Research Catalog

Title

Social science : beyond constructivism and realism / Gerard Delanty.

Author

Delanty, Gerard.

Publication

Minneapolis, Minn. : University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

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Holdings

Details

Description

x, 159 pages; 22 cm.

Summary

• This concise and comprehensive volume provides an accessible overview of the main debates on the sociology and philosophy of the social sciences from the contemporary perspective of radical reflexivity and democratization. From its origins in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when a new system of knowledge was created around the idea of modernity, the author tracts the transformation of modern conceptions of social science as a cognitive system and as an institution.
• Focusing on the rise of positivism in the age of the Enlightenment to its final collapse in the twentieth century, Delanty argues how social science is today recovering its role as the critical voice of modernity and examines the positivist dispute from post-empiricist perspectives. It is argued that the conception of social science emerging today is one that involves a synthesis of radical constructivism and critical realism.
• The crucial challenge facing social science is a question of its public role: growing reflexivity in society has implications for the social production of knowledge and is bringing into question the separation of expert systems from other forms of knowledge.
• This is one of the most ambitious and wide-ranging texts in recent years on debates about the contemporary situation of social science. It will be of strong interest to undergraduates and postgraduates in the social sciences as well as to professional researchers working in the areas of the philosophy of social science, the sociology of science and knowledge, and social and political theory.

Series Statement

Concepts in social thought

Uniform Title

Concepts in social thought.

Subject

• Social sciences

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction: Crisis or Transition? -- 1. Positivism, Science and the Politics of Knowledge -- 2. Hermeneutics and Interpretation: The Search for Meaning -- 3. The Dialectical Imagination: Marxism, Critique and Emancipation -- 4. Communication and Reconstruction: Habermas, Apel and the Search for a Synthesis -- 5. Deconstructionism and Postmodernism: The Problem of Indeterminacy -- 6. New Debates: Constructivism and Realism -- 7. Conclusion: Social Science as Discursive Practice.

ISBN

• 0816631263 (alk. paper)
• 0816631271 (pbk. : alk. paper)

LCCN

97033615

OCLC

• 37331728
• ocm37331728

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries