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Realism
About: Realism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10799 publications have been published within this topic receiving 175785 citations.
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TL;DR: Vasquez's assessment of realism suffers from three serious flaws as discussed by the authors : his reliance on Imre Lakatos's (1970) model of scientific progress is problematic, because the Lakatosian model has been largely rejected by contemporary historians and philosophers of science.
Abstract: John Vasquez's assessment of realism suffers from three serious flaws. First, his reliance on Imre Lakatos's (1970) model of scientific progress is problematic, because the Lakatosian model has been largely rejected by contemporary historians and philosophers of science. Second, Vasquez understates the range and diversity of the realist research program and mistakenly sees disagreements among realists as evidence of theoretical degeneration. Finally, he overlooks the progressive character of contemporary realist theory, largely because he does not consider all the relevant literature. Disagreements within and across competing research programs are essential to progress and should be welcomed, but Vasquez's effort suggests that criticism will be most helpful when it seeks to do more than merely delegitimate a particular research tradition.
92 citations
TL;DR: The Evolutionary Challenge for moral realism as mentioned in this paper is the challenge to explain our having many true moral beliefs, given that those beliefs are the products of evolutionary forces that would be indifferent to the moral truth.
Abstract: The Evolutionary Challenge for moral realism is, roughly, the challenge to explain our having many true moral beliefs, given that those beliefs are the products of evolutionary forces that would be indifferent to the moral truth. This challenge is widely thought not to apply to mathematical realism. In this article, I argue that it does. Along the way, I substantially clarify the Evolutionary Challenge, discuss its relation to more familiar epistemological challenges, and broach the problem of moral disagreement. I conclude that there may be no epistemological ground on which to be a moral antirealist and a mathematical realist.
92 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that dilemmas inevitably emerge for the researcher before they make contact with the research setting, during the process of ethnographic research, and subsequently in the lengthy time taken to unravel the theoretical importance of the research after the fieldwork has ended.
Abstract: In this paper we argue that what is missing from many ethnographic accounts is a recognition that dilemmas inevitably emerge for the researcher before they make contact with the research setting, during the process of ethnographic research, and subsequently in the lengthy time taken to unravel the theoretical importance of the research after the fieldwork has ended. Using a comparison of two ethnographies as case studies, and by recourse to a realist methodology, such dilemmas are, we argue, overdetermined by many non-observable social structures that influence the everyday research process. We argue that specific mechanisms determine both the process and the outcome of the ethnographic journey in the before, during and after stages of research. For example we demonstrate how biography and the wider process of institutional knowledge production are two key resources that influence research practice. We use the term pragmatic realism as a means to reflect upon some of the connections between the dilemmas of research and real structures in these three stages.
92 citations