The dominant position for some time on the metaphysics of sex and gender within feminist theory has been an anti-realist position. Roughly, gender is viewed as cultural, and sex, rather than being biological, is viewed as epiphenomenal on gender. I would summarize the main arguments for this position in the following four claims: (1) a claim about the fluid variability of all categorizations, which means that categories are subject to (even reducible to) ideological manipulation or radically incommensurable cultural and historical alteration, (2) a claim about the mediated nature of all descriptions, including the descriptions implicit in categorizations, (3) a claim about the inevitably prescriptive effects of description, and (4) a claim that objectivism about sexual difference will serve to reinforce compulsory heterosexuality. Against these four points, I will argue that there are persuasive grounds for an objective rather than arbitrary account of sex categories, that objectivity does not require an escape from mediation in human knowledge, and that the tendency for descriptive accounts to become prescriptive is a variable rather than uniform or absolute tendency, and can be offset. I will argue that the objective basis of sex categories is in the differential relationship to reproductive capacity between men and women, but that a sexual categorization based on the biological division of reproductive labour does not establish a necessary link between reproduction beyond conception (which is the only meaningful sense of reproduction for human beings) and heterosexuality. Thus, I argue for a realist position on sex difference.
 

One of the key contributions of critical realism is the postulation of ontological depth. Retaining the notion of 'open system', in this paper I argue that because generative mechanisms in the human social realm can only be understood as historical outcomes of past occurrences (mainly as the reproduced or transformed outcomes of human doings), an ontological domain that embraces 'history', characterised as much by the lack of co-presence of its actual parts as by its efficacious causality, deserves to be considered. Translating these notions to the historical sciences, I illustrate this position by drawing parallels between the historicity of human agents and that of materiality in archaeological thinking.

This paper illustrates (1) the contributions of natural theology in the study of economics and ontology and (2) the difference that metaphysics can make for economic policy.  Following Malthus, Paley and Sumner, I use natural theology to assess the teleology of scarcity.  However, I employ the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and arrive at a completely different account of scarcity, and by extension, of economic life.  Using Aristotelean-Thomistic ontology, I advance a priori arguments for material sufficiency in light of the threefold causality of God (Final, Formal and Efficient Cause).  However, such material sufficiency is merely conditional; it is dependent on free and intelligent secondary causality.  Since only humans are intelligent and capable of acting freely and not by necessity, the proximate end of the economic order can be attained only through moral agency.

 There are at least two key differences between Thomistic ontology, on the one hand, and Malthus, Paley and Sumner’s natural theology, on the other hand, in their account of scarcity.  First, the former calls for systemic poor relief, while the latter is opposed to it.  Second, Malthusian theodicy sees economic life as being prodded by necessity and the threat of hunger, while Thomistic metaphysics views economic life as a venue for participating in a divine goodness proffered, received and then communicated.  Thomistic ontology and natural theology have much to contribute to philosophers’ and economists’ interest in the ontology of economic life.

In his development of a theory of ‘practice’ Pierre Bourdieu appeals to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as offering a new ontological framework for understanding the social world that transcends the long standing antinomy between different versions of ‘subjectivist’ and ‘objectivist’ ontological views that have dominated traditional social science.  In particular, Bourdieu takes Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations as raising a powerful argument against certain ‘intellectualist’ understandings of the social world.  In this paper, I argue that whilst Bourdieu’s Wittgensteinian attack of these ‘intellectualist’ ontological views is convincing, his proposed ontological framework developed in terms of ‘habitus’ and ‘practices’ runs into ‘Wittgensteinian’ problems of its own.  Specifically, I argue that Bourdieu underestimates the ontological (as opposed to just epistemological) nature of Wittgenstein’s rule-scepticism.  I develop my critique by appeal to some of the ideas presented by Saul Kripke in his account of Wittgenstein’s rule-following passages.  In my concluding section, I explore the implications of this critique not only in terms of an assessment of Bourdieu’s framework but for ontological theorising in social theory more generally. 

We are experiencing a situation of increasing criticism on the state in which economics is being represented nowadays. One of the remarks is that economics has become too formalized and too abstract and that the state of the discipline has become increasingly unable to express many phenomena of “real life” in terms of concrete socio-economic, cultural, regional and historic specifics. In this sense, criticism has found a way to get cumulated in terms of “heterodox economics”, “post autistic economics”, socio-economics or institutionalism which are new platforms to describe alternative approaches. The claim for fostering interdisciplinary research which we also find in recent times reflects the same diagnosis that our islands of shared knowledge have become too fragmented.

The development of academic thought during the twentieth century is marked by a rapid and continual process of accumulation of a vast quantity of scientific material. If we narrow down the field and consider merely economics and social sciences, a drastic accumulation of academic output is evident during the course of the twentieth century. The result is that economics and social sciences find themselves in a totally different position at the beginning of the twenty-first century than they occupied at the end of the nineteenth or beginning of the twentieth.

What is the background to this change? The increasing consolidation and delimitation of economics and the social sciences is of prime importance. Economic subjects have become separated from social sciences institutionally and have themselves been divided into national economics, public finance and business studies in the process. Social sciences for their part have separated into autonomous subjects: history, sociology, political science, pedagogy, media studies, geography and a few others.

Even at the beginning of the twentieth century prominent academics held professorships and chairs in the fields of national economics, business studies and social sciences. National economics existed without competition as a subject, since professorships for the newer subjects, such as sociology, that have now become standard, still did not exist. These academics concerned themselves with themes, which, from the modern standpoint, are the property of history, sociology, business studies, economics, legal or administrative sciences.

The proposed paper will deal with the topic. Aim of discussion is to underline that some specific reasons exist which are ultimately connected to the historic course in which the scientific development has run during the last hundred years or so. Much of the essence of current criticism is a criticism of formalism in social sciences and of the missing interplay between economics, history and sociology at least. A remarkable fact is that many contemporaries are not fully aware of the first battle of methods which was carried out by Carl Menger and Gustav Schmoller more then hundred years ago. This, still unsolved, first Methodenstreit contains some very principal arguments which provide a brilliant background to understand up-to-date debates. Although the debate between Menger and Schmoller was rather sketchy and polemically, the confrontation between inductive and deductive ways to generate scientific statements remains to be a classic piece. The proposed paper tries to embed recent discussion on ontology and the issue of realism versus formalism in the scenario of the history of economic thought since the first battle of methods in order to find out how much of recent thought reflects the situation of a hundred years ago.

This paper presents a novel interpretation and affirmation of Marx's initial arguments for the labour theory of value in Capital. The materialist principles that (i) powers are materially based, and (ii) ‘labour’ articulates nature and society, are developed so as to validate and emphasise Marx's opening arguments. This development is presented as a novel addition to existing critiques of ‘systematic dialectics’ and of ‘value form theory’. Though having some resemblance to critical realism, the materialist and dialectical underpinnings of the argument are drawn from the philosophy of E.V. Ilyenkov.

This paper develops some possibilities for a theoretical understanding of three current research and development projects in education. All three are being researched in various ways by combinations of education academics and others, but my involvement in each has prompted me to interrogate them for a common explanation of causes. I will argue that the theoretical frameworks of all three are inadequate and that a realist framework, centring on ontology, is a promising framework suitable to these and other investigations of learning environments. 

The first project is a reformulation of an Australian undergraduate teacher education course. The structure, content and presentation of this course is generally similar to many such courses offered in universities in Australia and elsewhere, and may be considered as a general liberal arts degree model. In the last few years, however, an alternative course has been run leading to the same qualifications, but in which the organisation and presentation of core subjects is markedly different. This is called the Knowledge Building Community (KBC) course, run initially as a pilot co-sponsored by the NSW Department of Education. The KBC course aims to develop a community of learners who work collegially and independently to build knowledge and skills, and who work regularly in schools with mentor teachers. It has resulted in a number of successes and has been recognised in several reports and reviews of teacher education and university education generally. However, there are barriers to expanding this mode into the mainstream course: it is more expensive, its philosophical underpinnings are not universally shared by academics and students, and it is logistically complex. 

The second is an evaluation and professional development consultancy in a primary (elementary) government school in New South Wales (NSW). This school receives supplementary funding because of several measures of socio-economic and other disadvantage, through the NSW Priority Schools Funding Plan (PSFP) and, as one of the 72 most needy of these, also through the Priority Action Schools (PAS) funding program of the NSW Government. The primary aim of this support is to ‘increase the capacity of the school’ using measures and initiatives identified by the schools themselves. These are schools with chronic difficulties in a range of areas, in which a succession of approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, education policy, social policy and structures have failed to achieve the results claimed for them. 

The third is the development and initial implementation of a technology supported visitation program for the site of the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney Australia, the Sydney Olympic Park. The site is embedded with rich educational content and offers a broad range of extended studies and investigations for school children. Briefly, school students will be able to study topics from across the curriculum that will start at school but extend to the Park in ways not previously available. They will be able to collect and analyse data at various site locations before, during and after their site visits, and work collaboratively with students at other schools and professionals such as scientists, designers, historians and politicians. A key element of this capability will be the use of swipe card and web-based technologies. However, to this point the processes of combining stakeholders’ expertise and interests have highlighted the lack of a common explanatory theory.

Central to a theoretical framework that can improve the understanding of all three projects is the notion of the learning environment, understood in terms of realist concepts of ontology. That is, learning takes place in, and is enabled and frustrated by, learning environments, which are not simply defined as the four walls of traditional classrooms. A realist perspective enables plausible critiques of a range of education and social policy approaches that do not work in at least some settings. It also generates plausible alternatives to existing approaches and accounts of novel approaches and events. Learning environments, understood as differentiated and stratified, provide a promising account of learning and direction for thinking about curriculum and pedagogy. 

The nature/culture relation is of crucial ethical significance: from ecology to surrogacy, and from questions of the nature of ‘evil’ to the grounding of notions of ‘human rights’, the relation between what is ‘given’ about human beings, and what is socially contingent, runs deep.  And yet recent ethical theory in the mainstream Anglophone tradition has tended to ignore, or to swerve around, both ontology and sociology.  From emotivism down to the later work of Rawls, there is a stubborn assumption (though manifest in different ways) that when it comes to normative theorising, opening up such issues makes for unnecessary or unwarranted clutter.  Meanwhile, in ‘continental’ traditions taking their cue either from Heidegger, from Levinas, from Habermas or from structuralism, there is a similar resistance to the idea that claims about ‘human nature’ might have any specific ethical resonance.  And despite the attention paid to historicity in the continental tradition, we find mirrored here (especially in postmodern and poststructralist thinking) the sociological deficit of its Anglophone counterpart – epitomized, perhaps, by those such as Judith Butler for whom the nature/culture distinction is itself always already a product of discourse (which in turn is installed as a kind of all-creating elan vital).  The result, I would argue, is that much of contemporary ethical theory is ill-equipped to deal with the relationship between ontology and sociology – or, put differently, between nature and culture. 

Taking these generalisations as a backdrop, this paper develops three main lines of argument.  One is that these deficits have tended to make most contemporary ethical dealings with nature (particularly in what has come to be known as ‘bioethics’) reductively empiricist and utilitarian.  Secondly, positions which attempt to escape ontological claims, or exclude them from the ethical domain (for instance, by severing the realms of ‘fact’ and ‘value’), fail to do so: like a lump in the carpet, they resurface elsewhere to disrupt the coherence of the position constructed.  In considering the scope for a distinctively realist ‘take’ on the nature/culture relation in ethics, I argue – in parallel to the work of Andrew Collier, rather than against its grain – that there is a crucial resource in the thinking of the Frankfurt School, and in particular that of Adorno.  In particular, Adorno’s conception of the relation between subject and object affords a perspective on the nature/culture relationship which avoids the tendency either to avoid confronting the complexity of that relation, or to resolve it in favour of one or other pole.

Some authors have signaled a realist orientation in Keynes’s thought (although many times assigning different meaning to this label). This paper will maintain that Keynes held an ontological, epistemic and logical-semantic realism. As recognized by those scholars, Moore’s philosophy have had a deep influence in Keynes´s realism. However, nobody has developed the possible influence of Franz Brentano. Instead, they have appraised the issue of Keynes’s realism from different traditions, frequently alien or posterior to Keynes. The paper will show that Brentano’s influence helps to a arrive at clarifying interpretation of Keynes’s realism and of his key notion of intuition. It will also maintain that this is the central contribution of Keynes’s epistemology.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the development of a critical realist political theory which will aid constructive thinking about the nature of emancipation and the means of its achievement. It follows Bhaskar in taking its understanding of emancipation from the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia and therefore takes citizenship as its core concept. Focusing on capacities, rather th an rights, it looks to the communicative theories of the Toronto School (Innis, McLuhan, Ong) to provide an understanding of the development of citizenship and the arts of communication.

Although Roy Bhaskar’s ontology in A Realist Theory of Science is explicitly stratified, he makes little attempt to examine the basis of stratification, or the implications of a stratified reality for his three domains of the empirical, the actual, and the real. This paper attempts to remedy that deficiency, by examining the impact of emergence on our understanding of experiences, events, entities, and, most significantly, causes. Bhaskar’s account of cause in this work focuses on causal mechanisms in the domain of the real, and these mechanisms can be seen either as defined at a single level or as bridging a pair of adjacent levels. By contrast, I argue that within the realm of the actual we must see events and entities as inherently and inclusively multi-layered. The causation of any individual actual event, therefore, can only be described by combining the effects of a number of mechanisms operating at the different levels included in the event. This single-instance (but multi-layered) causation belongs in the realm of the actual, unlike the generic mechanisms that contribute to it. Similarly, the entities that appear in the real are single-level abstractions, whereas ‘actual’ entities are inclusively multi-levelled.  Hence this paper expands Bhaskar’s account of the actual, and proposes an alternative way of conceptualising his domain of the real. Ultimately, it concludes that consideration of emergence both benefits from, and can enhance, Bhaskar’s ontology.

The aim of the paper is to substantiate dialectical critical realism, by furnishing the subsequent, supervenient moments of its dialectic from 1M to 4D (5C), by the insights from General Systems Theory and from the discussion in the aftermath of Althusserian structural Marxism regarding structural causality, regional and particular theories. While the general tendency in the later writings of Bhaskar has been to encompass all processes and mechanisms of determination under the umbrella concept of dialectic, which then is virtually reduced to the logic of absence, I reinstate the essential distinctions between emergence and causality, between horizontal and vertical determination and between synchronic and diachronic emergence at the centre of DCR.

 By merging the DCR account, which stresses the centrality of concepts/processes such as ontological stratification, emergence, constellationality etc with systems theory, with central themes as (neg)entropy, feedback, homeostasis, adaptation etc and further with metaphors and analogies from evolutionary theory, the concepts of constellationality and rhythmics get a more substantial content. By this token I distinguish between three modes of systems; equilibrial, homeostatic, and processual, as outlined by Walter Buckley. The paradigm forms of explanation applicable to these three types of system are often held to be causal, functional and intentional respectively. I am partly challenging this assumption, and hold that we should see these three types of systems as part of a stratified but essentially unified world in which various forms of determination apply.

 It is my contention that a synthesis of critical realism and a systems approach would be valuable in providing a bridge between philosophical and scientific ontologies and between pure and applied research, and, to use the terms of Poulantzas, between regional and particular theories within a more encompassing general theoretical frame. This provides also means for linking taxonomic and nomothetic knowledge.

 I argue for the conception of a fourth domain, situated at the intersection of the domains of the real and the actual, which I denominate the domain of the real2 or the domain of structurata. This fourth ‘domain’ of reality has to be added to the Bhaskarian trinity: the domain of the real2, which in some sense ‘stands between’ the domains of the real and the actual in Bhaskar’s writings. This domain is described as that of more ephemerally laminated or dynamic structures, distinct both from the domain of the real (in the sense that these dynamic aspects have no real or better radically transfactual status, but are in essence products of, but nevertheless irreducible to, the transfactual, structural causal mechanisms in the domain of the real) and from the domain of the actual (in that they are the immediate ‘producers’ of the (f)actual flux of events). In borrowing the terminology of Bunge, we could say that the two domains of the real would then coincide in cases of disjunctive pluralities of causes, but in cases of conjunctive plurality of causes, the domain of the real2 would act as a mediator between the real1 (Bhaskar’s domain of the real) and the actual. However, the real2, while causally efficacious on the domain of the actual, could very well be seen as emergentally efficacious ‘back’ on the domain of the real1. Here Archer’s concept of ‘elaboration’ is used as the key to the ‘routinisation’ of such real2 structures into real1 structures, thus bridging between diachronic and synchronic emergence.

 I then incorporate the notion of (natural/social) selection (in the sense of evolutionary theory) into the morphogenetic approach of Margaret Archer (with the elaboration provided by the notion of real2 or laminated systems) and posit these real2-structures as societal ‘probes’ for the possible ‘routinisation’ into real1-objects/structures. Those real2-structures (or parts or aspects of them) that prove to be beneficial for the survival of the group or of the rationalisation of the life-world tend to be routinised and ‘ossified’ into the more stable and unchanging real1-structures (rules, resources, practices, roles, class-positions etc) and mechanisms.

The stock markets of the United States and Europe are on the verge of a major collapse, which will have severe repercussions for the economy.  Current models are inadequate to predict or understand this due to their ontological assumptions. The aim of this paper is to propose an alternative to current approaches.  Lawson (1997) is correct when he states that any attempt to live without an ontology commits one to an implicit and assumed one.  Thus, there is the need to become conscious of one's ontological assumptions.  If it is denied that humans have some special insight into the structure of being and it is also denied that the structure of reality must somehow conform to the structure of human cognition, then it seems that ontology must not be possible.  However, such dogmatic metaphysics can be avoided while also recognizing the necessity of metaphysics by changing the perspective from one who claims to have knowledge to one who is seeking it.  Thus, it is within the context of inquiry that ontology has an essential role.  Consequently, if one changes one’s perspective from viewing ontologies as constitutive of reality to seeing them as regulative principles of inquiry, one can see the usefulness of ontological inquiry, especially in the social sciences.

The idea of a discipline called ‘International Relations’ conveys a notion of a field of knowledge whose scope and constituency is international – about and constructed by peoples all over the world. To date, however, the majority of literature in the discipline of IR is written by and about only some of the peoples of the world – predominantly Americans and Europeans. This paper explores methodological problems associated with the international knowledge/power nexus which must be confronted in order to overcome eurocentricity in IR – in other words, in order to ‘decolonise’ the discipline of International Relations. Rather than privileging marginalised perspectives on the basis of normative commitments, it is argued that critical social inquiry should retain a commitment to objectivity, taking the form of explanatory critique which exposes the flaws in dominant ideologies through providing more adequate accounts of the global historical constitution of social realities throughout the world.

This paper is situated primarily within a context of the past thirty years’ “pulse of freedom” beating in our Australia. It is secondarily situated within the third year of writing a doctoral thesis. Over the past ten years I have lived and worked amongst a culturally diverse team increasingly committed to discerning and engaging with various causes and consequences of local realities of alienation, discrimination, oppression and injustice, as experienced in history by Aboriginal peoples in our area of Queensland, Australia. Our emerging theory-praxis dialectic is focused on revitalising processes and organic structures for personal and social transformation at five Aboriginal community locations comprising an incorporated Company within a radius of 40km. 

In October 2002, 31 organisations state-wide (two of them Aboriginal) were granted a year’s funding through the then Department of Families to trial new ways of “keeping clients out of the statutory system and/or helping them to exit earlier”. One of these two Aboriginal organisations is also a community Housing and Development Company, one of the five on whose behalf the thesis is being written. Our year’s trial period was a success. The company has been granted another three years’ funding and now provides one of the State’s 14 “Prevention and Early Intervention Family Support Services.” The doctoral thesis will include an assessment of various approaches to data collection and evaluation taken by the 14 Support Services. This paper focuses on a comparison and emerging contrast between some of these, particularly the North Carolina Family Assessment Scale, and the approach of our own service. The Mununjali Jymbi Centre is committed to maintaining a creative tension between service delivery and community development as expressed in cycles of participatory action research and evaluation.

The overall thesis question is currently:  What conditions enable the choice and development of values, actions and structures for empowerment, self-emancipation, justice and freedom through learning within Aboriginal organisations? This paper itself is infused with dialectical and spiritual aspects of a critical realist meta-theory (viewed as a deepening within ontology) that inform an holistic approach to transformation. Contributions from within the five phases of Transcendental Dialectical Critical Realism (thematising issues to do with the ultimate nature of reality, transcendence, unconditional love, emotions, right action, enhanced reflexivity and universal self-realisation) are supplemented from within the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Edward Said, Benjamin Whorf, Franz Fanon and Taiaiake Alfred. I argue a case for this approach as laying a strong foundation for the theory-praxis dialectic of decolonisation for “peace, power and righteousness”.

Ontology has recently become a widely discussed subject in the social sciences with contributions from critical realists at the forefront of ontological debates.  But the study of ontology runs the risk of being dismissed as irrelevant by ‘hard-headed’ social scientists who claim to be uninterested in ‘purely abstract’ thought.  Social ontologists must not only defend their arguments and proposals, but also the motivation underlying an interest in ontology in the first place.  Indeed, ontology was not considered to be a respectable subject within philosophy until relatively recently.  Social scientists interested in ontology are engaged in the same arguments as philosophers were one generation ago.  Certain recent developments offer a particularly interesting parallel with older battles waged within analytic philosophy.  Central to these debates was the groundbreaking work of WVO Quine, who made frequent references to ontology in his contributions.  One of Quine’s main objectives was to demonstrate that the development of scientific theory was always accompanied by some set of ontological assumptions.  This was intended and seen as a threat to dominant positivist trends in philosophy which insisted that ontology was unverifiable hocus-pocus.  Some forty years later, what appears to be a similar debate has surfaced in the social sciences.
 In this paper I will examine the apparent affinity between the Quineian turn towards ontology and the one advocated within Tony Lawson’s variant of critical realism.  The claim that any student of the sciences must take seriously the ontological implications of the theories they study is, I will argue, central to both projects.  In spite of this, there are deep divergences between the worldviews ultimately promoted by the two approaches.  These divergences open up possibilities for deeper research into the relationship between critical realist social theorising and analytic philosophy that have not been widely discussed to date.

Technology remains a relatively under-theorised category within the critical realist literature. This is surprising not only because of its central importance to a wide range of disciplines, but also because it seems to be a category about which critical realism has much to say. One aspect of technology that has proved to be especially problematic for commentators to accommodate is that technology’s constitution is as much a part of the social as well as the natural domains. This has caused problems to the extent that accounts of technology implicitly reduce one domain to another or only manage to distinguish one from the other in an unsustainable way (typically, those emphasising the social constitution of technology tend to treat the natural world as ‘constructed’ in much the same manner as the social world, and those stressing the importance of the material/natural component in technology tend to treat the social world overly mechanistically). This paper draws upon the critical naturalism of critical realism and the transformational model of social activity in particular to develop a conception of technology that avoids these problems. It then draws out some of the implications of this account.  In particular, some attempt is made to re-cast claims made by some so-called technological determinists, such as Heidegger and Habermas, who on closer inspection seem to be posing important questions that simply cannot be addressed without the kind of systematic (ontological) elaboration of the social and natural domains that I am suggesting.

In recent years theorists within the field of critical realism have highlighted the drive within modern mainstream economics towards mathematical modelling (Lawson [Tony] 1997; Fleetwood 1999). Simultaneously, a group of French economics students have criticised the discipline, describing it as autistic and calling for a return to reality (Devine 2002). More recently, a theory has been advanced drawing in part on the work of critical realism to provide a psychological explanation of autism spectrum conditions on the cognitive level (Lawson [John] 2003). This paper provides an overview of this most recent theory and draws on it to offer an explanation as to why there is a drive towards closed system methodology (in the form of mathematisation) in mainstream economics. The drive is argued to result from a male tendency towards closed system thinking and evidenced by research into autism spectrum conditions.

This paper discloses the abstract manner orthodox theories of “welfare” conceive social values (ethics) and the consequences of such subjective treatment of values for theory itself and for praxis. The interest here relies particularly on the demonstration that the abstract utterance of social values stems from the admission of determined ontological tenets, which characterise a profoundly conservative worldview. As the realization of some of the values considered by orthodox theories of “welfare” themselves (such as the value of equality) demands a truly transformative praxis, its fulfilment is obstructed a priori. To overcome this continued frustration and finally realise social values, economists reclaim the state intervention. The question then is whether the state has the capacity of radically modifying social reality.

This paper puts forward the late work of G. Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, as an indispensable contribution to ontological investigation in general and particularly to the understanding of social reality. As the ontology of Lukács is quite unknown even by authors and currents which have been (properly) dealing with ontological issues in the last decades it seems to be extremely fruitful to bring it into discussion. Comparing the analysis of Lukács with the ontology of Critical Realism, for instance, it is not only possible to identify obvious convergences but also to shed light on many questions that still demand a proper treatment from an ontological perspective.

Loraine Daston has claimed that scientific objects from all domains (dreams, atoms, monsters, culture, mortality, centre of gravity, value, cytoplasmatic particles, the self, tuberculosis) ‘come into being’ and ‘fade away’ as referents of epistemic inquiry, depending on the scientists’ interests, lines of questioning and techniques of salience, and their embeddedness in research practice. This does not mean that these objects are invented by the scientists, and therefore that they are not real. Against the traditional realist/constructivist divide, reality – she claims – is a matter of degrees. Phenomena  which are undoubtedly real (in the colloquial sense that they ‘exist’) can become ‘more or less’ real depending on how much and how deeply they are involved in scientific practice. She names her view ‘applied metaphysics’, and she specifically sets it against any ontological approaches according to which if an object is real, it cannot be invented, and viceversa.

Daston intends her view to be ‘catholic’ in scope, meaning that it is applicable to both the natural and the social world. However, does an applied metaphysics really also apply to the objects of the social or human world? What does/can such metaphysics say of objects such as: ‘productivity growth’, or ‘racially motivated crimes’, or ‘rates of inflation’, or ‘child abuse’ – or, to go for more general, abstract objects, ‘society’ and ‘culture’? Do reality and invention equally and seemingly constitute both natural and social objects of inquiry?

In order to find out what kind of ontological claims an applied metaphysics allows us to make, and how inclusive it proves to be of the objects of the various sciences, I will address the following three questions: 1) what is a ‘scientific’ object? 2) in what sense can a social object be (become) a scientific object? 3) what counts as a social scientific object of inquiry? By comparing some examples of scientific objects, different ways of becoming ‘the object of a science’ will emerge, and a revised version of applied metaphysics will be suggested. 

In deducing natural necessity from the intelligibility of science, Roy Bhaskar suggests that any social activity presupposes this ontology. This paper considers Bhaskar’s observation in light of Habermas’ theory of communicative action and in light of Luhmann’s conception of action systems.  Neither Habermas nor Luhmann claims to be scientific realist. I nonetheless attempt to show that Habermas and Luhmann veer toward scientific realism in their attempts to resolve contradictions within Weber’s idealist theory of action.  In the process I hope to develop the argument that natural necessity is implied in the possibility of purposive activity.

A critical realist theory of gender – yet to be fully developed – would recognise actual gendered inequalities and differences as the result of the emergent properties of structures at different levels. These include physical sexual difference (real, though not merely dichotomous), and the capacities and liabilities belonging to it; social structures, such as the articulation of domestic and formal economies in capitalist societies and the institution of marriage; conceptual systems and beliefs which justify and explain these structures; and the psychological capacities and processes through which, in particular social contexts, subjectivity becomes gendered. Applied to feminism, critical realism offers a dual critique, analogous to its critique elsewhere of positivism on the one hand and poststructuralism on the other. It takes issue with versions of radical feminism which treat concrete forms of gender oppression as merely expressing the essential natures of women and men. Insisting on the distinction between ontology and epistemology, CR feminists reject the claim that women’s experience is a privileged route to knowledge, but unlike postmodern critics of feminist standpoint theory, admit the evidential significance of experience. Critical realist feminists are able to show that a ‘deconstructionist’ retreat to nominalist understandings of the category of ‘woman’ rests on a misunderstanding, and to the disempowering political tactic of ‘groundless solidarity’. In current societies, women do have non-contingent (but not eternal or simple) interests in common which can rationally ground common action and alliances.

This paper seeks common ground between deconstruction and dialectical critical realism by focusing on ontology and its relation to ethics. It begins with Derida who refuses the concept of ontology. It is argued that he has an ontology, that it is based on a process of metaphysical abstraction, and that it is inadequate to ground the notion of the 'spectral' in his work. The paper then moves to Bhaskar and the realist ontology grounding dialectical critical realism. It argues  that an ontology elaborating (1) non-identity as real absence, (2) real negativity, (3) open totality and (4) transformative agency is better able to support notions of fluidity, incompleteness, openness and change: what Derrida refers to as 'spectrality'. The paper then notes a difference between Bhaskar's ontology and his ethics which, in their sense of programmatic completeness, appear incompatible with his ontology. It suggests that Derrida's notion of an ethics that is 'to come', relocated onto a critical realist ontological terrain, provides a more appropriate vision of the ethical potential of modernity, a potential that exists as unactualised presence under modernity's social relations.

Under contemporary pressures of globalization CARICOM seems threatened by increasing global and regional insecurity, vulnerability and marginalization as they are seemingly once again carried across another middle passage rite in the turbulent waves of a neo-liberal globalization. How can the region find safe passage in this contemporary cross roads marking yet another chapter in their struggle for ‘survival and beyond’? What are the imperatives for successfully navigating globalization, or negotiating, a space –if there is little to none- in order to cross-over? Do contemporary analysis and policies for regional development provide an improved or even relevant basis for small and vulnerable states to achieve competitiveness? What exactly are the preconditions for CARICOM’s success? In this paper I explore these questions and point towards elements of an answer, which prioritizes analyses about ontology, through a critical engagement of some of the existing approaches to these issues.

In particular, I argue that the current perspectives for competitiveness are either still rooted on positivistic modernization theories of development as the sine qua non for sustaining competitive performance in small states and/or   they continue to bypass systematic analysis, and related empirical examination, of the first order political and social ontological  conditions (inclusive of social structural, institutional and social capital states)  for strategic transformation or regional competitive ascent. That is, there is a failure to substantively explore the complex ontological structuring of power or the “state of the ‘State’” in Creole Caribbean societies’ and correspondingly a failure to provide analyses (local and comparative) capable of helping one to elicit a better grasp of the complex forces shaping/challenging the ‘state of’ dynamically and complexly constituted but still plantation embedded ‘states’  and ‘creole societies’. Yet, without this research and analysis on the ‘ontology of  creole power’ there is little to act as a basis for cogently articulating on the region’s States’ transformational or  emancipatory ‘necessities’ and the possibilities to sustain local or regional success.

 In either case, the theoretical, methodological and empirical limits of existing analysis on the possibilities and processes for development in the region perpetuate an insidious bias against endogenous social transformation, by continuing to ignore the lessons from the enduring Bestian observations on  the complexity of  Caribbean ontology- emergent from unique yet systemic ‘global and local’, structural and institutional’ ‘plantation and post colonial’ ‘processes and forces’- and his related critiques of Caribbean’s epistemology. Moreover, by continuing to fail to integrate critical observations on the nuanced character and strengths (or weaknesses) of Caribbean creolity - culture, society, polity, economy-  into ‘adjustment’ and ‘adaptation’ paradigms and strategies for ‘ascent’, these current approaches and paradigms for ‘competitive success’ threaten to leave the rich depth of the Caribbean’s’ potentials and values in a state of endogenous peripherilization, despite the recurrent rhetorical praise for the creative spirit and ethic of the peoples’ of the region. 

Nancy Cartwright and proponents of critical realism have contributed to both the philosophy of science literature and also debates in the field of the philosophy/methodology of economics. In pursuing their respective projects they each emphasise the importance of explicit ontological elaboration. While the connections between critical realism and Cartwright’s work have generated considerable interest in the context of the philosophy of physics less attention has been paid to the connections and distinctions between the two programmes as these projects have been extended into the field of the philosophy of economics. In this paper, I argue that (i) Cartwright and critical realists both defend a form of depth realism, they demonstrate that in order to make sense of key experimental practices and the application of scientific results outside the experimental set up it is necessary to acknowledge the existence of underlying capacities, tendencies and natures, (ii) each project, when analysing contemporary economics, see conventional economic modelling procedures as primarily driven by the aim of ensuring deductivist results follow and both examine the implications for the interpretation of econometrics and the relevance of the traditional framework and (iii) that one distinction between the projects relates to their views concerning the availability/adequacy of methods which do not rely on isolationist strategies as a means to uncovering previously unknown causal mechanisms in the social realm.

With reference to the conference theme ‘theorising ontology’ the paper will begin by reflecting on the usefulness of studying the ontology of a particular scholar and by exploring some methodological issues that need to be addressed before doing so. The preferred approach adopted for this paper is broad – it is argued that in order to appreciate the possibly changing ontology of an author it is necessary to move beyond analysis of key published texts (crucial as this is) to a deeper understanding which would situate those texts within a broader analysis of the scholarly and personal life and times of the writer, paying particular attention to how life experiences influence normative and ideological positions. This also implies using but moving beyond, in Karl Polanyi’s case, the key published texts of ‘The Great Transformation’ and ‘The Economy as Instituted Process’ to study unpublished articles, notes and personal correspondence. 

The paper will then take a number of theoretical propositions central to the work of  Karl Polanyi – such as the notion of the disembedded market economy; the double movement; economy as instituted process; exchange and economic integration, and will interrogate these propositions against a set of questions of interest to ontologists  and in particular to advocates of critical realism. With reference to Polanyi’s work this would lead us to explore for example, the level of theoretical abstraction, the basic units and levels of analysis, the explanandum of human economic activity, the approach to causality, underlying causal mechanisms of social relations and processes, the role and constituent dimensions of agency, the relationship between agency and social structure, and the relation between theory and empirics. 

Finally the paper will return reflexively to the original conference theme to re-address the question of how the study of the ontology of an individual scholar contributes to the larger project of understanding and theorising ontology more generally.

This paper provides an account of aspects of the ongoing transition from chemical photography to digital imaging in the domain of home photography, drawing on a model of the relationship between human agency and social structure that has emerged in recent contributions to realist social theory.   In contrast to the emphasis on conscious deliberation and intentional causation of the standard model of economic agency, the emphasis in the present paper is on routine behaviour and non-intentional mental phenomena.  Various illustrations are presented, drawn from a wider empirical study of the development and commercialisation of digital technologies. 

Since the Second World War, a comprehensive regime of international norms governing women’s human rights has been established.  Yet states have been slower to integrate these norms domestically than other human rights norms, and the record of diffusion varies greatly from one state to another.  This paper is concerned, first, to illuminate the barriers preventing the more extensive diffusion of women’s human rights and, second, to identify the factors that enable more effective diffusion.  The paper’s central thesis is that the gender-biased corporate identity of many states represents the most significant barrier to diffusion.  However, it also demonstrates the way in which particular norms have been incorporated into particular states at particular points in time as a consequence of articulated international and domestic pressure.  And, while international pressure emanates from international bodies either imposing conditions of membership, initiating infringement proceedings, or criticising states through international reporting systems, domestic pressure emanates from feminist political activism and private individual or group litigation.  The paper begins by examining the limitations of existing explanations of international norms and then proceeds to develop an alternative argument to explain cross-national variation in the diffusion and influence of international norms of sexual non-discrimination.  It uses a critical realist framework to examine and explain the way in which the complex and reciprocal interrelationship between these various structures and agents conditions the diffusion and efficacy of international norms of sexual non-discrimination.  This framework is illustrated through case studies of Germany and Japan.  These show how the diffusion of international norms of sexual non-discrimination is more often than not impeded by the dynamic interaction between various structures and agents, discourse, and power.  Finally, the paper discusses the implications of the argument for international relations theory, feminist international legalism, and feminist comparative politics.  It also addresses the practical implications of the argument for those operating in the field.

The crisis of Marxism has been attributed to many political reasons such as  the demise of the Soviet Union and the apparent decline of collective class struggle. In contrast to these attempts to attribute the crisis of Marxism to political factors I will try to provide a philosophical understanding of the crisis of Marxism. Indeed it will be argued that the very political attempts of the various ˜Marxist" groups to provide political answers to the crisis of Marxism only intensifies this crisis. This is because contemporary Marxist politics has an instrumental approach that repels rather than attracts support for its cause. In other words Marxist politics is based upon an alienated consciousness that is unable to overcome the alienation within society that creates a postmodern condition that is very hostile to the Marxist project. Instead  Marxism is part of the very postmodern condition that it is trying to overcome.

In order to elaborate my argument I will attempt to show that the atheist  standpoint of Marxist politics is integral to this process of adaptation to an alienated consciousness. This means that if Marxism is to struggle to overcome its alienation it will need to tackle the regressive atheism to which it has traditionally supported. The philosophical basis for my argument will be provided by Hegel and his view that a religious consciousness aspires to realise the highest forms of philosophical consciousness. Thus it is a religious consciousness that can actually struggle against rather than adapt to an alienated consciousness. This Hegelian standpoint is connected to the view that the adoption of the Feuerbachian approach towards religion by Marxism was  counterproductive. In order to substantiate this claim a brief analysis of the history of the relationship between Marxism and religion will be carried out in order to show that the atheism of Marxism is essentially the legacy of Russian political conditions rather than being integral to Marxism. Thus the Feuerbachian attitude towards religion can be rejected without this in any sense undermining the philosophical and theoretical coherence of Marxism.

Consequently once Marxism is liberated from its alienating atheist background it will be possible for Marxism to establish a more non-instrumental approach towards its potential supporters within the working class. For Marxism will then be able to develop the spiritual conditions for a philosophical 
relationship with the working class based upon the Hegelian conceptions of ethics, morality and conscience. This means that the possibility is created for a philosophical interaction between Marxism and the class based upon love rather than the instrumental standpoint of politics and its narrow secular premises. Such a standpoint does not deny the ultimate importance of politics, rather that the basis for a political relation between Marxism and the working class is based upon the practical construction and realisation of philosophical premises.

The work of Hegel is very important for my paper because Hegel challenges the crude and mechanical understanding of class consciousness as the outcome of social being determining consciousness. This objectivist standpoint does not establish the dialectical complexity and contradictory character of the 
development of class consciousness which has diverse and complex stages that cannot be reduced to the importance of economics being translated into politics. Instead the development of class consciousness has an irreducible spiritual and philosophical character, which has often been ignored by Marxism. This is precisely why in order to challenge the mechanical, rigidly determinist and non-dialectical aspects of the Marxist approach towards class consciousness it is necessary to also critically engage its atheist and Feuerbachian world view. Thus the philosophical significance of the work of Hegel for Marxism cannot be restricted or reduced to a role in the development of the method of ˜Capital˜. On the contary Hegel's work is also able to indicate important philosophical problems in the Marxist conception of class consciousness. In this sense the work of Hegel has always been crucial for the addressing the question of the crisis of Marxism.

Critical realism is uniquely positioned to provide an antidote to the problems besetting contemporary educational research and pedagogy. However, while the emancipatory mission of CR is most helpful in reaffirming what education should ³be about², Bhaskar¹s concept of emancipation raises some interesting questions regarding the possibility of emancipating students who, for various reasons, do not possess all the criteria for rational agency. These questions have the potential to challenge current conceptions of educational research and pedagogy.

What are the implications for students who may lack (i) the cognitive, (ii) the empowered, or (iii) the dispositional components of rational agency? This would seem to be a significant issue for both the relevancy and scope of application of critical realism, not only in education, but for those in other disciplines who work with "pre-rational" agents.

This paper argues that a CR perspective on education in the compulsory years of schooling emphasises two main points:

1. The "opening movement" of the emancipatory process from primal scream to cognitive emancipation indicates that there is much important "custodial" work for teachers to do, as they facilitate the articulation of their students¹ "assertoric utterances".

2. The criteria for rational agency can be possessed in degrees, as opposed to possessed or not; thus revealing the universal moral worth of both the agent¹s emancipatory process and the agent¹s being to be independent of the limitations upon them.

Recent historical-sociological studies of Scandinavian education emphasise the enduring tradition of state intervention in the Nordic countries. Using Archer’s multi-level theory of morphogenesis this paper argues that the enduring practice of state intervention is conditioned by the long lasting structural integration of education with the state. It puts forward the hypothesis that the Lutheran reformation in Denmark-Norway effected a dual integration of education both with the state and the church. This means that in Scandinavia, the transition from the Medieval mono-integration of education with the church to the modern multi-integrated educational system must have occurred through two morphogenetic cycles instead of one. The hypothesis of dual integration is substantiated by an analysis of the changing structural integration of secondary education in Norwegian society during the 19th century and the nature of the strategies that were deployed by self-assertive and dominant educational groups in their struggle for educational control. The early 19th century integration of secondary education with other social institutions beside the church, and the employment of municipalization of educational control as the main strategy of the opposition support the contention that education was structurally integrated with the state prior to the emergence of the system. 

‘There are some things money can’t buy.’ Contrary to a well-know copy line of the MasterCard’s ‘Priceless’ advertisement, however, there seems to be little money cannot buy nowadays — e.g. money can buy even babies and bodily organs. Moreover, the MasterCard company itself owns multiple U.S. copyright registrations for its trademark and a series of this ‘Priceless’ advertisement including the very slogan of ‘there are some things money can’t buy.’ Because those words and images are valuable for the company they can be patented. We can buy this patent with money: it is not ‘priceless’. ‘For everything else, there’s MasterCard’, which suggests that there is an a priori boundary between what money can and cannot buy, and we can use money only for what money can buy. It also appears to be true in a market economy, however, to invert the aphorism and say ‘For MasterCard, there is everything else’, that is, whether we like it or not, there is such a thing as money in the world we live, and therefore we can create and/or transform things into what money can buy.

Some Post-Structualists have considered these issues and conclude that a market boundary is merely discursive: things are either marketable or non-marketable on the grounds that they are discursively constructed. ‘A market boundary exists for us: it is classified by us, and therefore it can only have a meaning for us’. Critical realists like myself find this unacceptable because it is rooted in strongly social constructionist ontology. My paper makes use of the ontology developed within critical realist circles in order to defend the existence of a (non-merely discursive) market boundary — i.e. a separation between the marketable and the non-marketable items.

This paper aims to do as follows:

Ø It examines Michael Walzer’s ‘blocked exchanges (i.e. things which cannot and/or should not be traded for money)’, and Judith Andre’s framework for the ‘blocked exchanges’ argument, which consists of following two kinds of items: ‘what cannot be bought and sold (i.e. empirical impossibility)’ and ‘what could be but ought not be bought and sold (i.e. normative undesirability)’. Andre is sceptical that all these arguments can be synthesised by any single principle.

Ø It considers ‘constitutive incommensurability (i.e. certain social relations and value commitments, which are constituted by the refusal of being priced)’ as a principle for a market boundary, and Critical Realist meta-theory as a perspective for exploring the ontology of a market boundary.

Ø It tackles some scepticism and criticism against the ontological status of a market boundary — e.g. instrumental incommensurability (i.e. even if there are the incommensurable, it is best to assume that there are not), incommensurability claims (i.e. people rationally make incommensurability claims to obtain strategic advantages), incommensurability belief (i.e. friendship and money may be incomparable for you but comparable for me), etc.

Ontology is now widely recognised to be of central importance to science, philosophy and the interaction between the two.  Yet there is no clear agreement on how it should be done or even what the term means.  There are at least two different ways in which the term is interpreted: on the one hand, as the examination of the explicit ontological beliefs of the scientists whose theories are of interest in any given study; or, on the other, the examination of the ontological presuppositions of the theories (or concepts, propositions etc…) themselves. 

This paper is concerned only with the latter and in particular one form of such theorising, namely the transcendental argument (henceforth “TA”).  For this mode of theorising has attracted significant criticism and misunderstanding both in general and in its specific “realist” formulation, as employed by Lawson, Bhaskar and other critical realists, such that many continue to deny it any validity at all. 

Two issues in particular have aroused such criticism, namely: (1) the nature of the argument, in respect of (a) the nature of its premisses and status of its conclusions and (b) the validity of its inference, as one of “necessity”; and (2) the connection between the examination of conceptual presuppositions and the uncovering of knowledge concerning the nature of being, that is the ontological purchase of the TA. 

Any discussion of these issues immediately opens up huge philosophical topics, most evidently the relation between (the theory of) meaning – i.e. as regards conceptual presuppositions – and ontology, for which there is evidently insufficient time and space here.

In this context, the aim of this paper is limited to providing a preliminary examination of research regarding the nature of the TA in order to defend it against various empiricist-tradition critics.  In particular, this paper has three aims: 

(i) To establish the synthetic a priori, which the TA deduces, as a valid, third form of reasoned necessity, against the denials of empiricist traditions, by showing it to be a question of necessary conditions of intelligibility;

(ii) To examine the nature of the ontological commitment of the synthetic a priori; and

(iii) To establish that the TA, so formulated, remains sufficiently Kantian to merit the Kantian title of “transcendental argument”, even if it differs from Kant in respect of its lack of commitment to transcendental idealism.

Why is Dietzgen's Dialectical Materialsm a Great Improvement on that of Official Communism?

Joseph Dietzgen wrote in the 1850s and 1860s but the relevance of his work did not become apparent on a mass scale until long after his death in 1888.  In order to argue for the importance of Dietzgen’s dialectical materialism I will compare the views of the official Communist Tommy Jackson (who wrote a 600 page book entitled Dialectics which was vehemently opposed to the philosophical views of Dietzgen) with his contemporary Fred Casey who was a continuator of Dietzgen’s thought.

It had been a great insight of Dietzgen’s that traditional materialism and traditional idealism had distinguished between the material and the immaterial (thought) in such a radical and excessive way that they had not been able to connect thought to the material universe either logically or ontologically.  Those traditions had advocated a dualist separation of thought from the material world.  It was as though thought lived in one realm and the material world resided in an entirely different realm.  Dietzgen had realised that this misguided dualism had resulted in a historic division between materialism and idealism which had lasted many centuries.

Casey followed Dietzgen in that whilst he did not deny the essential philosophical difference between materialism and idealism – materialism has an emphasis on a primary material world, whilst idealism primarily emphasises consciousness – Casey shows that it is possible to overcome the one-sided errors in the relationship between materialism and idealism.  This does not mean that either Dietzgen or Casey made concessions to idealism.  On the contrary, they are concerned to show the importance of thought within the primary material world.  They accept the idealist view that thought is important (and not just a passive reflection of reality) but they succeed in locating the role of thought within the primary material world.  They made no concessions to the idealist view that thought is primary over matter.  Such an idealist standpoint is considered ontologically and epistemologically unviable in the monist materialist world-view of Dietzgen and Casey.

Jackson’s criticism of Dietzgen and Casey is that they are allegedly assuming a priori that dialectical materialism has an absolute superiority over other ways of cognizing the world.  Jackson links this to the idea that:  “It is in practice that the superiority of Dialectical Materialism is manifest, not in any a priori superiority in its inner logical consistency”. 

But unlike Jackson, for Dietzgen and Casey practice is not the defining aspect for explaining social reality.  For practice cannot occur without consciousness and the elaboration of conceptual reasoning as thought and logic.  So theory is essential for developing effective practice, and practice is the objective confirmation of theory, or the basis to develop more effective practice and so on.  The problem with Jackson’s formulaic emphasis on the unity of theory and practice is that the mere formula does not explain the distinctive ontological (material) role of theory within social reality.  Jackson and official Communism advocate practice without theory, because official Communism cannot provide any ontological and epistemological reasons to uphold the importance of theory without undermining official Communism.

The issue of how a ‘new’ labour market emerges for the first time has been given little explicit attention in labour market literature.  Indeed, there has been a general ontological assumption that labour markets just exist.  This paper seeks to explore this issue by providing a causal-explanatory account of how the UK early music musician labour market emerged in the early 1970s.  This is developed through the application of Archer’s Morphogenetic Approach, which recognises a stratified and transformational social ontology.  It is argued that the resulting analysis takes account of the dynamic and transitory nature of the labour market, thus emphasising the need to re-think the concept in terms of structures and the actions of agents, rather than structures alone.  As such, the interdependency of labour market, firm, and market, through the mediation of human agency, is highlighted.  The paper makes a call for further research to understand this interplay.  It is suggested that the ‘dynamic of entrepreneurship’ represents a useful conceptual way forward in this respect.