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Research necessarily entails the close interrelation of concepts and arguments, including solutions to a range of meta-questions, whether acknowledged explicitly or not. Despite this, few detailed accounts currently exist that support researchers to develop their complex conceptual architectures, especially in critical realist spheres. Indeed, many published accounts often omit much of this 'messiness' that sits behind, yet is foundational to, research projects. Those accounts that do seek to portray how/why researchers have made decisions (e.g. about connections between research philosophy, methodology, methods, theory and empirical evidence) tend to focus on one set of meta-questions, or occasionally on the relationships between two sets, at a time. Therefore, this paper presents a flexible framework – supported by specific examples from studies – that we hope will be useful in supporting researchers from all traditions, but especially critical realists, to carefully think through and develop more holistic connections in their conceptual architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At another moment, Wilson links subjective experience and art, juxtaposing the realist theory of art 'which accounts for (aesthetic) experience, subjectivity and the relation between imagination and perception' and the realist theory of science (192). Rather, it is because I take as my starting point the idea that our current approaches to art and the arts, and our cultures that sustain these, are characterised by a TINA compromise form: where the truth in practice - that art is (only) what artists do in the arts, is combined with the falsity in theory - that art is (only) what artists do in the arts. To the extent that my argument enables art to be liberated from the culturally limiting contexts of "aesthetics" or "sciences", I would say I am for aesthetics (and art) in science, just as I am for science in the arts. The "bold" and "ambitious" claim of my realist theory of art is just this - in all instances of art, not just those where the designation "art" is conferred by representatives of "the arts" or the "artworld", art is caring about experience. This is all very reasonable until art is connected back to Wilson's particular view of the aesthetic: 'I have defined aesthetic experience as our emergent experience of being-in-relation with the natural necessity of the world ... and art as the skilled practice of giving shareable form to our aesthetic experience' (192). [Extracted from the article]

Giorgos Tsiolis and Michalis Christodoulou have written a deeply theoretical book arguing that we should see reconstructive biographical research as a method for constructing causal accounts of social lives and generalizing beyond the particular cases under study. As I have argued elsewhere, Sawyer's approach is incompatible with the sort of relational approach to emergence that is called for by a critical realist ontology (Elder-Vass [3]). Tsiolis and Christodoulou are tempted by Keith Sawyer's argument that the argument from wildly disjunctive multiple realizability can be transferred to the social realm (Sawyer [4]; Sawyer [5]; Sawyer [6]; Sawyer [7]). [Extracted from the article]