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Realism and Social Science
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Realism – or at least the ‘critical realism’ that I want to defend – is not what many people think it is. Many suppose that realism claims a privileged access to the Truth and thus involves a kind of ‘foundationalism’. But such claims are incon- sistent with realism, for if the de
W ning feature of realism is the belief that there is a world existing independently of our knowledge of it, then that independence of objects from knowledge immediately undermines any complacent assumptions about the relation between them and renders it problematic. What reason have we for accepting this basic realist proposition of the mind-independence of the world? I would argue that it is the evident fallibility of our knowledge – the experience of getting things wrong, of having our expectations confounded, and of crashing into things – that justi
W es us in believing that the world exists regard- less of what we happen to think about it. If, by contrast, the world itself was a product or construction of our knowledge, then our knowledge would surely be infallible, for how could we ever be mistaken about anything? How could it be said that things were not as we supposed? Realism is therefore necessarily a fallibilist philosophy and one which must be wary of simple correspondence concepts of truth. It must acknowledge that the world can only be known under particular descriptions, in terms of available discourses, though it does not follow from this that no description or explanation is better than any other.
Andrew Sayer - Personal Name
0-7619-6123-2
NONE
Social Science
English
2000
1-34
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