Search

In this wide-ranging interview Professor Douglas V. Porpora discusses a number of issues. First, how he became a Critical Realist through his early work on the concept of structure. Second, drawing on his Reconstructing Sociology, his take on the current state of American sociology. This leads to discussion of the broader range of his work as part of Margaret Archer's various Centre for Social Ontology projects, and on moral-macro reasoning and the concept of truth in political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a commentary on Christian Smith's 'The Conceptual Incoherence of 'Culture' in American Cultural Sociology.' This paper accepts Smith's finding of conceptual incoherence at the disciplinary level and argues that it is a symptom of empiricism in American sociology. The paper suggests we employ conceptual analysis as practiced by analytical philosophy and proceeds to show how the use of that methodology can resolve the problem regarding the meaning of culture. In the end, the paper defends a conception of culture along the lines of Archer's (1996) intelligibilia, interpreted as action and its products bearing social reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article concerns a recent methodological debate in American sociology that generated widespread attention in the United States. It was a debate that spanned at least four journals:American Journal of Sociology,Sociological Methods & Research,Qualitative SociologyandAmerican Journal of Cultural Sociology. As the debate was not just about methods per se but about the ‘theory of reality’ underlying each method and its ‘social ontology’, critical realism has much to say about it. Although at the end everyone comes around to critical realism's position of methodological pluralism, what makes the debate interesting is the reasoning, the ontological assumptions, and the surprising directions of attack. Above all this article will take issue with the assumption common to all disputants that people tend ‘to give self-contradictory and inadequate accounts of their actions and motives’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a critical response to the newest version of the rational choice theory of religion (RCTR). In comparison with previous critiques, this paper takes aim at RCTR's foundational assumption of psychological egoism and argues that the thesis of psychological egoism is untenable. Without that thesis, the normative aspects of religious commitment cannot be reduced validly to instrumental reason. On neither conceptual nor empirical grounds therefore can religion or religious commitment be defined comprehensively in terms of exchange theory. With the failure of psychological egoism as a point of departure, the paper articulates an alternative theory of religion, one based on the epistemic rationality grounded in religious experience and religious emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second volume of his Theoretical Logic in Sociology (1982b), Jeffrey Alexander argues that Marxian theory is predicated on a unidimensional model of human action. That means that Marxian theory overlooks the normative dimension of action, thereby portraying human action as entirely egoistic and deterministic. This article argues that Alexander's criticisms of Marxian theory are unfounded, and, more fundamentally, that Alexander's unfounded criticisms reveal that his whole neo-Parsonian project is based on an underlying conception of human action that is seriously mistaken. A major objective of this article is to present a more tenable conception of action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the notion that for many important contemporary problems, the Marxian paradigm has no rival. For a majority of the phenomena listed in the article, the Marxian perspective has no real competitors. There are three phenomena listed where the adequacy of Marxian theory is currently in doubt--racial inequality, gender inequality and the study of discourse and meaning. The Marxian perspective does not just promote an historical and structural metatheory, it offers a highly substantive model of a specific social arrangement--capitalism--in terms of which many of the listed phenomena are explained. It may be concluded that for the phenomena on the list where the Marxian perspective is strong, i.e., the great majority, its explanations are virtually uncontested by theories from the rival perspectives. If this conclusion is correct, it means that despite all the talk of sociology being a multiparadigm discipline, for a large class of important phenomena, sociology is a single paradigm discipline.

The article reexamines the issues raised in the debate between sociologist writers Louis Althusser, E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson related to human agency and social structure. Althusser rejects the concept of agency arguing that agency is not a scientific concept but an illusion of ideology. Thompson attacks structuralist Marxism, given by sociologist and philosopher Karl Marx, at its core, arguing that history cannot be understood apart from a consideration of the teleological pursuits of human agents, particularly their pursuit of class struggle. Anderson argues that historically the human agency involved in class struggle did not play a significant role in social transformations prior to the rise of the modern revolutionary socialist movement. He concludes that of the two one-sided positions, Althusser's stress on structural necessity more closely corresponds to the Marxian theory of history and to the "actual lessons of scientific study of the past'' whereas Thompson's emphasis on agency is more prophetic of what might be expected of the modern revolutionary socialist movement.