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What kind of realism - if any - are we allowed to endorse? It is often stated that, in order to provide realism with a solid foundation, we need having recourse to a reality that is totally independent of thought (and let alone of language). This is taken to be the key thesis of realism. But many philosophers reply that, even when we imagine a world totally devoid of human presence, we must use human concepts. From this point of view, conceptualization does not seem to be an optional we can get rid of, but rather a built-in component of the nature of human beings.

Critical realism is emerging as a viable philosophical paradigm for conducting social science research, and has been proposed as an alternative to the more prevalent paradigms of positivism and interpretivism. Few papers, however, have offered clear guidance for applying this philosophy to actual research methodologies. Under critical realism, a causal explanation for a given phenomenon is inferred by explicitly identifying the means by which structural entities and contextual conditions interact to generate a given set of events. Consistent with this view of causality, we propose a set of methodological principles for conducting and evaluating critical realism-based explanatory case study research within the information systems field. The principles are derived directly from the ontological and epistemological assumptions of critical realism. We demonstrate the utility of each of the principles through examples drawn from existing critical realist case studies. The article concludes by discussing the implications ofcritical realism based research for IS research and practice.

  Audi argues that people must recognize grounding as a distinct relation of determination, and say with as much precision as possible what grounding is and how the concept can be useful in philosophy. There are certain non-fundamental properties, properties that are never instantiated brutely, but always because some other properties are. It is in making sense of the force of this because that grounding earns its keep.

  Christensen examines the epistemology of disagreement. He first examines an initially attractive way of denying the disagreement of peers should typically occasion belief revision. He then considers some simple, somewhat idealized cases that motivate a general demand for revision, develops and defends an account of when and why belief revisions are called for, examines the effect of relaxing the idealizations involved in the central cases, and finally explores the extent to which the position he defends entails an objectionable degree of skepticism.

This study identifies the practical and philosophical difficulties associated with testing strategic management and organization theories. Working from a critical realist perspective, we affirm the importance of falsification and verification efforts for progress in theory development. We advocate a four-step approach for advancing theory testing that prioritizes identifying and testing for the presence and effects of hypothesized causal mechanisms, rather than solely focusing on correlational methods to jointly test the set of effects composing a theoretical system. Going beyond prior critical realist writings, we provide practical guidance for deploying established research methods to test management theories.

Many scholars continue to accord routine action a central role in social theory and defend the continuing relevance of Bourdieu's habitus. Simultaneously, most recognize the importance of reflexivity. In this article, I consider three versions of the effort to render these concepts compatible, which I term \"empirical combination,\" \"hybridization,\" and \"ontological and theoretical reconciliation.\" None of the efforts is ultimately successful in analytical terms. Moreover, I argue on empirical grounds that the relevance of habitus began to decrease toward the end of the 20th century, given major changes in the structures of the advanced capitalist democracies. In these circumstances, habitual forms prove incapable of providing guidelines for people's lives and, thus, make reflexivity imperative. I conclude by arguing that even the reproduction of natal background is a reflexive activity today and that the mode most favorable to producing it—what I call \"communicative reflexivity\"—is becoming harder to sustain.

This article sketches the outlines of an object-oriented literary criticism, contrasting it with several familiar critical schools. We begin with a summary of two new philosophical trends: speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy. The latter approach offers new arguments for the autonomy of objects from their relations, and allows us to consider whether various approaches to literature do justice to this autonomy. The New Criticism insists on the independence of the text, but only at the price of destroying the independence of its internal elements, due to its excessively holistic vision of the textual interior. New Historicism famously embeds the text in its cultural and material surroundings, thereby over-relationizing it, which is found to be philosophically untenable. Deconstruction leads to similar difficulties through its misinterpretation of identity as a form of presence, thereby disallowing any independence of things. In closing, some suggestions are offered for new methods of criticism capable of living up to the unity and autonomy of both the text and its internal elements.

Although Gandhi is often taken to be an exemplary moral idealist in politics, this article seeks to demonstrate that Gandhian nonviolence is premised on a form of political realism, specifically a contextual, consequentialist, and moral-psychological analysis of a political world understood to be marked by inherent tendencies toward conflict, domination, and violence. By treating nonviolence as the essential analog and correlative response to a realist theory of politics, one can better register the novelty of satyagraha (nonviolent action) as a practical orientation in politics as opposed to a moral proposition, ethical stance, or standard of judgment. The singularity of satyagraha lays in its self-limiting character as a form of political action that seeks to constrain the negative consequences of politics while working toward progressive social and political reform. Gandhian nonviolence thereby points toward a transformational realism that need not begin and end in conservatism, moral equivocation, or pure instrumentalism.

Latour comments on the issues that most critics are looking into, emphasizing the editorial in the New York Times magazine. He emancipates the public from prematurely naturalized objectified facts, for he has been accused of fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument, although he has spent time in showing the lack of scientific certainty. He also argues that if the critical mind renews itself and be relevant again, it has to be found in the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude and deal the realism of matters of concern and not matters of fact.

This article investigates how political theorists and philosophers should understand egalitarian political demands in light of the increasingly important realist critique of much of contemporary political theory and philosophy. It suggests, first, that what Martin O’Neill has called non-intrinsic egalitarianism is, in one form at least, a potentially realistic egalitarian political project and, second, that realists may be compelled to impose an egalitarian threshold on state claims to legitimacy under certain circumstances. Non-intrinsic egalitarianism can meet realism’s methodological requirements because it does not have to assume an unavailable moral consensus since it can focus on widely acknowledged bads rather than contentious claims about the good. Further, an appropriately formulated non-intrinsic egalitarianism may be a minimum requirement of an appropriately realistic claim by a political order to authoritatively structure some of its members’ lives. Without at least a threshold set of egalitarian commitments, a political order seems unable to be transparent to many of its worse-off members under a plausible construal of contemporary conditions.