Abstract
This study critiques the ontological perspective of Margaret Archer and Andrew Sayer’s epistemology on social reality. To explain the social world dynamism, Archer introduces morphogenetic social theory. Accordingly, she explains the social world by an interaction between culture, agency, and structure. Also, Andrew Sayer besides paying attention to the existing complexities in the nature of social reality struggles to introduce a specific model upon which one can come up with a new formulation of the process of social knowledge. His model is based on the dialectical relation between the researcher (subject), research topic (object) and other subjects who work in a common linguistic community. The article criticizes both approaches because they do not pay attention to the self-generation of social reality. Self-generation is referring to the role of social reality (object) in changing and reproducing itself. Bothe Archer’s morphogenesis and Sayer’s epistemology neglect the effective role of social reality in self-reproduction.
Presenters
Farhad BayaniAssistant Professor of Sociology, Sociocultural Studies of Science and Technology, Institute for Cultural, Social and Civilization Studies, Iran
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Self-generation, Social Ontology, Critical Realism, Morphogenesis, Epistemology
