Generalizing as Morally Implicative Practice: A Critical Realist Approach

摘要

This paper examines "generalization" within the broader context of explanationin the human sciences. Drawing upon the ontological, epistemological, and methodological pluralism of critical realism, it advocates realism as both a moral stance and as a meta-theoretical framework that offers an inclusive alternative to the unreflective positivism and the reductionist social constructionism that tend to polarize contemporary theoretical discourses in the human sciences. This critical realist approach is supported by the methodological parallelism of Paul Ricoeur, whose philosophical work maintains a creative compatibility and tension between the methods of the natural and the human sciences (Fleming, 1990). Critical realism recognizes and accommodates the ontological complexity of the world, that is, the existence of diverse types of entities and phenomena that are not reducible to our knowledge of them. As communication researchers build more intricate models and theories in their attempts to represent and understand that complexity, they require more reflective philosophical frameworks that can support their conceptual constructs. Communication researchers explore phenomena as disparate as physiological responses to stimuli, computer-mediated group interaction and broad social discourses that shape communication at multiple levels, yet we do not have frameworks that can provide coherence or integration across this diversity without reducing it to our perceptions or to our discursive constructions.