16 results
Bibliography
- Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, Philadelphia
-
- Book:
- Reconstructing Sociology
- Published online:
- 05 April 2016
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2015, pp 221-236
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
1 - Seven myths of American sociology
- Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, Philadelphia
-
- Book:
- Reconstructing Sociology
- Published online:
- 05 April 2016
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2015, pp 1-30
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
What Is Critical Realism (CR) And Who Needs it?
Let us take the second question first. Sociology, particularly American sociology, needs CR. In the United Kingdom (UK) and elsewhere, it is already known. You might need CR as well. Are you unconvinced that a regression equation constitutes an explanation but do not quite know what does? Are you equally incredulous that ethnography and historical narrative do not explain? Maybe you hold the heretical view that not all reality is socially constructed but wonder how to formulate this counter case. Are you perhaps troubled by what various perspectives in sociology do with human personhood – decentering it, dissolving it into discourse, or otherwise deconstructing it? Perhaps you harbor doubts about the posture of value freedom that is supposed to characterize science. If these and other such disquieting thoughts about sociology fail to trouble you, carry on: You do not need CR. Otherwise, you do – at least a discussion about it.
This book is about CR and the contribution it can make to sociology. It is a book for those devoted to sociology who, nevertheless, are troubled by its current guiding assumptions. And sociology does have current guiding assumptions. All intellectual endeavors do. We may not notice them, but they are there. They exist at the level of presuppositions.
Sociologists are good at calling on others to recognize their presuppositions. Presuppositions are important, we tell them, because our presuppositions underlie and shape everything we do. Presuppositions determine what we think about our country and ourselves. They underlie and shape what we think is normal or deviant. Presuppositions shape how we think about criminality and poverty and religion.
Presuppositions are thus crucial to our current behavior and to the most radical changes we can make for the better – in ourselves, in our society, in the world. The word radical comes from the Latin, meaning root. So a radical shift or change is one that begins at the roots. A radical change is thus deeper, more thoroughgoing than one that affects life only farther up the stem. And under the surface, the roots of our thinking are our presuppositions.
Reconstructing Sociology
- The Critical Realist Approach
- Douglas V. Porpora
-
- Published online:
- 05 April 2016
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2015
-
Critical realism is a philosophy of science that positions itself against the major alternative philosophies underlying contemporary sociology. This book offers a general critique of sociology, particularly sociology in the United States, from a critical realist perspective. It also acts as an introduction to critical realism for students and scholars of sociology. Written in a lively, accessible style, Douglas V. Porpora argues that sociology currently operates with deficient accounts of truth, culture, structure, agency, and causality that are all better served by a critical realist perspective. This approach argues against the alternative sociological perspectives, in particular the dominant positivism which privileges statistical techniques and experimental design over ethnographic and historical approaches. However, the book also compares critical realism favourably with a range of other approaches, including poststructuralism, pragmatism, interpretivism, practice theory, and relational sociology. Numerous sociological examples are included, and each chapter addresses well-known and current work in sociology.
8 - So what do we do with it?
- Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, Philadelphia
-
- Book:
- Reconstructing Sociology
- Published online:
- 05 April 2016
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2015, pp 209-220
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
First, let me answer a question not asked by the title: What do we not do with CR? I said it at the end of the last chapter, and Christian Smith says I always say it. I say it again here: CR is not a theory; therefore do not treat it as such. Strictly speaking, there is no CR explanation of anything. No more than there is a positivist or post-positivist account of this or that. What is the positivist theory of social stratification? There may be multiple theories of stratification all positivist in nature, but there is no particular theory that is singularly the positivist theory of stratification or of anything. The same goes for CR.
Like positivism, postmodernism, or pragmatism, CR is a metatheory rather than a theory. As such it parameterizes – from its criteria – what good theories are. Thus, it provides grounding for what it considers tenable research and challenge to research that departs from its premises. But that is all it does.
Is that enough? Enough to explain anything? No, but it is still something. Something needed and something important.
So how do we use CR? In the first place we use it for defense and for attack. We know that from the positivist point of view, which still reigns in sociology, that ethnography and historical narrative are suspect. Not so from the standpoint of CR. From the standpoint of CR, neither of these approaches is second best. Instead, from a CR perspective, even purely descriptive work is scientifically important. It is important to know what is out there, especially if attention has not previously been drawn to what is described and especially if, in the process, what is identified is described in theoretical language that highlights the significance of what is identified.
From a CR perspective as well, neither ethnography nor historical narrative need encompass only description. Insofar as CR separates causation from generality, ethnographic description of operative mechanisms can contribute to causal explanation even if what operates does so in only one place and time. Historical narrative, on the other hand, is the only way to bring together the causal effects of conjunctures of mechanisms. As I said before, narrative, not a regression equation, is the canonical form of a CR explanation as it is of any scientific account of anything in the real world outside the laboratory.
Dedication
- Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, Philadelphia
-
- Book:
- Reconstructing Sociology
- Published online:
- 05 April 2016
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2015, pp v-vi
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
4 - Whatever happened to social structure?
- Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, Philadelphia
-
- Book:
- Reconstructing Sociology
- Published online:
- 05 April 2016
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2015, pp 96-128
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
“‘When I use a word,’” said Humpty Dumpty, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’”
When it comes to social structure, sociology has been like Humpty Dumpty. Over 20 years ago, in an article well-known among critical realists, I identified four different conceptions of social structure prevalent in sociology. Today, those four conceptions are still very much with us, attesting to a definite stability in the discipline.
Does it matter what we individually call social structure, as long as we each know what we are talking about? Certainly, we cannot legislate meaning, and it is foolish to argue about mere semantics. But more than semantics is at stake. With different conceptions of social structure come different research agendas, emphasizing different aspects of social ontology. As William Sewell insightfully notes, “the term structure empowers what it designates.” Conversely, disempowered is what it ceases to designate.
Consider, as I have noted, that the American culture of poverty debate in the 1960s pitted culture against structure – specifically the opportunity structure – as rival explanations of chronic poverty with rival policy implications. As noted, that debate has recently returned, along with the rival policy implications. But now that on one prominent view – the one in fact favored by Sewell – structure has virtually been devoured by culture or in Margaret Archer's terms conflated with it, how do we even formulate the former opposition? Would-be advocates of a structural view are deprived even of the words with which to speak.
This chapter will revisit the four concepts of social structure I identified some 20 years ago. It will again state the case for the CR conception of social structure against its mainstream rivals. Over the 20 years since that article, mainstream American sociology has not challenged but only ignored the CR view and the case for it. Such is the prerogative of epistemic dominance.
Today, however, the terms of debate are a bit different. New actors have entered the scene and one of the rival views has been amended – although not in a way that alters the CR critique. The critique now can also be put more sharply.
5 - Are we not men – or, rather, persons?
- Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, Philadelphia
-
- Book:
- Reconstructing Sociology
- Published online:
- 05 April 2016
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2015, pp 129-158
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
For those too young to remember, the title of this chapter is an homage to the punk band, Devo, whose name signified its charge that, at least in America, humans were no longer evolving; instead we were devolving or going backward. From what were we devolving? If we exchange the sexist designation men, we arrive at persons and at personhood as an ontological category.
Whether American society is devolving is a theoretical question that needs to be answered empirically. Whether American sociology is devolving is a question that is metatheoretical in nature. Within sociological theory, if the category of person is not quite devolving, it is at least under sustained attack from multiple directions.
What is a person? The question is the title of a CR book by Christian Smith. He needs to ask because in sociology, we rarely speak of persons or of personhood. We speak rather of the self, as do the Symbolic Interactionists or as in poststructuralist circles of the subject or Cartesian subject. Person, though, is the technical term used in philosophy and law and is the term critical realists tend to favor.
Although person more or less coincides with what we in sociology call the self, it bears different connotations. Whereas the self conveys an image of something floating inside us, some mysterious I and me that we need to locate, person is not something we have but something we are. Put in sociological terms, persons do not have selves; they are selves. The full meaning of that declaration is something in this chapter we will explore further.
In Chapter 4 I spoke in passing of zombies. As I write, zombies are hot; in film and on television, they have replaced vampires as the favored denizen of the supernatural. Wikipedia provides a very apt definition of zombie: “a hypnotized person bereft of consciousness and self-awareness, yet ambulant and able to respond to surrounding stimuli.”
Re-read Wikipedia's definition of zombie and behold: It also describes in nuce what has become of persons in much contemporary sociological theory. Contemporary sociological theory is uncomfortable with persons, selves, or Cartesian subjects. Contemporary sociological theory does not want consciousness or at least centered, reflective, self-aware consciousness. It expressly does not want intentionality. In their place, contemporary sociological theory wants – at most – the unconscious, hypnotized responsiveness to surrounding stimuli of Bourdieu's habitus.
6 - What and where is culture?
- Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, Philadelphia
-
- Book:
- Reconstructing Sociology
- Published online:
- 05 April 2016
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2015, pp 159-187
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Having gone through structure and agency, now, with culture, we come to the C portion of Margaret Archer's SAC. It is Archer's own Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory that represents the major CR statement on this topic, and for Archer, culture needs to be treated in parallel with structure. That parallel means in the first instance to treat culture as something analytically distinct from agency. The two obviously interrelate causally, just as structure and agency interrelate causally. But, again, for two things to interrelate causally, they must be ontologically distinct. It is that ontological distinctness of culture and agency that first marks Archer's CR view.
Of course, for Archer and CR, structure and culture also are distinct. Neither reduces to the other. Whereas structure, as I have said, refers to social organizational relations, for Archer culture refers to intelligibilia.
What does Archer mean by intelligibilia? Intelligibilia are anything with meaningful content produced by social intentionality. That formulation itself requires unpacking. As I made clear in the previous chapter, intentionality and reasoned motivation lie somewhere behind all human action. Action in turn can be social in two respects. It can be motivated or informed by social phenomena – such as rules, myths or ideologies. It can also be socially oriented as is anything designed to communicate to or to otherwise influence others. And, of course, what is social can be both informed by and oriented to what is social.
Because intelligibilia express intentionality, intelligibilia require hermeneutical interpretation to understand or explain. Why do I invoke this clumsy-sounding locution, hermeneutical interpretation? Ironically, for the sake of clarity. In one sense, to understand anything requires interpretation. It requires a kind of interpretation, for example, to discern whether or not in the cosmic background radiation, there is evidence that our universe once inflated astronomically. That kind of interpretation, however, is not the kind we mean when we speak of specifically hermeneutical interpretation.
What is distinctive of the kind of interpretation we mean when we speak of hermeneutical interpretation? The simplest answer is it refers to the distinction the interpretivists or Verstehen sociologists invoke to mark the difference between the natural and the human. Whereas natural phenomena, they say, need to be explained causally, human phenomena need to be understood hermeneutically. Whereas the former involves laws, the latter involves reasons.
Acknowledgments
- Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, Philadelphia
-
- Book:
- Reconstructing Sociology
- Published online:
- 05 April 2016
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2015, pp viii-x
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
7 - Do we need critical realism?
- Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, Philadelphia
-
- Book:
- Reconstructing Sociology
- Published online:
- 05 April 2016
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2015, pp 188-208
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Again, please forgive the predictability. I am hardly going to answer this chapter's title question negatively. Clearly, I would not have brought you this far to conclude that we do not need CR after all.
The point of this chapter is to bring everything together, to see how CR compares in terms of similarities and differences with various other theoretical and philosophical positions in sociology. My hope is that even if you are un-persuaded by what I have said so far about CR, the discussion here will at least help you better navigate through the thicket of philosophical commitments across sociological perspectives.
I speak of philosophical commitments, and hopefully by this time it is clear we cannot escape them. We have them and they influence us, whether we recognize them or not. Such being the case, as we sociologists counsel others, so should we think critically ourselves. We should make sure that the positions to which we are philosophically committed are the those that are most defensible.
Although much good social science can still come from faulty philosophical premises, it will not be the best social science it could be. With faulty philosophical premises, moreover, much that might be potentially good social science will not even be entertained. Under the long dominant positivism, for example, ethnography has been devalued and discouraged. Under CR, it is not. So there is a pragmatic payoff here. Like the pragmatists, we in CR – or at least I – do not believe in philosophizing without practical point. However long our sojourn in philosophy may last, our work there should all ultimately relate back to some practical problem of life. In this case, the practical problem is how we best go about doing social science – and how, even more pertinently – we avoid practicing a sham discipline, one that looks like science but is not.
I promised that in this chapter there would be a handy chart, and there it is as Table 7.1. It will facilitate our task of examining similarities and differences across theoretical positions. First, I need to explain a bit what you are seeing, and the first thing to say is that the chart is sort of a mixed bag as it includes both theoretical and metatheoretical positions. The top four positions are philosophical metatheories; the bottom nine are more standard theoretical perspectives in sociology.
Index
- Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, Philadelphia
-
- Book:
- Reconstructing Sociology
- Published online:
- 05 April 2016
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2015, pp 237-242
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Contents
- Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, Philadelphia
-
- Book:
- Reconstructing Sociology
- Published online:
- 05 April 2016
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2015, pp vii-vii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
2 - Do realists run regressions?
- Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, Philadelphia
-
- Book:
- Reconstructing Sociology
- Published online:
- 05 April 2016
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2015, pp 31-64
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The question posed by the title of this chapter has already been answered briefly in the introduction. Yes, critical realists do run regressions – and other analytical statistics – but not with the same understanding or point as positivists. The reason is that CR has a completely different understanding of causality and causal explanation. In this chapter we will take things slowly. We will begin by seeing why the positivist understanding of causality is completely untenable and why, if we replace it, there is no reason to deny causality in the human sphere as do the post-Wittgensteinians and their interpretivist followers in sociology.
The CR conception of sociology is associated with mechanisms and with emergence. In this book, I will speak sparingly of emergence. Although I believe in emergence and, as we will soon see, it is sometimes key, we can understand much of CR without raising the complications associated with it.
Mechanisms, on the other hand, are central. As Philip Gorski observes, mechanisms are now trendy, increasingly spoken of also by Symbolic Interactionists, historical sociologists, and rational choice theorists. Thus, one thing we will need to do is differentiate the CR conception from these others. Doing so will to some extent anticipate our discussion in Chapter 4, because the differences also involve differences in the ways we think of structure and agency.
Mechanisms, however, do not exhaust the CR approach to causality or its implications for plurality in research methods. According to CR, causal analysis proceeds at three different levels. First is the identification and description of causal mechanisms and causal powers; second is the invocation of those causal mechanisms and causal powers in narrative accounts of contingent, causal conjunctures. Narrative, not regression equations, is, according to CR, the canonical form of causal explanation – not just in the social sciences but in all open systems, including physics.
The final level at which causal analysis proceeds is the methodological adjudication among rival explanations and narratives. Just because we offer an explanation or narrative does not mean it is the right one. There may be better explanations or narratives. At this level, recapturing a fractured unity, CR embraces methodological pluralism.
3 - What is truth?
- Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, Philadelphia
-
- Book:
- Reconstructing Sociology
- Published online:
- 05 April 2016
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2015, pp 65-95
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The question posed by this chapter's title was, according to the New Testament, Pontius Pilot's retort to Jesus. Jesus had just declared himself the truth, effectively assigning himself what Roy Bhaskar would call Alethic truth and others Truth (with a big T), the ultimate truth behind “life, the universe, and everything.” Pilot, clearly a proto-postmodernist, was having none of it.
Today, especially with what postmodernists termed the “end of meta-narratives,” many liberal thinkers are hostile to any kind of Truth with a big T, religious or otherwise. They see assertions of such Truth as “totalizing,” as repressive of alternate ways of thinking and seeing. If they countenance at all the concept of truth, they prefer local, shifting truths, truth with a little t. One of my feminist comrades tells me that of course she believes in facts. It is only Truth with a big T she opposes. Others are phobic even to such modest talk of truth. They prefer truth-surrogates like robustness or, better yet, no overt reference to truth at all.
The twentieth century ended with a crisis of truth, and we are still in it. Witness the continued popularity of Jean Baudrillard. There is even an International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. According to Baudrillard, in our era, the possibility of truth has vanished. Baudrillard's argument is essentially a poststructuralist one: The very words we would use to speak of reality merely conjure other words, the whole a self-referential system that fails to make contact with wordless reality as it is in itself. As Jacques Derrida likewise put it, “Il n'y a pas hors-texte.”
Of course, as we already saw in our introduction, there remains the problem of performative contradiction. As speech acts, assertions ineluctably carry with them their own validity claims, among them that what is asserted is true. Severed from that validity claim, any putative assertion becomes unintelligible. Derrida's claim, for example, is meta-textual and so itself beyond its own textual announcement. So it is with Baudrillard. If we are to make any sense of Baudrillard's assertion, we must take him to be asserting it true that in our era, access to reality has passed. But then does not Baudrillard's own assertion imply contact with at least one reality, the possibility of which the assertion denies?
Frontmatter
- Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, Philadelphia
-
- Book:
- Reconstructing Sociology
- Published online:
- 05 April 2016
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2015, pp i-iv
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Operant Conditioning and Teleology
- Douglas V. Porpora
-
- Journal:
- Philosophy of Science / Volume 47 / Issue 4 / December 1980
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 April 2022, pp. 568-582
- Print publication:
- December 1980
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
This paper defends the relevance of Taylor's (1964) critique of S-R behaviorism to Skinner's model of operant conditioning. In particular, it is argued against Ringen (1976) that the model of operant conditioning is a nonteleological variety of explanation. Operant conditioning is shown unable, on this account, to provide a parsimonious and predictive explanation of the behavior of higher level organisms. Finally, it is shown that the principle of operant conditioning implicitly assumes a teleological capacity, the admission of which renders the principle of operant conditioning superfluous.