by I have argued against the postmodern tendency to flip from naive objectivism to relativism and idealism, from totalities to fragments, and from ethnocentrisms to new forms of self-contradictory cultural relativism. A realist approach shows us that we can escape from these alternatives. The Modernist project — and more specifically, critical social science — don’t need foundationalism or notions of absolute truth. They can be not only better understood but furthered through a critical realist interpretation. The new kinds of idealism and relativism that have infected postmodernist thought offer no support to critical social science, to anti-racism and feminism. Let us update Hume’s taunts against idealism: we will see how idealists — all those who bracket out reality, who
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Lars Pålsson Syll considers the following as important: Theory of Science & Methodology
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I have argued against the postmodern tendency to flip from naive objectivism to relativism and idealism, from totalities to fragments, and from ethnocentrisms to new forms of self-contradictory cultural relativism. A realist approach shows us that we can escape from these alternatives. The Modernist project — and more specifically, critical social science — don’t need foundationalism or notions of absolute truth. They can be not only better understood but furthered through a critical realist interpretation. The new kinds of idealism and relativism that have infected postmodernist thought offer no support to critical social science, to anti-racism and feminism.
Let us update Hume’s taunts against idealism: we will see how idealists — all those who bracket out reality, who imagine that knowledge is purely a matter of rhetoric and power, those who want to throw out reference and representation along with any concept of truth — fare when the meeting is ended. Truth being apparently purely a matter of convention or power and purely internal to theory and nothing to do with representation of some external ‘reality’, it will of course be easy for the anti-realists to change the conventions and leave through (the so-called) solid walls rather than through the doors of realist orthodoxy. And to add a dash of Bachelard, we shall see the difference between the nocturnal philosophies of the idealists and their diurnal realism, when at the end of the meeting, they sheepishly leave by the door.