Tag Archives: critical realism

Quote by Silvia Merler/Bruegel mentioning Lars, with a shoutout to Brian Romanchuk.Lars P. Syll’s BlogThe DSGE quarrel Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo UniversityMore from LarsEconomic history — a victim of economics imperialism Empirical economics and statistical power

Critical realism proposes an approach to the social world that pays particular attention to objective and material features of the social realm -- property relations, impersonal institutional arrangements, supra-individual social structures. Between structure and agent, CR seems most often to lean towards structures rather than consciously feeling and thinking agents. And so one might doubt whether CR has anything useful to offer when it comes to studying the subjective side of social...

Critical realists share a rejection of the fact-value distinction as a fundamental criterion of scientific rationality -- and rightly so (link). They believe that social research and theorizing involve value commitments all the way down. Further, they commonly believe that good social science should lead to improvement in the world and in our system of moral judgments. So far, so good. But some critical realists think that this points to "moral realism" as well as scientific realism. Moral...