From criticism to conflationist sociology to morphogenetic critical realism in Margaret Archer

Abstract

This text reconstructs the general criticism to conflation formulated by Margaret Archer. In its social morphogenesis programme, Archer elaborates an acute diagnosis about the main deficits of different constructions of sociological object and she questioned them ontological and epistemologically through the figure of conflation, in which she distinguished three modes (downwards, upwards and central). Here we reconstruct each of them separately and we analyse the formulation in nuce the theoretical basis of critical and morphogenetic realism, a scientific research programme that she establishes as a non-conflation sociological way, supported by critical realism and analytical dualism. In doing so, we assume the systematic perspective of multileveled research programmes and the category of metatheorizing as prelude by Ritzer.