Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour最新文献

Emergence is central to critical realism, but there has been little attempt to develop a systematic account of this concept within the tradition. Two notable exceptions are seen in the work of Dave Elder-Vass and Tony Lawson. However, both face problems in responding to reductionist claims and accounting for downward causation. This paper proposes contextual emergence as a robust alternative that overcomes these issues and provides a better justification for critical realism's stratified worldview. Contextual emergence explains that while properties at a lower ‘level’ offer necessary conditions, for emergence to obtain, there must also be contingent conditions at a higher ‘level’. This approach maintains many of critical realism's intuitions about emergence, providing a robust account of ontological stratification and downward causation.

Connecting the critical realist morphogenetic model to insights made by Nicholas Rescher, this paper argues that our predictions are always subject to chance and contingency but nevertheless ineluctably useful for both practical and scientific inquiry. Contingency results from the causal openness of the world, including the causal openness of our own decision-making. On the other hand, as Rescher notes, human interaction would fail without a degree of stability, which makes the predictions of morphostatic relations if not lawlike at least predictable in a practical sense. Nor is it just habit that makes for morphostasis. Human agents strive reflectively to produce in morphostatic ways the human goods they have created by their interaction. And beyond individual actors, there is, from the critical realist point of view, the combined effects of structure and culture inclining at least in the short-term to reliably predictable if not lawlike outcomes. With that background, the paper reflects on the dual role of coincidence in social theory, on the one hand signalling contingency and the other on what, according to the active causal mechanisms, generally co-occur.

Animacy is an important framework through which humans view and categorize the world, but many objects do not easily fit within this scale. Plants are unique because they are very familiar to humans, yet the features and traits relevant for placement within the animacy scale are generally poorly understood by the public. Animacy occurs at three levels, with the inherent attributes of the object (biology), how they are perceived (cognition), and how they are expressed in languages (linguistics). Animacy is dependent on qualification and perception as alive, mobile, and intentional. In the absence of visible movement, classification is dependent on featural attributes indicating mobility or placement in a group recognized as animate (animalness). Plants have complicated bodies whose forms and structures are frequently clear representations of their life history and function (plantness), more than many animals, yet these signs of movement and activity are rarely recognized. The animacy scale may be more closely based on human similarity (humanness) with humans as the peak of life, mobility, and intentionality. As humans, we can have an anthropocentric viewpoint, rendering plants as scenery or utility, or use anthropomorphic interaction to better understand and recognize the dynamic lives of plants. The goal of this review is to compare the current evidence on the placement of plants within animacy and adjacent scales with the biology and habit of land plants, to better understand human perception and behaviour, and work with this process to educate and inform people about the complex lives of plants.

I will argue that from a CR perspective, social reality is complex. It just is not complex in the ways CT suggests. Even emergence, according to CR, is more complex and stronger than CT suggests. First wave CR is enough to advance the issue considerably, but I will also examine dialectical CR as a further attempt within CR to take account of complexity.

This article examines the gradual evolution of the French Régulation school (FR) for the study of capitalism through the lens of structure and agency. The analysis first segments the school into two epochs, the early Régulation, led by authors Aglietta and Lipietz, and the later Régulation, which saw the rise of Boyer. We find that the gradual progression that occurred within the FR school is linked to its authors' implicit ontic engagement with structure and agency, which, in turn, provides natural linkages to Critical Realism. In the second part of the paper, we demonstrate how the comparison between Morphogenetic Régulation and French Régulation (FR) can facilitate a much deeper reading of the structure-agency debate pertaining to the transformation of capitalism. In so doing, it discusses the value addedness of Morphogenetic Régulation through three specific concepts by stressing their relevance for contemporary studies in international political economy. These concepts are: stratified emergence; causality and the problématique of hierarchy.

This paper re-examines a key feature of Emile Durkheim's sociology of knowledge from a critical realist perspective. It is argued that Durkheim's attempt to establish a social basis for the categories in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life should be understood along ontological rather than epistemological lines. This brings to light new problems with the argument which, however, can be brought fruitfully into contact with the more recent social psychological literature on collective intentionality. This yields insights into future lines of inquiry into social cognition and theories of human conceptualizing capacities.