Post-structuralism exchanges the undesirable situation of lack of communication between the social sciences for the equally undesirable one where the internal logic of each subdiscipline is completely ignored. To be specific, there is little satisfaction with the present status quo… Read More ›
General Theory Stuff 
What’s the point of sociological theory?
By maintaining its specialized logic and orientation it is capable of providing a set of conceptual tools that can operate as a theoretical lingua franca, as a flexible vocabulary with no foundationalist pretensions, which can help sociologists establish bridges between… Read More ›
Moral behaviour in animals
In this talk the primatologist Frans de Waal explains the transition underway from a tendency to construe animal behaviour (including the human animal) in terms of competition, aggression and domination to a new understanding of a pervasive capacity for cooperation and empathy. It’s… Read More ›
Moving beyond abstracted dichotomies in sociological treatments of decision making
Back when I planned to do a PhD in political philosophy, I was extremely interested in Michael Sandel’s critique of John Rawls. Particularly his attack on what he claimed was Rawl’s notion of an ‘unencumbered self’: Now the unencumbered self describes… Read More ›
Catnets: my new favourite concept (and not *just* because of the name)
Catnets exist where a set of actors are both internally densely networked in a relevant and meaningful manner and also share a common ‘category’ or ‘collective identity’. Actors can belong to a common category and even adhere to a common… Read More ›
A Realist Approach to Semiotics
Semiosis is multi-functional (Jakobson 1990; Halliday 1994). It is simultaneously referential (or propositional, or ideational), social-relational (or interpersonal), and expressive. Thus, in the Habermasian terms introduced earlier, semiosis raises validity claims of truth, appropriateness and truthfulness/sincerity. Though it should hardly need saying, we insist… Read More ›
What critical realists mean when they go on about the ‘real’, the ‘actual’ and the ‘empirical’…
critical realists distinguish the real from the actual and the empirical. The ’real’ refers to objects, their structures or natures and their causal powers and liabilities. The ‘actual’ refers to what happens when these powers and liabilities are activated and produce… Read More ›
Social theory and social research – what went wrong?
Underlying much sociological explanation is an attempt to bridge the gap between the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’ within the context of a specific empirical inquiry. As the authors put it, “in the human and behavioural sciences, the analytical connection or… Read More ›
Rehabilitating ‘essences’
It’s difficult to express quite how much I agree with the passage below. Historically, some justified objections to specific understandings of essence led to a repudiation of the concept in its entirety. As Christian Smith points out there has been… Read More ›
The politics of relationality
it is especially surprising when the political Left embraces relational ontology (I am astonished that Peter Hallward defends such an ontology), because nothing is more politically reactionary than the idea that we are all exhaustively the products of our context…. Read More ›
An eerily poetic defence of ontology
The ostensibly revolutionary transition from consciousness to language still leaves humans in absolute command as the primary subject matter of philosophy. All that happens is that the lucid, squeaky-clean ego of phenomenology is replaced by a more troubled figure- a… Read More ›
Postmodernism and the Three ‘Pomo Flips’
Faced with theoretical or philosophical positions that seem untenable, it is tempting to counter them by reversing or inverting them, for example, responding to empiricism’s belief in the rooting of knowledge in empirical observation by claiming knowledge to be independent… Read More ›
