The Ontology of Social Reality from Critical Realism’s Perspective; Focusing on the Ideas of Margaret Archer and Andrew Sayer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This essay seeks to present the ontological perspectives of Margaret Archer and Andrew Sayer on social reality. Archer and Sayer represent two key sociologists who have taken advantage of philosophical school of critical realism for explaning the social world. Methodology is based on descriptive-analytical method. Archer introduces two notions of morphogenesis (dynamic aspect of society) and morphostasis (stability and continuation of society) and offers a new type of theoretical conflation relying on morphogenesis. Accordingly, she propounds some differences between culture, structure and action and this distinguishes her efforts from the ideas of other conflationary theoreticians, especially Anthony Giddens. Besides paying attention to the existing complexities in the nature of social reality, Sayer struggles to introduce a specific model with which one can come up with a new formulation of the process of knowledge of social reality. Sayer believes that his model provides a clearer ontology of social realities. Sayer’s thought is based on the dialectical relation between the researcher (subject), research topic (object) and other researchers who work in a common linguistic community and this dialectic is among the mechanisms that give rise to the complexities of the social world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.079 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".