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There are many differing ways to be a realist about language. This paper seeks to classify some of these and to examine the implications of each for the study of language. The principle of classification it adopts is that we may distinguish between realisms on the basis of what exactly it is that they take to be real. Examining in turn realisms that ascribe reality to the external world in general, to causal mechanisms, to innate capacities, to linguistic signs, to social structures, to language systems, and to linguistic groups, the paper summarises the case for a particular critical realist ontology of language. In the process, it engages briefly with the work of Saussure, Chomsky, Halliday, and more recent explicitly realist thinkers such as Bhaskar, Pateman, Archer, Sealey and Carter. One implication is that language itself is not a phenomenon that separates us from a causally structured world, but rather a part of that world, a part with an identifiable causal structure of its own that is similar to that of other normative phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short reply seeks to clarify the concept of linguistic norm circles and to correct some misunderstandings of it implicit in Sealey & Carter's response. It also reinforces some doubts over their version of the linguistic system. Norm circles, it argues, provide an important part of the explanation for linguistic practices, but always in conjunction with other interacting causal powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article attempts to construct an alternative analysis of Michel Foucault's theory of the nature and role of discourse. It outline's Foucault's meaning of discourse and discursive formations and considers the various concepts pertinent to the development of a realist alternative. The article also develops an alternative ontology of discourse along with debates related to the issue and discusses how this move the discussion forward to solve some of the problems facing Foucault's account and as part of a wider realist social ontology.

Superficially, Actor Network Theory (ANT) and critical realism (CR) are radically opposed research traditions. Written from a realist perspective, this paper asks whether there might be a basis for finding common ground between these two traditions. It looks in turn at the questions of realism, structure, and agency, analysing the differences between the two perspectives and seeking to identify what each might learn from the other. Overall, the paper argues that there is a great deal that realists can learn from actor network theory; yet ANT remains stunted by its lack of a depth ontology. It fails to recognize the significance of mechanisms, and of their dependence on emergence, and thus lacks both dimensions of the depth that is characteristic of critical realism's ontology. This prevents ANT from recognizing the role and powers of social structure; but on the other hand, realists would do well to heed ANT's call for us to trace the connections through which structures are constantly made and remade. A lack of ontological depth also underpins ANT's practice of treating human and non-human actors symmetrically, yet this remains a valuable provocation to sociologists who neglect non-human entities entirely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins to develop an emergentist and realist account of normative social institutions. The argument is developed as a response to Lopez and Scott's historical portrait of the debate on social structure as a dialogue between two different concepts of structure: institutional structure and relational structure, integrated more recently through the concept of embodied structure. The paper argues that all these approaches tend to neglect the idea of structure as a whole and suggests that we cannot understand social structures without recognizing the nature of the corresponding wholes, and how they relate to the human individuals that comprise them. Such a perspective makes clear that embodiment alone is inadequate as a means of integrating institutional and relational conceptions of structure. For a fuller resolution, we must set social structure in an emergentist framework, which can reconcile the complementary roles of institutional structure, relational structure, and indeed embodiment, as aspects of the production of social structures as wholes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper replies to Porpora, King, and Varela's responses to my earlier paper “For Emergence”, focussing on the relationship between the concepts of social structure and social relations. It recognises the importance of identifying the mechanisms responsible whenever we make claims for the emergence of causal powers, and discusses the mechanism underlying one case of social structure: normative institutions. It also shows how critical realism reconciles the claims that both social structures and human individuals have emergent causal powers that combine to produce actual social events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of social structure and its relationship to human agency remains one of the central problems of social theory. One of the most promising attempts to provide a solution has been Margaret Archer's morphogenetic approach, which invokes emergence to justify treating social structure as causally effective. Archer's argument, however, has been criticised by a number of authors who suggest that the examples she cites can be explained in reductionist terms and thus that they fail to sustain her claim for the independent causal effectiveness of social structure. This paper offers an alternative argument to support the emergentist claim for the causal effectiveness of social structure, and shows how this argument refutes a representative critique of social emergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]