Critical thoughts about critical realism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6251567 |
|---|---|
| Authors | G R Steele (0000-0001-5281-2922, Lancaster University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 1-2 |
| Pages | 133-154 |
| Publication date | 2005-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Critical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0891-3811 • E-ISSN: 1933-8007 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/08913810508443632 |
| OpenAlex | W2032429737 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 14 |
As microeconomic calculus and macroeconomic estimation superseded earlier approaches to political economy, broad questions about how things are (ontology), how things might be known (epistemology), and how science should proceed (methodology) were neglected. As a corrective, Critical Realism (CR) has been proposed as an alternative to the orthodox deductive‐nomological (ODN) tradition; i.e., to mathematical deduction and statistical induction. In their place, retroduction—the use of analogy, metaphor, intuition and ordinary language—is supposed to illuminate root causes by identifying the deep mechanisms that govern events. CR offers guidelines for social science that are of a most general kind: from initial “premises,” retroduction proceeds to hypotheses about deep structures and mechanisms. The initial premises are determined by a desire to understand events that surprise us. However, nothing is thereby excluded, including ODN. And since historical processes are revealed neither by assumption nor by the net effects of whatever initial conditions hold, it might be apposite to drop the search for (deep) socio‐economic laws and to use whatever evidence is at hand to see whether, and the extent to which, ideal types apply to any given historical sequence
Analogy · Critical realism (philosophy of perception · Epistemology · Intuition · Metaphor · Metaphysics · Nothing · Political science · Politics · Realism · Sociology · Surprise · Critical Realism in Sociology · Economic Theory and Institutions · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Law · Philosophy
Realism and Social Science
The Possibility of Naturalism
Money-Wage Dynamics and Labor-Market Equilibrium
The Relation Between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861–1957 1
The “Closure” Assumption as a First Step
Developments in Economics as Realist Social Theory
A Realist Theory of Science
What Kind of Theory is Marx's LabourTheoryof Value? A Critical Realist Inquiry
| Citations per year | 0.13 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2011 - 2011 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |