Beyond Positivism: Re-Imagining the Social Sciences?

We have built a Critical Realist movement within North American sociology with allies in neighboring disciplines including psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and theology. We have mounted a serious challenge to both sociological positivism and cultural relativism and successfully reignited debate about realism and human flourishing amongst our colleagues. We have forcefully argued for the reality of human persons who are able to act freely in an open world. We now wish to broaden, deepen, and institutionalize this movement and with it, social scientific forms of moral enquiry. In this planning grant, we propose some intermediate steps towards that goal: i) comprehensive surveys of theory and methods training and ii) research on morality and ethics within contemporary sociology. This will help us to refine an effective strategy of long-term change that will inform a follow-up proposal. Additional goals of this grant include: developing a touchstone book series and online course, both addressing questions of realism, science, morality, and human flourishing. Our long-term ambition is to reopen the big questions in social science that once animated the discipline’s founders: questions about human purpose and common goods.