Proponents Of Realism Research Articles

George Eliot and George Lewes in Justus von Liebig’s laboratory: realism, chemistry, and agriculture in the mid-nineteenth century

ABSTRACT In Spring 1858, George Eliot and George Lewes visited Munich, where they became friends with the chemist Justus von Liebig, famous for his pioneering work on chemistry in its applications to agriculture. I consider their friendship as the basis for an examination of realism in literary and scientific writing on the agricultural environment. I show that Eliot’s literary realism of rural life responded to Liebig’s chemistry, broadly diverging from his ideas regarding science’s applications to agriculture. I also demonstrate that Liebig’s scientific method evolved by drawing on Eliot’s and Lewes’s theories of realism. Shared representations of the agricultural environment can be discerned across their writing, suggesting a representationalism co-constructed by the period’s foremost agricultural chemist and most important proponents of realism in literature. As my conclusion identifies, this understanding of links between mid-nineteenth-century literature and science has material consequences for the representation of agriculture in a time of ecological crisis.

The Consequence of Ethical Criticism of Intelligence on Countering Terrorism in Indonesia

The global war on terror has raised debates between liberals and realists on the position of ethics in intelligence operations. On the one hand, liberal ethicists insist that the conduct of intelligence gathering to counter terrorism must not violate the security rights of citizens. On the other hand, proponents of realism consider national security to be of greater importance than ethical principles governing individual freedom. This article tries to present an alternative point of view by examining the consequence of ethical criticisms of intelligence activities on the Indonesian government’s counterterrorism measures. It proposes two approaches to understanding the connection between ethics and intelligence: examining the nature of the terror threat, and looking at the sociopolitical situations which affect the role of the state’s security agencies. Arguably, securitizing intelligence by enforcing an ethical reconceptualization of intelligence roles increases the challenges facing Indonesia’s intelligence operatives and damages the effectiveness of the government’s counterterrorism policy.

EMMIE and engineering: What works as evidence to improve decisions?

While written by a proponent of realism, this article argues in favour of a pragmatic approach to evaluation. It argues that multiple sources of evidence collected using diverse research methods can be useful in conducting informative evaluations of programmes, practices and policies. It argues in particular that methods, even if their assumptions appear incommensurable with one another, should be chosen to meet the evidence needs of decision-makers. These evidence needs are captured in the acronym, EMMIE, which refers to Effect size, Mechanism, Moderator (or context), Implementation and Economic impact. Finally the article questions evidence hierarchies that are inspired by clinical trials, and suggests instead that, notwithstanding the clear differences in the physical and social worlds, engineering may provide a superior model for evaluators to try to emulate. And engineering is, above all, a pragmatic field.

Theorizing ‘Relevance’ in Psychology

Calls for ‘relevance’ in psychological theory and practice have gathered pace since at least the late 1960s when radical soci al protests irrupted as every day, frequently international, events. Beginning with a crisis in American and European social psychology, sentiments about the social irrelevance of psychology found their way subsequently into the psychological communities of the disciplinary hinterlands, including India, the Philippines, Malaysia, Turkey, Latin America and Africa. Curiously, however, despite the intransigence of ‘relevance’ discourse, almost no attempt has been made to theorize its emergence in the discipline. This theoretical paper attempts to do just that by acknowledging, inter alia, developments in the sociolog y of science, contract theory (as a metaphorical recasting of the science-society relationship), the Habermasian theory of cognitive interests, ideas on disciplinarity, the historical indeterminacy of psychology's subject and the discipline's vexed relations hip with the phenomenon of rapid social change. The paper concludes that notions about ‘relevance’, while rooted ostensibly in material concerns, are expressed unavoidably in predominantly rhetorical terms, mirroring stubborn controversies between proponents of realism and relativism. As far as a professional practice is concerned, in developing contexts where ‘relevance’ – translated as indigenization – guarantees political currency, the implications are potentially salutary but may also intersect with ideological configurations.

Social scientific inquiry and meta-theoretical fantasy: the case of International Relations

AbstractThe turn to the philosophy of scientific realism as a meta-theory for the study of International Relations manifests a reluctance to confront the basic problem of the relationship between philosophy and social scientific inquiry. Despite the realists' rejection of traditional empiricism, and particularly the instrumentalist account of scientific theory, the enthusiasm for realism neglects many of the same problems that, more than a generation earlier, were involved in the social scientific embrace of positivism. One of these problems was a lack of understanding regarding the character and history of the philosophy of natural science and its relationship and applicability to the study of social phenomena. Proponents of realism have also neither adequately articulated and defended realism as a philosophical position, and distinguished it from other perspectives, nor confronted the fundamental challenge to realism and other foundationalist philosophies which has been mounted by the contemporary critique of traditional representational philosophy.

International Law as Ideology: Theorizing the Relationship between International Law and International Politics

Theorization of the relationship of international law to the broader political system of which it is a sub-system is of relevance to scholars of international law and international relations. The dominant post-war paradigm in international relations has been realism, which dismisses international law as being virtually irrelevant to matters of 'high' politics. The process of international politics is accounted for by the concept of power and international law is regarded as having no intrinsic significance. The retention of a power-law dichotomy has effectively blocked moves towards a more sophisticated conceptualization of the significance of international law to international politics. It is understandable that, as a group, international lawyers have perceived little to be gained from dialogue with proponents of realism and have remained sheltered behind legal positivism. The two disciplines have for the most part remained comfortably disengaged on the subject And yet, international legal theorists have increasingly recognized their need for greater understanding of the politics of international law and stand to gain much

The Canterbury Tales: A Literary Pilgrimage by David Williams

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER been ampler throughout. What is a reader to make of an extraordinary word like "rewin" (in the first lyric quoted on p. 93), for example? This cettainlydemandsexplanation.Even so, theseare small points.The book is generally worthwhile and buttressed securely with scholarship. ALANJ. FLETCHER University College Dublin DAVID WILLIAMS. The Canterbury Tales: A Literary Pilgrimage. Twayne's Masterwork Studies, vol. 4. Boston: G. K. Hall, Twayne Publishers, 1987. Pp. X, 115. $17.95. The main argument ofthis short, shrewd study is that Chaucer "makes the problem of the function of language and poetry the very subject of his poetry" (p. 6). Aware that other critics (like Robert Burlin and Lisa Kiser) have made similar cases, Williams is concerned to show that this is so in the pilgrimage-framed Canterbury Tales: Basic to the pilgrimage is recognition of one's personal disorder and the desire to reconstruct order in the self through the discovery and reaffirmation of order in the world. In a pilgrimage like Chaucer's, created by the telling of tales with a confessional character, it is essential that the pilgrims, as audience, understand clearly the stories they hear, and that the pilgrims, as authors, understand the implications of their own stories, in order to perceive how these tales have ordered or disorderedtheworlds theydescribe. It is essential, that is, if fictionhas thepowerto redeem itself. [P. 53] In brief background chapters ("Historical Context," "The Philosophical Debate") Williams emphasizes Chaucer as a philosophical poet alert to contemporary debates between proponents of realism and nominalism. His ethical reading of the Tales (in a chapter entitled "Language Re­ deemed" that is half of the book) reveals Chaucer to be unsympathetic toward the nominalist view that language is "heuristic" and permits only relative meaning (p. 20). Particularly in the tales of those entertaining but deconstructively misleading pilgrims the Miller, the Wife of Bath, and the Pardoner(a "radical"nominalist),Williams seesvariousattempts at discon­ necting fiction from reality. Harry Bailly's reply to the Pardoner reflects not only the "common man's intuition" about mimesis (p. 85) but a general, 208 REVIEWS older Christian belief that "the basis of fiction is reality, and when that is removed all communication becomes expository" (p. 74). The Nun's Priest's Tale and The Parson's Tale insist on the stability of language, the former "by showing both the danger of its abuse in fiction and its inherent ability to correct that abuse," the latter "by clarifying and reaffirming the orthodox truths that through language can be applied to life," and they prepare for Chaucer's final statements on "right content and right lan­ guage" in the Retraction (p. 90). At that endpoint: Given Chaucer's formula for fiction, in which characters become authors, authors become audiences, and creatures become creators, we, as readers, discover through our association with Chaucer on this third level ofaudienceship that the existential formula is the reverse ofthe fictional: we, as audience, must become authors, and our stories will be, like those of the Canterbury pilgrims, as good as our lives. [P. 1031 Williams's claim that the Tales embodies Chaucer's mature poetics is convincing overall and in most of its details. Some passing observations couldhavebeen given more explanation:What are the "comicreasons" why Chaucer putsMelibee in prose (p. 37)? Is The Parson's Tale generically only a sermon, and for whom is it "boring" (pp. 38, 90)?Why does the Franklin "loathe" himself (p. 45)? Is the Reeve really aformer carpenter (p. SS)? Are the poor widow and her daughters in The Nun'.r Priests Tale undeniably "a standard medieval allegory of the Church" (p. 91)? And, whether or not that is the case, have they no other function? Had thisTwayne series allowed the author more space, he probably could have developed these assertions and tested his thesis against other tales besides the handful he analyzes at length. One broader sort of reservation. It is always a difficult assignment to write for a double audience such as the pair the Twayne series envisions ("an incisive critical reading...that is accessible to students"), and at times one notices a gap between the kernel ofWilliams's larger...

Testing for Convergent Realism

In “A Confutation of Convergent Realism,” Larry Laudan presents the realist with these fascinating challenges:What,then,of realism itself as a ‘scientific’ hypothesis?…If realism has made some novel predictions or been subjected to carefully controlled tests, one does not learn about it from the literature of contemporary realism. (1981, p. 46.)He then goes on to say:No proponent of realism has sought to show that realism satisfies those stringent empirical demands which the realist himself minimally insists on when appraising scientific theories. (1981, p. 46)Not only do I fully endorse what Laudan says in these passages, I think it is time to take him up on these challenges.Laudan’s position has been that scientific progress can be explained without having to appeal to verisimilitude. Instead, we explain the success of a scientific theory in terms of its subjugation to the cannons of experimental controls: those theories that have been put through proper testing during the course of their formulation are the ones that are most likely to be reliable. (1984, pp. 96-101)