Jun 23, 2017 07:35 PM
Emotions and Emergence in Sociology: The Critical-Realist Alternative
http://criticalrealismnetwork.org/2017/0...ternative/
EXCERPT: “…emotions are in themselves generative mechanisms with special tendencies toward action, inaction, and communication. In their most immediate effects, emotions motivate approaching or avoiding behavior.”
* This is a guest blog post by Dr. Benjamin Lamb-Books. Benjamin is the author of Angry Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Slavery: Moral Emotions in Social Movements (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). He obtained his PhD from the University of Colorado in 2015. He lives in Boulder with his wife Danielle.
The subjectivity of emotions has been grounds for their dismissal by social science in the past. Emotions are nothing if not experienced, so how one views the nature of experience matters greatly for this topic as well as how one assumes ‘mind’ and ‘body’ are related. Human emotions exist in a (microsociological) life-world domain of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. They are felt, and without this element of feeling-towards objects, they do not exist. Because of their ontological status as unobservable inner-worlds, positivists have used the label ‘emotivism’ to repudiate them as unreal (along with values, moral beliefs, and anything else based on ‘desires’; Foot 2001; cf. Gorski 2013).
Although subjective in nature, emotion is as real as consciousness or as any other social phenomena that is concept-dependent. [...] What’s wrong with the positivist approach to emotion in making such generalizations and predictions (or even ‘postdictions’)? Critical realism would identify at least three major fallacies...
MORE: http://criticalrealismnetwork.org/2017/0...ternative/
What is critical realism?
http://www.asatheory.org/current-newslet...al-realism
EXCERPT: Critical realism is a series of philosophical positions on a range of matters including ontology, causation, structure, persons, and forms of explanation. Emerging in the context of the post-positivist crises in the natural and social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s, critical realism represents a broad alliance of social theorists and researchers trying to develop a properly post-positivist social science. Critical realism situates itself as an alternative paradigm both to scientistic forms of positivism concerned with regularities, regression-based variables models, and the quest for law-like forms; and also to the strong interpretivist or postmodern turn which denied explanation in favor of interpretation, with a focus on hermeneutics and description at the cost of causation.
Defining critical realism is not an easy task. While there is a pool of scholars that critical realists often draw upon (e.g. Archer 1982, 1995; Bhaskar 1975, 1979; Elder-Vass 2010; Gorski 2008, 2013a; Lawson 1997; Little 2016; Porpora 2015; Sayer 2000; Steinmetz 1998, 2003, 2014; Vandenberghe 2015) there is not one unitary framework, set of beliefs, methodology, or dogma that unites critical realists as a whole. Instead, critical realism is much more like a series of family resemblances in which there are various commonalities that exist between the members of a family, but these commonalities overlap and crisscross in different ways. There is not one common feature that defines a family, instead, it is a heterogeneous assemblage of elements drawn from a relatively common “genetic” pool. Critical realism is a philosophical well from which Marxists, Bourdieusians, Habermasians, Latourians, and even poststructuralists have drawn. The reason for this is simple. Critical realism is not an empirical program; it is not a methodology; it is not even truly a theory, because it explains nothing. It is, rather, a meta-theoretical position: a reflexive philosophical stance concerned with providing a philosophically informed account of science and social science which can in turn inform our empirical investigations. We might think of this in terms of three layers: our empirical data, the theories that we draw upon to explain our empirical data, and our metatheories—the theory and the philosophy behind our theories.
While critical realism may be a heterogeneous series of positions, there is one loose genetic feature which unites it as a metatheory: a commitment to formulating a properly post-positivist philosophy. This commitment is often cast in the terms of a normative agenda for science and social science: ontological realism, epistemic relativism, judgmental rationality, and a cautious ethical naturalism....
MORE: http://www.asatheory.org/current-newslet...al-realism
http://criticalrealismnetwork.org/2017/0...ternative/
EXCERPT: “…emotions are in themselves generative mechanisms with special tendencies toward action, inaction, and communication. In their most immediate effects, emotions motivate approaching or avoiding behavior.”
* This is a guest blog post by Dr. Benjamin Lamb-Books. Benjamin is the author of Angry Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Slavery: Moral Emotions in Social Movements (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). He obtained his PhD from the University of Colorado in 2015. He lives in Boulder with his wife Danielle.
The subjectivity of emotions has been grounds for their dismissal by social science in the past. Emotions are nothing if not experienced, so how one views the nature of experience matters greatly for this topic as well as how one assumes ‘mind’ and ‘body’ are related. Human emotions exist in a (microsociological) life-world domain of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. They are felt, and without this element of feeling-towards objects, they do not exist. Because of their ontological status as unobservable inner-worlds, positivists have used the label ‘emotivism’ to repudiate them as unreal (along with values, moral beliefs, and anything else based on ‘desires’; Foot 2001; cf. Gorski 2013).
Although subjective in nature, emotion is as real as consciousness or as any other social phenomena that is concept-dependent. [...] What’s wrong with the positivist approach to emotion in making such generalizations and predictions (or even ‘postdictions’)? Critical realism would identify at least three major fallacies...
MORE: http://criticalrealismnetwork.org/2017/0...ternative/
What is critical realism?
http://www.asatheory.org/current-newslet...al-realism
EXCERPT: Critical realism is a series of philosophical positions on a range of matters including ontology, causation, structure, persons, and forms of explanation. Emerging in the context of the post-positivist crises in the natural and social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s, critical realism represents a broad alliance of social theorists and researchers trying to develop a properly post-positivist social science. Critical realism situates itself as an alternative paradigm both to scientistic forms of positivism concerned with regularities, regression-based variables models, and the quest for law-like forms; and also to the strong interpretivist or postmodern turn which denied explanation in favor of interpretation, with a focus on hermeneutics and description at the cost of causation.
Defining critical realism is not an easy task. While there is a pool of scholars that critical realists often draw upon (e.g. Archer 1982, 1995; Bhaskar 1975, 1979; Elder-Vass 2010; Gorski 2008, 2013a; Lawson 1997; Little 2016; Porpora 2015; Sayer 2000; Steinmetz 1998, 2003, 2014; Vandenberghe 2015) there is not one unitary framework, set of beliefs, methodology, or dogma that unites critical realists as a whole. Instead, critical realism is much more like a series of family resemblances in which there are various commonalities that exist between the members of a family, but these commonalities overlap and crisscross in different ways. There is not one common feature that defines a family, instead, it is a heterogeneous assemblage of elements drawn from a relatively common “genetic” pool. Critical realism is a philosophical well from which Marxists, Bourdieusians, Habermasians, Latourians, and even poststructuralists have drawn. The reason for this is simple. Critical realism is not an empirical program; it is not a methodology; it is not even truly a theory, because it explains nothing. It is, rather, a meta-theoretical position: a reflexive philosophical stance concerned with providing a philosophically informed account of science and social science which can in turn inform our empirical investigations. We might think of this in terms of three layers: our empirical data, the theories that we draw upon to explain our empirical data, and our metatheories—the theory and the philosophy behind our theories.
While critical realism may be a heterogeneous series of positions, there is one loose genetic feature which unites it as a metatheory: a commitment to formulating a properly post-positivist philosophy. This commitment is often cast in the terms of a normative agenda for science and social science: ontological realism, epistemic relativism, judgmental rationality, and a cautious ethical naturalism....
MORE: http://www.asatheory.org/current-newslet...al-realism