The Dialogist in a Positivist World: Theory in the Social Sciences and the Humanities at the End of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

While theory in the social sciences and the humanities in our period has come to be dominated by what might be called a dialogist perspective, following on the thinking of philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Bhaskar, and sociologists and critics from Foucault to Bakhtin, the understanding of all knowledge as discursively produced remains at a considerable distance from the classical hypothetico-deductive discourse of many practitioners of science as well as from the commonsense view of how knowledge is produced, held in general by an international public discourse of commerce and government. Thus, the problems faced by practitioners within the two broad discourses of dialogism and positivism are rather different, and these differences underlie numerous difficulties in communication between members of these discourses. For the positivist, the most urgent problem is to establish and maintain the authority structures of academic, government, and commercial worlds that have historically produced the ascendant position of positivist discourse. For the dialogist, the most urgent problem is to produce a working ontology and epistemology that will underpin the dialogist's wish to undertake social action. This paper proposes that Bhaskar's ‘critical realism’ provides a philosophical basis for the resolution of at least some of these difficulties and a basis for developing a socially engaged social science that is not undermined by its own deconstructive relativism.