Companies are increasingly asked to provide innovative solutions to deep-seated problems of human misery, even as economic theory instructs managers to focus on maximizing their shareholders' wealt

Misery Loves Companies: Rethinking Social Initiatives by Business:

Qualitative researchers rely — implicitly or explicitly — on a variety of understandings and corresponding types of validity in the process of describing, interpreting, and explaining phenomena of ...

Understanding and Validity in Qualitative Research

Evidence-based policy is a dominant theme in contemporary public services but the practical realities and challenges involved in using evidence in policy-making are formidable. Part of the problem is one of complexity. In health services and other public services, we are dealing with complex social interventions which act on complex social systems--things like league tables, performance measures, regulation and inspection, or funding reforms. These are not 'magic bullets' which will always hit their target, but programmes whose effects are crucially dependent on context and implementation. Traditional methods of review focus on measuring and reporting on programme effectiveness, often find that the evidence is mixed or conflicting, and provide little or no clue as to why the intervention worked or did not work when applied in different contexts or circumstances, deployed by different stakeholders, or used for different purposes. This paper offers a model of research synthesis which is designed to work with complex social interventions or programmes, and which is based on the emerging 'realist' approach to evaluation. It provides an explanatory analysis aimed at discerning what works for whom, in what circumstances, in what respects and how. The first step is to make explicit the programme theory (or theories)--the underlying assumptions about how an intervention is meant to work and what impacts it is expected to have. We then look for empirical evidence to populate this theoretical framework, supporting, contradicting or modifying the programme theories as it goes. The results of the review combine theoretical understanding and empirical evidence, and focus on explaining the relationship between the context in which the intervention is applied, the mechanisms by which it works and the outcomes which are produced. The aim is to enable decision-makers to reach a deeper understanding of the intervention and how it can be made to work most effectively. Realist review does not provide simple answers to complex questions. It will not tell policy-makers or managers whether something works or not, but will provide the policy and practice community with the kind of rich, detailed and highly practical understanding of complex social interventions which is likely to be of much more use to them when planning and implementing programmes at a national, regional or local level.

Realist review - a new method of systematic review designed for complex policy interventions

Because new product development (NPD) teams are engaged in knowledge creation, NPD management should emphasize cognitive team processes rather than purely social processes. Using the notions of tac...

From Embedded Knowledge to Embodied Knowledge: New Product Development as Knowledge Management:

A National Research Council report, Scientific Research in Education, has elicited considerable criticism from the education research community, but this criticism has not focused on a key assumption of the report—its Humean, regularity conception of causality. It is argued that this conception, which also underlies other arguments for “scientifically-based research,” is narrow and philosophically outdated, and leads to a misrepresentation of the nature and value of qualitative research for causal explanation. An alternative, realist approach to causality is presented that supports the scientific legitimacy of using qualitative research for causal investigation, reframes the arguments for experimental methods in educational research, and can support a more productive collaboration between qualitative and quantitative researchers.

Causal Explanation, Qualitative Research, and Scientific Inquiry in Education

Hilary Putnam calls upon philosophers to attend to the gap between the present condition of their subject and the human aspirations that philosophy should and once did claim to represent. Putnam's goal is to embed philosophy in social life. – The first part of this book is dedicated to metaphysical questions. Putnam rejects the contemporary metaphysics that insists on describing both the mind and the world from a God's-eye view. In its place he argues for pluralism, for a philosophy that is not a closed systematic method but a human practice connected to real life. Philosophy has a task, to be sure, but it is not to provide an inventory of the basic furniture of the universe or to separate reality in itself from our own projections. Putnam makes it clear that science is not in the business of describing a ready-made world, and philosophy should not be in that business either. The author moves on to show that the larger human context in which science matters is a world of values animated by ethics and aesthetic judgments. No adequate philosophy should try to explain away ethical facts. The dimension of history is added in the third part of the book. Here Putnam takes up a set of American philosophers, some firmly within and others outside the canon of analytic philosophy, such as William James and C. S. Peirce, and he explores the pragmatist contribution to philosophy from James to Quine and Goodman. – Contents : Introduction [by James Conant]. – Part 1 : Metaphysics. 1. Realism with a Human Face (A. Realism; B. Relativism); 2. A Defense of Internal Realism; 3. After Empiricism; 4. Is Water Necessarily H2O?; 5. Is the Causal Structure of the Physical Itself Something Physical?; 6. Truth and Convention; 7. Why Is a Philosopher?; 8. The Craving for Objectivity. – Part 2 : Ethics and Aesthetics. 9. Beyond the Fact/Value Dichotomy; 10. The Place of Facts in a World of Values; 11. Objectivity and the Science/Ethics Distinction; 12. How Not to Solve Ethical Problems; 13. Taking Rules Seriously; 14. Scientific Liberty and Scientific License; 15. Is There a Fact of the Matter about Fiction?. – Part 3 : Studies in American Philosophy. 16. William James’s Ideas [with Ruth Anna Putnam]; 17. James’s Theory of Perception; 18. Peirce the Logician; 19. The Way the World Is; 20. The Greatest Logical Positivist; 21. Meaning Holism; 22. Nelson Goodman’s Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. – Notes. Credits. Index. M.-M. V.

Realism with a human face

Hilary Putnam has been convinced for some time that the present situation in philosophy calls for revitalization and renewal; in this book he shows us what shape he would like that renewal to take. "Words and Life" offers an account of the sources of several of the central problems of philosophy, past and present, and of why some of those problems are not going to go away. As the first four part titles in the volume suggest - "The Return of Aristotle", "The Legacy of Logical Positivism", "The Inheritance of Pragmatism" and "Essays after Wittgenstein" - many of the essays are concerned with tracing the recent, and the not so recent, history of these problems. The goal is to bring out what is coercive and arbitrary about some of our present ways of posing the problems and what is of continuous interest in certain past approaches to them. Various supposedly timeless philosophical problems appear, on closer inspection, to change with altered historical circumstances; while there turns out to be much of permanent value in Aristotle's, Peirce's, Dewey's and Reichenbach's work on some of the problems that continue to exercise us. A unifying theme of the volume as a whole is that reductionism, scientism and old-style disenchanted naturalism tend to be obstacles to philosophical progress. As the titles of the final three parts of the volume indicate - "Truth and Reference", "Mind and Language" and "The Diversity of the Sciences" - the sweep of the problems considered here comprehends all the fundamental areas of contemporary analytic philosophy.

Words and life

Dans le cadre du colloque consacre a l'essai de Wittgenstein sur «La certitude», organise par H. E. Mason a l'universite du Minnesota en octobre 1996, l'A. etudie la conception du non-sens developpee par Wittgenstein en reponse a la refutation du scepticisme entreprise par Moore. Soulignant l'incompatibilite de la proposition et du contexte de son utilisation, et examinant l'interpretation proposee par M. McGinn, l'A. montre que le probleme souleve dans «La certitude» releve de la definition de la signification chez Frege, d'une part, et montre comment la philosophie tardive de Wittgenstein realise une generalisation du principe fregeen du contexte a l'ensemble des jeux de langage, d'autre part

James Conant

Papers

Realism with a human face

Words and life

Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use

The Method of the Tractatus

The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege, and the Tractatus