Outer Worlds: Animated Documentary and Critical Realism

Several authors emphasise the need for a change in classification theory due to the influence of a dogmatic and monistic ontology supported by an outdated essentialism. These claims tend to focus on the fallibility of knowledge, the need for a pluralistic view, and the theoretical burden of observations. Regardless of the legitimacy of these concerns, there is the risk, when not moderate, to fall into the opposite relativistic extreme. Based on a narrative review of the literature, we aim to reflectively discuss the theoretical foundations that can serve as a basis for a realist position supporting pluralistic ontological classifications. The goal is to show that, against rather conventional solutions, objective scientific-based approaches to natural classifications are presented to be viable, allowing a proper distinction between ontological and taxonomic questions. Supported by critical scientific realism, we consider that such an approach is suitable for the development of ontological Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOSs). We believe that ontological perspectivism can provide the necessary adaptation to the different granularities of reality.

Using critical realism in nursing and health research: promise and challenges

Qualitative researchers wishing to circumnavigate the limitations of positivism, on the one hand, and strong constructionism, on the other, tend to be attracted to critical realism (CR), which offers a middle ground between the two: CR combines ontological realism and epistemological relativism. As a philosophical position for qualitative research, CR has been adopted by researchers utilising diverse data collection and analytic methods. However, there are at least two distinct approaches claiming the CR name: one developed by Joseph Maxwell, with qualitative research specifically in mind, and one developed by Roy Bhaskar and colleagues, as a general philosophy of natural and social sciences. In this paper I compare these two forms of CR on four dimensions, which on the surface they appear to share: (1) what does ‘critical’ mean; (2) epistemological relativism; (3) ontological realism; (4) causality. It is obvious that, below the surface when the details are examined, the two approaches to CR differ considerably on at least the last three dimensions, if not all four. I propose four reasons for preferring Bhaskar’s CR over Maxwell’s CR, arguing the former is more appropriate for qualitative research in psychology.

Critical realism and information systems: brief responses to Monod and Klein

Critical realism and information systems: brief responses to Monod and Klein

The starting point of this essay is that today’s ecological challenges call upon enrichment of the discourse concerning biophysical processes with socially inspired reasoning. I further propose that arguing on the grounds of critical realism (which eclectically borrows methodological items from pragmatism and hermeneutics) may fulfil this task. The specific version of critical realism I outline herewith combines a stratified ontology of bhaskarian origin with an equally stratified epistemology descending from althusserian thinking. At the deeper level lay non-observable mechanisms which produce actual events. At a second level non-observable actual events are generated by the mechanisms laying at the deep domain, while observable experience occurs only at the surface layer. Concerning the stratified scientific practice it starts from ‘Generality I’, i.e. elementary information, knowledge and mental representations, while it also involves first ideas and concepts about the real. Apart from genuine knowledge about the real, at this first step ideological burdens are also embodied. To partially discharge the scientific product from ideology, further scientific practice involves ‘Generality II’, i.e. conceptual tools such as statistics, models, and the like. The final output of this endeavour is termed ‘Generality III’ and consists of a theoretical framework relating to the knowledge of the real world out there. Next, I maintain that the scientific edifice comprises interdependent elements such as the objective of study, the research tools, the theoretical framework and a specific jargon, which shape dialectic wholeness. Then, I describe a stratified scheme including general theories describing the biological universe, partial theories which, within general theories, describe specific ecological worlds, and models at different levels of abstraction. Among these latter, theoretical schemata shape one among the many ecological worlds potentially descending from a partial theory, exploratory tools - foremost simulation models - undertake the task to concretize theoretical schemata and then to explore alternative hypothesis, while the low-level generalizations, i.e. the empirical models carry out the description of the experimental data and statistical testing. Accordingly, I conclude, models occupy an intermediate position bridging theoretical abstracta with experimental data by means of a continuous back-forth movement between the theoretical constructions and raw data, which I compare to the hermeneutic cycle. Exploring the possibility for eclecticisms between critical realism and various empiricist traditions, I first remark that critical realist insights appear incompatible with positivist thinking mainly because, in accordance with the biological practice, the former aims at the development of coherent ex-post explanatory constructions rather than at the construction of ex-ante explanations relaying on the correspondence with the reality. I further conclude that critical realism on the one hand and pragmatism and hermeneutics on the other belong to diverging mental traditions in that the former keeps strongly on the unity of scientific and everyday ideological meanings, whereas, adhering on dualistic grounds, the latter involve irrevocable distinctions among subject and object, abstract and concrete etc., finally endorsing the idea that theory and praxis belong to different realms. Moreover, critical realism is definitively at odds with the idea of transitive causality which is pertinent to empiricist traditions. I maintain, however, that critical realism, pragmatism and hermeneutics share comparable thoughts relating to the independent existence of the real world out there, while they support the idea of socially mediated scientific explanation. Moreover they share comparable ideas regarding the hermeneutic cycle and the need for pluralistic approaches to the scientific phenomenon. Accordingly, I conclude that careful borrowing of instrumental items may strengthen the explanatory power of critical realism as well as the applicability of realist ideas.

Aesthetic Culture* György Lukác (bio) and Tyrus Miller (bio) Translated by Rita Keresztesi-Treat (bio) Editor’s Introduction “Aesthetic Culture” is one of the most important statements of György Lukács’s philosophy of culture in the period prior to his departure from Hungary in 1912 to study in Heidelberg. First published in the journal Renaissance in 1910 and reprinted in 1913 in the essay collection to which it lent its title, “Aesthetic Culture” appeared in immediate proximity to the essays in his first major book, The Soul and Forms, and shares a number of concepts and concerns with that work. In Lukács’s early essays, concepts from the philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) fashionable at that time in the German-speaking world mingled with such heterogeneous literary sources as Christian mystical writings, German romantic criticism, the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Hauptmann’s and Ibsen’s naturalist drama, and the aestheticism of Oscar Wilde and D’Annunzio to lend his meditations a vague but thickly elaborated terminology of “life,” “soul,” “form,” “mood,” “solitude,” “depth,” “culture,” “heroism,” and “tragedy.” At the same time, despite this idealist conceptual framework, these texts reveal surprising continuities between Lukács’s pre-Marxist, ethical criticism of modernist literature and his mature, Marxist opposition of an historically grounded “critical realism” to a subjectivistic and decadent modernism. Directly attacking the aestheticist stance that Lukács thought characteristic of modern art and literature generally, “Aesthetic Culture” is an especially revealing work to compare to his later communist polemics against expressionism and the modernist novel. Lukács’s title embodies a paradox, which he unfolds in the course of the essay. At present, he argues, there is no culture, and especially no “aesthetic culture.” Indeed, it is precisely the emphasis on the “aesthetic” in present-day art and life that is symptomatic of culture’s definitive disappearance and, at the same time, that is inimical to any culture’s forming in modern society. Wherever aesthetic culture has appeared, Lukács asserts, “there is no architecture, no tragedy, no philosophy, no monumental painting, no real epic.” The key to this paradox lies with the problem of form, which the aesthete ironically has no ability to bring into being. Instead of authentic artistic or cultural form, the aesthete emphasizes the “mood,” the fleeting inner sensation that an artwork or even the outer world more generally may occasion. The task of the artist shifts from giving form to life towards a new, peculiarly “modern” imperative, that [End Page 365] of provoking aesthetic sensations in the inner selves of spectators and readers. Artistic forms evaporate in this hothouse atmosphere in which beautiful feelings are forced to effloresce. Genuine, unified form appears only when the artist actively struggles to overcome the powerful resistances of life to being contained within the forms of art. Aesthetic culture, however, allows the artist to piece together surfaces effortlessly, creating pleasant appearances with nothing of the endurance that forms have against the passing of time. “The admirers of ‘form,’” Lukács concludes, “killed form; the priests of l’art pour l’art paralyzed art.” The novelty of the aesthetic sensation and the ephemerality of artwork’s value are two sides of a single process in which objective substantiality of artistic form progressively gives way to the aesthetic effect’s fleeting presence in the isolated soul. Lukács suggests that aesthetic culture—this paradoxical absence of any genuinely formed, objectively substantive art or culture—has appeared only recently, at the end of the 19th century. At this threshold of the new century, he believed, inner experience had rapidly come to supplant form not just in art but in all spheres. Aesthetic culture emerged when the whole of life might be judged not according to any intrinsic value it might have, but rather according to a shifting “aesthetic” standard: its ability to occasion moods, to bring about pleasant or intense sensations in solitary men and women who live passively disengaged from their own lives, like a spectator might enjoy a theatrical performance from a darkened box. The German idealist tradition had looked to tragedy as the dialectical means by which the seeming antinomies of a character’s...

Purpose – The current state of theory-building in the field of operations and supply chain management (OSCM) is in a strong need of rigorous, empirically based theories that enhance understanding of the causal relationships between the structural elements and properties of the business processes. In this research note the authors propose the critical realism (CR) philosophy of science as a particularly suitable philosophical position (not to the exclusion of others) to review the mechanisms of OSCM knowledge generation and to provide philosophical grounding and methodological guidance for both OSCM theory building and testing. Design/methodology/approach – To demonstrate potential benefits of CR-based structured approach to knowledge generation in OSCM research, this conceptual paper uses a case study that illustrates the adoption of one of the OSCM theories – i.e. the theory of swift, even flow. Findings – CR interprets the accumulated empirical information about OSCM phenomena as observable manifestations of the underlying causal mechanisms that cannot be perceived otherwise. CR can provide epistemological support to the choice of performance measures that manifest the underlying causal mechanisms of interest. Extensive accumulation of empirical data from multiple innovative sources will not dramatically add to understanding of the system under investigation, unless and until the underlying causal mechanisms that trigger the observed behaviour are identified and tested. The CR abductive mode of reasoning emphasises the role of uncertainty in complex process behaviours and can facilitate enrichment and refutation of OSCM theories. Originality/value – CR has a clear potential to contribute to OSCM research by enabling better understanding of causal relationships underlying complex behaviours of different elements of business process by providing robust and relevant mechanisms of generating knowledge about business processes that explicitly link empirical and causal aspects of theory building and testing.

Purpose – The philosophical position known as critical realism is briefly introduced, and some of its central features are used to connect the philosophy and the realist social theory to some current library and information science (LIS) models of information behaviour.Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses a literature‐based analysis of the critical realism concepts of a stratified social reality, the importance of contextualisation, and the relation between structure and agency. These features are discussed in relation to various models of information‐seeking behaviour, but also to the “interpretative” approach to information as meaning which can only be achieved through discourses in a human community.Findings – The critical realism perspective could lay a fruitful foundation for an interdisciplinary research field like LIS, and its user studies in particular, concerned with many levels of information creation, seeking, use and processing. It is the task of the LIS researcher to explain the mecha...

This article aims to clarify two traditions of understanding time, namely the rationalistic, which includes the scientific (in the West, going back to the ‘Physics’ of Aristotle) and philosophical (going back in the West to Augustine), and mystical (the most methodically sustained is the Yogic tradition of Classical India and Sufism). The article contains several sections: Introduction raises the problem of time and sets the subject boundaries. The main part is comprised of the following sections: 1. Time as found in objects: a brief summary of the rational scientific and quasi scientific trend of time interpretation from Aristotle’s Physics to Reichenbach’s “Philosophy of Time and Space”. The physical one-sidedness of the consideration of time is completely immersed in the object domain. 2. Time as associated with the ontological subject: essential points of purely philosophical understanding of time beginning with St. Augustine via Kant up to Heidegger. This philosophical approach is no less one-sided, and comprehends time almost exclusively as a subjective phenomenon (memory, contemplation, desire, one’s own nature etc.) Both trends lack any discrimination between the initial indication of the phenomenon of time (the answer to the question ‘what is time as a phenomenon?’) and the interpretation of the meaning of this phenomenon (the answer to the question ‘how to understand the phenomenon of time?’). 3. Interpretations of the time phenomenon are implicitly based on the everyday mode of awareness. The problem of time is one of the most difficult problems to comprehend. The main thesis of the article is that the pra-phenomenon of time is revealed to consciousness from the necessarily occurring switching and comparison between two processes: orientation in the external world and attention to cogitation, i.e., between the external and internal. This duality coincides with the duality that is realized in the elementary unit of rational thought - judgment, the subject of which is recognized as belonging to the external world, and the predicate – to the internal. Separately, it is planned to consider the understanding of time in the mystical tradition. We will focus on two ways of understanding time - the rationalistic (philosophical), represented by the teachings of Kant, and the mystical, represented by the Sufis and Yogis (with an indication of the fundamental difference between them). Note that these two methods are not opposed by us, although in a sense they exclude each other. 4. Lapse of time and the notion of a mode of awareness. The ordinary mode of awareness called vikṣipta ‘dispersed’ in Yoga philosophy is characterized by a fundamental dualism of inner and outer worlds’ events. Both are processes and the non predicative comparison of their pace constitutes the ordinary experience of the lapse of time. This mode is the most habitual one and the very mode within which it is possible to speak and compose texts, however it is not unique. There exist other possibilities. 5. One-pointed awareness mode and the atemporal process. Voluntarily achieved one-pointedness has no distinction between the outer and inner world and is therefore ‘out of’ or ‘above’ time. It is well known in mystical literature (exemplified by the text by eminent Sufi author, Niffari). In European rational philosophy this position was explained by Hegel, but not in his ‘Philosophy of Nature”, usually associated with the concept of time, it was in the ‘Science of Logic’ (in the timeless unfolding of absolute knowledge). The Conclusion presents a summary. The crucial point which enables a thinker to overcome the traditional scientific and philosophical one-sidedness of the conceptualization of time is the notion of a mode of awareness and comprehension of the fundamental duality of outer world processes and cogitations’ succession. A non-ordinary awareness mode is methodologically elaborated in Yoga philosophy, witnessed in mystical Sufi texts, and finally, grasped in Hegel’s concept of a speculative proposition.

This paper promotes critical realism as a suitable and fruitful philosophical foundation for the development and implementation of urban digital twins. The proliferation of a-theoretical digital twin research and practices, not declaring their philosophical positions, is threatening the scientific soundness of this new paradigm and offers little evidence for reflecting on the knowledge it produces. To address this issue, first, this paper uses focus group discussions to explore digital twin experts’ perceptions of digital twin best practices for urban management and uncover the philosophical worldviews underlying these perceptions. A philosophical worldview is a general orientation about the world that is described in terms of ontological and epistemological assumptions and views on human nature. The inferred philosophical worldviews are then compared with critical realism principles, supporting the argument that critical realism provides a suitable philosophical foundation for digital twin practices in urban management envisaged by participating experts, as well as enhancing current forms of digital twin practice.

This paper analyzes how researchers’ different ontological and epistemological assumptions shape the process and outcomes of evaluation research. Focusing on the critical realism (CR) and social constructionism (SC) philosophical approaches, it outlines the rationale for multi-ontological evaluation and develops principles for conducting it. The paper draws from experience of evaluating a national implementation program of electronic health records in hospitals, one of the projects of the English National Programme for IT. It argues that an evaluation based on SC and one based on CR are significantly different in how they use knowledge gained in the field, and in the kind of evidence and recommendations that they can offer policy makers. The CR philosophy applied to evaluation research provides foundations from which judgments and abstractions can be presented in the form expected by the policy makers and managers who commission evaluations. In line with its ontological standing, social constructionism cannot simply or directly abstract and generalize across contexts, though it can offer other types of valuable evaluative insight. We show that, despite their differences, these two philosophical positions can, when taken together, produce jointly useful knowledge. This paper argues for the use of multi-ontological evaluation approaches and provides guidelines for undertaking such endeavors by emphasizing the need for mutual respect, dialogue, negotiation, and reflection.

Considering the long-standing debate about whether TCE treats opportunism and bounded rationality as attitudes or behaviors, this chapter suggests that this debate can be resolved by the introduction of the value-attitude-behavior (VAB) hierarchy. We point out that the VAB hierarchy can be regarded as a positivist parallel to critical realism (CR) and that the latter can provide the former with the much needed ontological depth. We also link CR to the emic-etic distinction and suggest that the two perspectives can be integrated into the actual domain of CR. Subsequently, we propose that opportunism and bounded rationality in TCE should be treated as attitudes. Since attitudes are institutions, we recommend that opportunism and bounded rationality be measured at the institutional level and suggest their respective measures.

Critical realism is a frequently mentioned, but not very well-known, late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century philosophical tradition. Having its roots in Kantian epistemology, critical realism is best characterized as a revisionist approach toward the original Kantian doctrine. Its most outstanding thesis is the idea that Kantian things-in-themselves are knowable. This idea was – at least implicitly – suggested by thinkers such as Alois Riehl, Wilhelm Wundt, and Oswald Külpe. Interestingly enough, the philosophical position of the early Moritz Schlick stands in the critical realist tradition as well. As will be outlined in the course of this paper, both Schlick’s magnum opus General Theory of Knowledge (1918) and his seminal Space and Time in Contemporary Physics (1917) are based on the assumption that the objects of science are relations and that relations have the status of Kantian things-in-themselves. By way of conclusion, I shall point out that this – more or less directly – leads to the current debate over “structural” realism.KeywordsPure ReasonCritical RealistTranscendental IdealismScientific PhilosophyKantian ConceptionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The field of mathematics education has been fashioned by a diversity of theoretical and philosophical perspectives. The purpose of this study is to add to this field an analysis of the philosophical position of critical realism. To achieve this objective, the study addresses the following questions: what does critical realism have to offer mathematics education? How may critical realism underlabour for this discipline? In addressing these questions, the study provides an overview of the basic theories and the possible weak points of and arguments against critical realism and realism in general. It then draws upon the notion of a dialectical phenomenology to provide a sequence of Achilles' heel critiques of some of the perspectives that constitute broadly the theoretical landscape of mathematics education research. This critique proceeds with an analysis of didactically oriented empiricism, hermeneutics, pragmatism, postmodernism, traditionally recognized forms of constructivism, traditionally recognized theories of activity, and ethnomathematics. The last section summarizes the implications of philosophical underlabouring for a more beneficial science of mathematics education.