Abstract
When we discuss government we refer to social entities, forces, and relations like these: organization, agency, social network, cultural scheme, social actor, normative system, institution, and local culture. The fundamental question of social ontology raised here is this: what kinds of entities, powers, and causal influence do we need to postulate in order to have an adequate theory of government? To take these questions seriously, we must be realists in the philosophical sense: we must assume that there is a reality underlying the observable characteristics of the thing we are investigating. Scientific realism is the view that developed areas of science offer theories of the nature of the real things and properties that underlie the observable world, and that the theories of well-confirmed areas of science are most likely approximately true. The chapter introduces the reader to the central ideas of scientific realism in application to the social sciences.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Archer, Margaret Scotford. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Archer, Margaret Scotford, ed. Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory. Rev. Cambridge, UK; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Archer, Margaret Scotford, ed. Critical Realism: Essential Readings. Critical Realism–Interventions. London; New York: Routledge, 1998.
Archer, Margaret S., Claire Decoteau, Philip Gorski, Daniel Little, Doug Porpora, Timothy Rutzou, Christian Smith, George Steinmetz, and Frederic Vandenberghe. “What Is Critical Realism?” Perspectives 38, no. 2 (2016): 4–9.
Bhaskar, Roy. A Realist Theory of Science. Leeds: Leeds Books, 1975.
Bhaskar, Roy. The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Human Sciences. 2nd ed. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.
Boyd, Richard. “Realism, Approximate Truth, and Philosophical Method.” In Scientific Theories, edited by C. Wade Savage. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Brinton, Mary C., and Victor Nee, eds. New Institutionalism in Sociology. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998.
Bunge, Mario. “Mechanism and Explanation.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 27, no. 4 (1997): 410–65.
Burguière, André. The Annales School: An Intellectual History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.
Coase, R. H. The Firm, the Market, and the Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Elder-Vass, David. The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Elster, Jon. Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Giddens, Anthony. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
Harré, Rom. Principles of Scientific Thinking. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970.
Hedström, Peter. Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Hedström, Peter, and Richard Swedberg, eds. Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory. Studies in Rationality and Social Change. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Little, Daniel. Varieties of Social Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991.
Little, Daniel. “Levels of the Social.” In Handbook for Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, edited by Stephen Turner and Mark Risjord, 15, 343–71. Handbook of the Philosophy of Science. Amsterdam; New York: Elsevier Publishing, 2006.
Little, Daniel. “Causal Mechanisms in the Social Realm.” In Causality in the Sciences, edited by Phyllis Illari, Federica Russo, and Jon Williamson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Little, Daniel. New Directions in the Philosophy of Social Science. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016.
Mahoney, James. “Beyond Correlational Analysis: Recent Innovations in Theory and Method.” Sociological Forum 16, no. 3 (2001): 575–93.
Manicas, Peter T. A Realist Philosophy of Social Science: Explanation and Understanding. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
McAdam, Doug, Sidney G. Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. Dynamics of Contention. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Merton, Robert K. “On Sociological Theories of the Middle Range.” In Social Theory and Social Structure, edited by Robert K. Merton. New York: Free Press, 1963.
Niiniluoto, Ilkka. Critical Scientific Realism. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Porpora, Doug. Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach. Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Tilly, Charles. “To Explain Political Processes.” American Journal of Sociology 100 (1995): 1594–1610.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Little, D. (2020). Scientific Realism and the Study of Government. In: A New Social Ontology of Government. Foundations of Government and Public Administration. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48923-6_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48923-6_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-48922-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-48923-6
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)