinning this commitment and the values intrinsic to inquiry, as a distinct form of activity has been left obscure. Furthermore, the validity of those jud...

Critical Realism

Critical Realism (CR) states that knowledge (epistemology) is different from being or existence (ontology). There is a reality (unobservable structures) which exists independent of human thought. Critical realists believe that these unobservable structures cause observable events. Therefore, the social world can be understood only if people understand the structures that generate events. This i...

A Unified Framework for the Social Sciences

This paper offers four main arguments about the nature of causation in the social sciences. First, contrary to most recent work, I argue that there is a unitary conception of causation: a cause raises the probability of an event. This understanding of causation, borrowed from but not wedded to Bayesian inference, provides common semantic ground on which to base a reconstruction of causation. I ...