Abstract
The crucial issue for realist naturalism is the sense to be given to structural concepts in the social sciences. Unlike reductionist forms of positivist naturalism, which tend to be attracted by behaviourism, a realist naturalism emphasises the stratification of reality as a general metaphysical principle. In the form defended here, it also accepts the ‘hermeneutic’ principle that the concepts and theories of the social sciences must make substantial reference to those of actors in the life-world. At the centre of our social ontology there must be, then, the commonsense picture of physically distinct persons capable of independent action: what Harré and Secord ironically called ‘the anthropomorphic model of man’.1
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References
Rom Harré and P. F. Secord, The Explanation of Social Behaviour (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), ch. 5.
Lukes, ‘Methodological Individualism Reconsidered’, in D. Emmet and A. MacIntyre (eds) Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 77.
Outhwaite, Concept Formation, ch. 5.
Bhaskar, Naturalism, p. 43.
J.-P. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (London: New Left Books, 1976); Alain Touraine, Sociologie de l’Action (Paris: Seuil, 1965).
Cf. Scott Lash and John Urry, ‘The New Marxism of Collective Action: A Critical Analysis’, Sociology, vol. 18, no. 1, 1984, pp. 33–50.
‘Theories of Social Action’, in Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet (eds), A History of Sociological Analysis (London: Heinemann, 1978), p. 367.
Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method, p. 161.
Giddens, Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 38.
One should note however that, like most social theory, it skates around issues to do with the intrinsic or pre-social powers of human beings — issues which are crucial to psychology and linguistics. See Trevor Pateman, Language in Mind and Language in Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
John Urry, The Anatomy of Capitalist Societies (London: Macmillan, 1981); Keat and Urry, Social Theory as Science; Urry,’ science, Realism and the Social’, Philosophy of Social Science, vol. 12, 1982, pp. 311–18.
Urry, The Anatomy of Capitalist Societies, p. 8.
For a Marxist account which tries to deal with these problems, see Karl Liebknecht, Studien über die Bewegungsgesetze der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung (1922, new edition edited by O. K. Flechtheim, Hamburg, 1974).
Urry, The Anatomy of Capitalist Societies.
Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 23.
Rom Harré, ‘Images of Society and Social Icons’.
Ibid.
Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, pp. 48 f.
Giddens, New Rules, p. 13.
Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 203.
Martin Albrow, ‘The Concept of “the Social” in the Work of Marx and Weber’, unpublished paper from conference on ‘Karl Marx and Max Weber’, Duisburg, 1981).
P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959).
Susan James, The Content of Social Explanation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 6 f.
Barry Hindess, ‘Actors and Social Relations’, in Mark Wardell and Stephen Turner (eds), Sociological Theory in Transition (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), p. 119.
Cf. ibid., p. 117.
Hollis and Nell, Rational Economic Man; Mary Farmer, ‘Rational Action in Economic and Social Theory: Some Misunderstandings’, Archives Europeennes de Sociologie, vol. 23, 1982, pp. 179–97.
See, for example, T. M. Bloomfield, ‘Psychoanalysis: a Human Science?’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, vol. 9, no. 3, 1979, pp. 271–87; David Will, ‘Psychoanalysis as a Human Science’, British Journal of Medical Psychology, vol. 53, no. 3, 1980, pp. 201–11.
For an overview, see Trevor Pateman, ‘Philosophy of Linguistics’, in Richard Coates et al. (eds), New Horizons in Linguistics 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, forthcoming).
Social scientists, for example, now have an excellent and very accessible methodological text written from a realist standpoint: Andrew Sayer, Method in Social Science (London: Hutchinson, 1984).
Cf. Norman Stockman, Anti-Positivist Theories of the Sciences.
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© 1987 William Outhwaite
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Outhwaite, W. (1987). Conclusion: Action, Structure and Realist Philosophy. In: New Philosophies of Social Science. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18946-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18946-5_8
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