Kuhn and Social Science

Abstract

The problems of realism and anti-realism are diffuse, ontological, and epistemological; roughly, they are problems of determining what exists and what can be known to exist. We are, accordingly, forced into some philosophical minefields with some huge consequences regarding the methodology and the goals and limits of social science. After explaining what common sense understands by realism, this entry reviews the rise of scientific realism and anti-realism; discusses the main issues involved in the realism/ anti-realism debate in social-scientific matters—that is, the issues of explanation, objectivity, and what it means to hold that reality is socially constructed; and ends by presenting a third kind of realism, called critical realism.