Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

A New Social Ontology of GovernmentScientific Realism and the Study of Government

A New Social Ontology of Government: Scientific Realism and the Study of Government [When we discuss governmentgovernment we refer to social entities, forces, and relations like these: organizationorganizations, agency, social networksocial networks, culturalculture scheme, social actorsocial actor, normativenormative systemsystemnormative system, institutioninstitutions, and local cultureculture. The fundamental question of social ontologyontology 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 realistsrealism 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.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A New Social Ontology of GovernmentScientific Realism and the Study of Government

Download PDF
17 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/a-new-social-ontology-of-government-scientific-realism-and-the-study-IKtY8TY7sH
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
ISBN
978-3-030-48922-9
Pages
17 –34
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-48923-6_2
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[When we discuss governmentgovernment we refer to social entities, forces, and relations like these: organizationorganizations, agency, social networksocial networks, culturalculture scheme, social actorsocial actor, normativenormative systemsystemnormative system, institutioninstitutions, and local cultureculture. The fundamental question of social ontologyontology 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 realistsrealism 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.]

Published: Jul 8, 2020

Keywords: Scientific realism; Critical realism; Causal mechanism; Causal power; Social causation; Morphogenesis

There are no references for this article.